so not only did they enforce a ridiculously small message limit, they also did it for the self-hosted version, and they did it without announcing it AND without a suitable migration path
and still no one from that company has admitted to it being a mistake?
In defense of them not admitting any kind of mistake, maybe it's not actually a mistake but instead a really well thought out, yet incredibly stupid, plan.
It works exceptionally well for Slack as we've seen over the years. Someone in your $group uses signs up for the free tier, gets people using it and then you've got to pay through the nose to access any history.
That'd be even more reason for them to have a solid PR plan prepared, to grind down opposition and gaslight everyone into giving up. Leaving all messaging about the issue to upset users is the worst way to handle it. Even just closing the issue would've been less damaging at this point.
I used to use Mattermost. Highly recommend looking at Zulip as an alternative. (It’s my favourite slack alternative and even better than Slack because it’s the best at managing distractions IMO. It also has an interesting history was acquired by Dropbox and then back from Dropbox I believe)
- No limitation on search, members, etc.
- 10 user limit for mobile notifications, can be relaxed via community (for non-profits, FOSS projects, etc.)
- SAML/LDAP *support* is available, you can configure it. They won't provide answers to your questions.
- Actually, all Zulip features are enabled sans Mobile Notifications, but for most of them, you're on your own. If you know what you're doing, it's not a problem, I assume.
IOW, for self-hosted plans, you pay for support, not the software. a-la early RedHat model.
They're now a defense contractor, the copy on their website sounds like military cosplaying.... Probably chasing the stupid profits of Anduril and Palantir, and doing the old open source rugpull in the process.
Zulip (for Slack) and Wekan (for Trello) are good replacements, save yourself the ethical and technical worries.
So so weird that we live in a timeline where Anduril and Palantir are military contractors of the US and other governments.
I know it’s somewhat of a tired observation by now but I still wonder every time how badly you have to misread LOTR to name your company after the witch kings cursed surveillance artefacts.
I wonder when the first weapons manufacturing company calls themselves Angmar or Uruk-hai.
The names are really dope though I have to give them that…
Ive seen MM instances across defense dev teams for quite a while specifically to avoid Teams bs in the air force, gov teams does not like mixing with other orgs. Now it seems they’re actually going for contracts and Ill bet great money are mostly funded by USAF. Im very, very surprised.
Knives were too, and yet I'm not calling people to use forks instead. There is a difference between military contractors and generic tools.
Edit: sorry, hotheaded reply. I assume you mean that the creator of mIRC was encouraging it (though it's not mentioned anywhere). I still.stand by my analogy, but I see your point given your assumption.
> I assume you mean that the creator of mIRC was aware of it and encouraging it.
Like most licensed software, it was likely licensed by “US Government” or “Department of Defense”. Plus, it was openly written about back in the day. It was well known. No clauses in their licensing to prevent its use for those purposes.
Comparing to Mattermost and amplifying the original comment, Mattermost website is openly associating with PlatformOne.
Maintaining your own fork is a ton of work. Even if it's just routinely rebasing on upstream and maintaining your own upgrade infrastructure and doing releases, that's far from trivial.
The open source community really needs to stop with the "just fork it" mindset.
I use MM for about a year. Forking it would be a major undertaking as the number of vulnerabilities for which you would need to backport is quite high like 5 a month?). Last time they removed features from free (group calls in v10) there was a lot of grumbling but thats it.
I don't think the implication is that anyone as an individual would fork it.
I think the implication is that some other interested org could very easily step in and assume the role that the Mattermost org was in, and everyone would very eagerly switch and leave Mattermost itself speaking to an empty room.
>The open source community really needs to stop with the "just fork it" mindset.
The open source community really needs to stop with the "just do everything i want for free" mindset.
I mean, open source does not mean you're entitled to free support, and free in free software is not about money. I think people depend too much on those projects and then act entitled.
Of course the open source bait and switch done by companies is a shitty behavior worth calling out, but the companies exist to earn money and at this point this can be expected.
I don't think I've expressed a "just do everything I want for free" mindset. In fact, I'm pushing against the idea that someone should just fork Mattermost and maintain that fork for free.
I do think this development represents a bait and switch though.
glancing through the code, it doesn't seem like it be that hard to remove limitations such as this. PostHistoryLimit/postHistoryLimit interpreted from License Limits. a little poke here and there and I'd guess the limitations would disappear.
The time and energy that it takes to do it and build it, and then make it easy for current users to move their automatic updates to the fork, then maintaining it etc.
AGPL and Apache are both open source licenses. So I’m not getting what the confusion would be as an end user, who won’t be modifying the software or packaging it for sale.
