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Bye bye BetterSlack

g3rv4.com

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Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#51

Post by ethbro »

sofaofthedamned wrote: post #23
canadaduane wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a medium-sized company during the transition from IRC to Slack. The problem the company had was a split in comms networks. There was a lack of will on the part of engineers to move to GChat, and non-engineers were unwilling to respond/engage on IRC. Marketing, Sales, and Admin were using GChat, while engineering used IRC. Getting everyone on the same comms platform was a major improvement. I'm not saying…

I worked at Cisco, who had their own awful IM client. Our team used Hangouts instead with great success. Company-wide conferences were a ball-ache. The corporate solution didn't mute by default, so with 40000 people in a conf it devolved into a "TURN YOUR MIC OFF" shouting match for the first 10 minutes.

The more frightening thing is that Cisco (presumably as developer of the client?) couldn't change the defaults to solve one of their own problems.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#52

Post by parliament32 »

nsarafa wrote: post #44

One of the nicest cease and desist letters I've ever seen. I think what they're asking in the name change is more than fair, and providing guidence on changing the functionality to comply with their api seems like a good approach. Kuddos to Slack legal for keeping the matter human and civil.

>providing guidence on changing the functionality to comply with their api

Nice or not, that isn't what this is about at all. They effectively told the dev he's not allowed to do what he's doing -- their api doesn't support anything the author changed. Seems they just linked to their api docs for giggles.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#53

Post by g3rv4 »

tdewitt wrote: post #46

You solved on of my biggest gripes (muting spam) and a few others I didn't even know I had. Thanks for doing this. I grabbed a fork for myself. Definitely a big middle finger from Slack to the developer community and when I'm the one making the decisions, I'll be recommending people skip Slack. They mostly lost me when they killed the IRC gateway but they added another nail to the coffin with this.

<3

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#54

Post by barbegal »

comesee wrote: post #7

I dont see any legal reason why you can't publish the extension under a different name. Your extension is under no legal obligation to follow their acceptable use policy, only the users that use your extension.

Whilst it is true that the extension has no legal obligation to follow the acceptable use policy, users do have to follow the policy and the courts would argue this extension coerces users to break the policy. The legal precedent is Blizzard vs Bossland [1] which Bossland lost in the UK courts [1], US courts [2] and German courts [3]

[1] https://www.bristows.com/news-and-publications/articles/bris...

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-39490317

[3] http://gameslaw.org/bots-and-buddies-the-blizzard-v-bossland...

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#55

Post by splatzone »

nsarafa wrote: post #44

One of the nicest cease and desist letters I've ever seen. I think what they're asking in the name change is more than fair, and providing guidence on changing the functionality to comply with their api seems like a good approach. Kuddos to Slack legal for keeping the matter human and civil.

No, they're bullying a developer who created something useful so they can keep control of their product. They're misleading him by saying that building a Chrome extension for a website somehow makes you agree with that website's Acceptable Use Policy

They didn't provide any real guidance, there's no way the extension could work using the official API.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#56

Post by saagarjha »

g3rv4 wrote: post #14
dasmoth wrote: post #11

I wonder how much longer Slack’s web client is going to remain a first class product? Clearly, it was a good way to drive adoption, but seems that at this point they want ever more control.

now that they got all that money, I wouldn't be surprised if they killed the web app and moved away from Electron to do native apps that are harder to be messed with.

> to do native apps that are harder to be messed with

As someone who messes with native apps: this really isn't true, at least in my experience. Native apps tend to follow platform paradigms, which usually make them reasonably well designed and structured–sometimes more so than web applications. Usually adding functionality is simply a matter of finding the class that manages the component, rather than digging thorough a bunch of broken CSS (for IE 6 support) and minified goop.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#57

Post by chadash »

pvg wrote: post #34
whoisjuan wrote: post #27

I think you can safely ignore this cease and desist. Just change the name and add a disclaimer so your users know that by using your extension they are violating their acceptable use policy. This is no different than any user writing a Tampermonkey script to modify any website they want to modify. Even further, this is no different than a user opening the Dev Tools console and modifying things there.