Nothing. Open Source is dying. The model to finance open source work (well-off suburban american dads or as a portfolio show off) no longer apply. The old generation that believed in this model is retiring and for the new generation it pays better to "network", leet code, or spam your resume to thousands of employers.
Now couple that with the fact that supply-chain control is profitable (legally or illegally); I think the next 5-10 years will be interesting.
> Would be a shame if someone with too much time on their hands dug into the binary and added a few zeroes to the message limit
Can this be done via some binary-patch tool? Really curious. It would save recompile efforts.
edit: link
edit 2: I just realized, their Ubuntu repository only contains the Enterprise edition labeled "Free edition". This is really confusing. I does look like entishitification has started long ago: https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment-guide/server/deploy-l...
Story time. This has basically nothing to do with this post other than it involves a limit of 10,000 but hey, it's Christmas and I want to tell a story.
I used to work for Facebook and many years ago people noticed you couldn't block certain people but the one that was most public was Mark Zuckerberg. It would just say it failed or something like that. And people would assign malice or just intent to it. But the truth was much funnier.
Most data on Facebook is stored in a custom graph database that basically only has 2 tables that are sharded across thousands of MySQL instances but most almost always accessed via an in-memory write-through cache, also custom. It's not quite a cache because it has functionality built on top of the database that accessing directly wouldn't have.
So a person is an object and following them is an edge. Importantly, many such edges were one-way so it was easy to query if person A followed B but much more difficult to query all the followers of B. This was by design to avoid hot shards.
So I lied when I said there were 2 tables. There was a third that was an optimization that counted certain edges. So if you see "10.7M people follow X" or "136K people like this", it's reading a count, not doing a query.
Now there was another optimization here: only the last 10,000 of (object ID,edge type) were in memory. You generally wanted to avoid dealing with anything older than that because you'd start hitting the database and that was generally a huge problem on a large, live query or update. As an example, it was easy to query the last 10,000 people or pages you've followed.
You should be able to see where this is going. All that had happened was 10,000 people had blocked Mark Zuckerberg. Blocks were another kind of edge that was bidirectional (IIRC). The system just wasn't designed for a situation where more than 10,000 people wanted to block someone.
This got fixed many years ago because somebody came along and build a separate system to handle blocking that didn't have the 10,000 limit. I don't know the implementation details but I can guess. There was a separate piece of reverse-indexing infrastructure for doing queries on one-way edges. I suspect that was used.
Anyway, I love this story because it's funny how a series of technical decisions can lead to behavior and a perception nobody intended.
Am I understanding this right that the main complainant in that issue thread is an IT company that wants to resell the (free) version of Mattermost software and is now complaining that they have to pay?
At first they tried to say that "we're a school" and then when the MM rep said they have an Education license, they admitted that they are not actually a school, but rather a consulting company that is gouging schools by overcharging for open source software.
> an IT company that wants to resell the (free) version of Mattermost software and is now complaining that they have to pay?
A user that was following the letter of the license and has suddenly had their access to the software restricted without warning.
Open source software means people are entirely within their rights to sell it to others, perhaps creating value by providing the warranty that all licenses expressly disclaim.
I looked at it for company chat and data, but those weird limits in functionality making in unusable was just too much, so them doing this too is not really surprising. Are they low on money?
What's mattermost? People in the GitHub comments say "I just need messages" but there's lots of self hosted messaging apps/servers, no? XMPP comes to mind immediately.
It's another level of insane to put hard limits for self hosted open source software. I'm surprised so few people in the thread have just changed the source code and build it themselves.
This seems like a poorly hashed out plan, but I do have some sympathy...
in the face of competitors with many more employees and seemingly endless piles of VC money, how do open source projects like this fund themselves? What could Mattermost do instead? Should they take more money and race everyone towards the same cliff?
Are projects like this doomed to a small niche of people who understand the implications (and meanwhile can't contribute enough to ensure development keeps pace)?
Everyone else is just going to keep using Slack, and arguably outside of these niche concerns, it's a better funded and higher quality product.
I'm not sure about MIT, but the GNU license specifically requires the application licensed to be available in source code (human readable and editable form or similar verbiage).
The FSF calls it a "free license" [1] and I don't think they would if they didn't make the source code available.
Source code available is necessary but not sufficient for Free software, see [2]
> Freedoms 1 and 3 require source code to be available because studying and modifying software without its source code can range from highly impractical to nearly impossible.
I think that the photos they have on their front page should be enough to tell you who is their target market.
I've invented this heuristic: if the page that describes the project uses the word "solutions", then they'll attempt to use "open source" to obtain free labour, but will distribute the revenues only amongst those people who actually have control.
I don't think the GP implied anything about race? The photos I see are war frigates, power plants, some sort of military operations center, and commercial airliners.
I left every option open for OP to explain. I personally couldn't care less what skin colour are in any of the photos. Not a single one of them match my own.
Everything you mentioned in that list in people who can pay. As opposed to people who code and they use what they code, and furthermore share it with other people who also code and use what they code.
It's "open source" so that they save on developer costs, not for ideological reasons, and you can tell from the photos on their front page - that's what I was implying.
I think this is kind of cynical. I often adopt open source tools because I want to avoid vendor lockin. And so do many. It's not like I say, "Wow. Another code base to dive into and spend hours trying to understand." Nope. I just want the assurance that I can do it if I ever need to do so.
Governmental organizations and corporate firms is the vibe (or maybe that was obvious and you're just trolling).
I think the point was that open source hasn't often been supported by companies serving these kinds of markets and the interests of the broader community are often sidelined.
> “Mattermost only got where it is today because of the open-source community.”
Not really? FOSS communities overestimate their importance on a daily basis.
Case in point: Linux. 90%+ of commits were corporate sponsored… in 2004. The pure community member does almost nothing of importance for Linux anymore; or any of these projects.
and still no one from that company has admitted to it being a mistake?
very nice
If they want to do that then, as every corporate "open source", they are free to do so but why not communicate that at least in the release post?
Any potential free user who would consider going paid will now be starting off their relationship negatively.
Really weird strategy.
Not sure what isn't included in the core though.
Ref: https://zulip.com/plans/#self-hosted-sponsorships
Push uses _their_ services. That's why it costs $$$. But you can build your own apns endpoint and plug into that at that volume
Zulip (for Slack) and Wekan (for Trello) are good replacements, save yourself the ethical and technical worries.
https://zulip.com/
https://wekan.github.io/
I know it’s somewhat of a tired observation by now but I still wonder every time how badly you have to misread LOTR to name your company after the witch kings cursed surveillance artefacts.
I wonder when the first weapons manufacturing company calls themselves Angmar or Uruk-hai.
The names are really dope though I have to give them that…
It was a Mike Judge type joke, aka ha-ha only serious.
Luckily/unluckily, AngMar is one of those shady medical subcontracting firms instead...
Wonder whether they do weapons integrations for this. Urgh.
Crucially, it's end to end encrypted.
You can self-host it, or pay for having it hosted (or use the hosted free tier).
Has other things in addition to kanban.
I got a 1 yr account.
https://cryptpad.fr/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147321
Edit: sorry, hotheaded reply. I assume you mean that the creator of mIRC was encouraging it (though it's not mentioned anywhere). I still.stand by my analogy, but I see your point given your assumption.
Like most licensed software, it was likely licensed by “US Government” or “Department of Defense”. Plus, it was openly written about back in the day. It was well known. No clauses in their licensing to prevent its use for those purposes.
Comparing to Mattermost and amplifying the original comment, Mattermost website is openly associating with PlatformOne.
https://p1.dso.mil/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46379589
The open source community really needs to stop with the "just fork it" mindset.
I think the implication is that some other interested org could very easily step in and assume the role that the Mattermost org was in, and everyone would very eagerly switch and leave Mattermost itself speaking to an empty room.
The open source community really needs to stop with the "just do everything i want for free" mindset.
I mean, open source does not mean you're entitled to free support, and free in free software is not about money. I think people depend too much on those projects and then act entitled.
Of course the open source bait and switch done by companies is a shitty behavior worth calling out, but the companies exist to earn money and at this point this can be expected.
I do think this development represents a bait and switch though.
Yes, that’s what we are doing here.
> but the companies exist to earn money and at this point this can be expected.
Expected != ethical. Also not a necessary, logical outcome.
What is legitimately expected is a pro version that has more corporate features. We’re not talking about $Xx/user/mo to enable SSO here, though.
Wanting to use Mattermost's binaries rather than building from source?
Re licensing see: https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/mattermost/
The source code is... AGPL licensed? But not the admin tools. They seem to be licensed under the Apache License 2.0.
--------
Yeah, good luck. Contact your lawyer.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
Now couple that with the fact that supply-chain control is profitable (legally or illegally); I think the next 5-10 years will be interesting.
https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuec...