You won't be able to tell your lawyer "this is no different than paying you with real money" and hand over a stack of monopoly banknotes. Legal advice by analogy is unlikely to be all that useful.

Analogies are used all the time in legal decisions. You'll find them regularly in supreme court opinions, for example. Anytime something that has never been seen is litigated, it's likely that analogies will be made to figure out the law [1].

I think the real lesson is "don't take legal advice from internet forums of non-lawyers", or at least take it with a grain of salt. Not all analogies are equally good and only a qualified lawyer is gonna know which analogies will fly in court.

[1] Here's a fun analogy in a tort law case cited at https://cyber.harvard.edu/bridge/Analogy/analogy3.htm:

In Adams v. New Jersey Steamboat Co., a steamboat passenger sued the owner after the theft of valuables from the rented cabin; neither passenger nor owner had been negligent. The passenger claimed the owner nonetheless was strictly responsible, regardless of any failure or compliance with care, in light of prior case ruling that innkeepers were strictly liable for the theft of boarders' valuables. The owner argued against strict liability and pointed to precedents rejecting liability claims by passengers on open-berth sleeping trains. For purposes of liability for theft from a passenger, should the steamboat owner be viewed as more like the innkeeper or more like the train owner? The court reasoned that "A steamer carrying passengers upon the water, and furnishing them with rooms and entertainment, is, for all practical purposes, a floating inn, and hence the duties which the proprietors owe to the passengers in their charge ought to be the same." The court noted that both innkeepers and steamboat operators are entrusted with high levels of confidence in the face of temptations by many to endanger guests. Given this parallel relationship to guests, innkeepers and steamboat operators should bear the same kinds of duties to guests.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#58

Post by caffeinewriter »

castis wrote: post #28

While I completely understand your decision to pull it; both their decision to flex their legal arm and your decision to not stand your ground are equally disappointing.

I completely understand the decision to not stand their ground. Going up against Slack means going up against a multi-billion dollar company, and potentially all the legal firepower that entails. Even if every monetary cost were covered, there's still the time and opportunity cost of dealing with legal headaches.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#59

Post by craigsmansion »

"we prefer that you do not include the word “Slack” in your product’s name."

From the people who had no problems naming their product identical to the colloquial name of the oldest maintained GNU/Linux distribution, thereby confusing the hell out of actual technical people for the longest time with press releases.

Also, Bob Dobbs called...

(Edit: you can take away my upticks, but you will never take away my slack. "Hacker" news my ass.)

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#60

Post by mosselman »

g3rv4 wrote: post #37
whoisjuan wrote: post #27

I think you can safely ignore this cease and desist. Just change the name and add a disclaimer so your users know that by using your extension they are violating their acceptable use policy. This is no different than any user writing a Tampermonkey script to modify any website they want to modify. Even further, this is no different than a user opening the Dev Tools console and modifying things there.

this was a bunch of Tampermonkey scripts... but I don't want to ignore their cease and desist. I... just don't do it. changing the name is not an issue... however, if I have to take it down, that's moot.

"I... just don't do it."

You mean you do not ignore cease and desist orders by principal? Why? There should be at least some criteria by which you judge which ones you can ignore and which you can't? What if they told you to cease and desist programming forever on any project because they state in their terms that once you mess with their UI with JavaScript you are not allowed to program anymore? Ridiculous right? So would you listen? Probably not.

So lets see what they are 'forbidding' you: They don't want you to write code that makes browsers do other things to their site... How is that any of their business?

What if a new browser comes along that renders all of their fonts differently so that they become unreadable, is that any of their business or is it the business of the people who use that browser? I'd say the latter.

I agree that a disclaimer and a change of name should be enough. I'd suggest 'SlackingOff' as a name.

You are free to write any extension that does anything to any website as long as you aren't hurting users' human rights and as long as you aren't hacking them if you ask me. Users can decide whether they want to use your extension perfectly fine on their own.

Also note that you are free to not write any extension as well. It is your life of course :)

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