Also one of the comments:
> Would be a shame if someone with too much time on their hands dug into the binary and added a few zeroes to the message limit
Can this be done via some binary-patch tool? Really curious. It would save recompile efforts.
edit: link
edit 2: I just realized, their Ubuntu repository only contains the Enterprise edition labeled "Free edition". This is really confusing. I does look like entishitification has started long ago: https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment-guide/server/deploy-l...
I used to work for Facebook and many years ago people noticed you couldn't block certain people but the one that was most public was Mark Zuckerberg. It would just say it failed or something like that. And people would assign malice or just intent to it. But the truth was much funnier.
Most data on Facebook is stored in a custom graph database that basically only has 2 tables that are sharded across thousands of MySQL instances but most almost always accessed via an in-memory write-through cache, also custom. It's not quite a cache because it has functionality built on top of the database that accessing directly wouldn't have.
So a person is an object and following them is an edge. Importantly, many such edges were one-way so it was easy to query if person A followed B but much more difficult to query all the followers of B. This was by design to avoid hot shards.
So I lied when I said there were 2 tables. There was a third that was an optimization that counted certain edges. So if you see "10.7M people follow X" or "136K people like this", it's reading a count, not doing a query.
Now there was another optimization here: only the last 10,000 of (object ID,edge type) were in memory. You generally wanted to avoid dealing with anything older than that because you'd start hitting the database and that was generally a huge problem on a large, live query or update. As an example, it was easy to query the last 10,000 people or pages you've followed.
You should be able to see where this is going. All that had happened was 10,000 people had blocked Mark Zuckerberg. Blocks were another kind of edge that was bidirectional (IIRC). The system just wasn't designed for a situation where more than 10,000 people wanted to block someone.
This got fixed many years ago because somebody came along and build a separate system to handle blocking that didn't have the 10,000 limit. I don't know the implementation details but I can guess. There was a separate piece of reverse-indexing infrastructure for doing queries on one-way edges. I suspect that was used.
Anyway, I love this story because it's funny how a series of technical decisions can lead to behavior and a perception nobody intended.
At first they tried to say that "we're a school" and then when the MM rep said they have an Education license, they admitted that they are not actually a school, but rather a consulting company that is gouging schools by overcharging for open source software.
A user that was following the letter of the license and has suddenly had their access to the software restricted without warning.
Open source software means people are entirely within their rights to sell it to others, perhaps creating value by providing the warranty that all licenses expressly disclaim.
And there are 3 things that you can do when in this situation:
1) Pay the fee, if that is what is required for it to continue to be easy for you to re-sell the software.
2) Fork the project, remove the restrictions, and maintain it yourself.
3) Stop using the software.
All of those are perfectly within the spirit of FOSS.
It's about rug pulling your users and cutting them off at the knees. I don't use mattermost but read the github thread in it's entirety.
in the face of competitors with many more employees and seemingly endless piles of VC money, how do open source projects like this fund themselves? What could Mattermost do instead? Should they take more money and race everyone towards the same cliff?
Are projects like this doomed to a small niche of people who understand the implications (and meanwhile can't contribute enough to ensure development keeps pace)?
Everyone else is just going to keep using Slack, and arguably outside of these niche concerns, it's a better funded and higher quality product.
> A new compiled version is released under an MIT license every month on the 16th.
What does than even mean? Is it equivalent to what we use to call "freeware". Is it legal to modify the binaries?
The FSF calls it a "free license" [1] and I don't think they would if they didn't make the source code available.
Source code available is necessary but not sufficient for Free software, see [2]
> Freedoms 1 and 3 require source code to be available because studying and modifying software without its source code can range from highly impractical to nearly impossible.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
EDIT Oh sorry, you mean for the LICENSE to be available. Never mind then.
You are thinking of copyleft (e.g. GPL)
The license is only three paragraphs long. You can see it does not contain text supporting your claim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License
I've invented this heuristic: if the page that describes the project uses the word "solutions", then they'll attempt to use "open source" to obtain free labour, but will distribute the revenues only amongst those people who actually have control.
I really don't get what you're implying. I don't see any problem with the photos on the mattermost front page.
https://mattermost.com/
Think "enterprise", rather than "racism".
It's "open source" so that they save on developer costs, not for ideological reasons, and you can tell from the photos on their front page - that's what I was implying.
I think the point was that open source hasn't often been supported by companies serving these kinds of markets and the interests of the broader community are often sidelined.
Enshitification ensues.
Not really? FOSS communities overestimate their importance on a daily basis.
Case in point: Linux. 90%+ of commits were corporate sponsored… in 2004. The pure community member does almost nothing of importance for Linux anymore; or any of these projects.