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Comment by rekoros | Hacker News Reader

Thank you!

We're so paranoid about getting shut down by Google (Hangouts, no API), Microsoft (Skype, no API), and Facebook (Messenger, no API) that we're not only not open sourcing any of our implementations, we're not even providing a commercial API in fear of having to deal with some form of abuse.

That said, the night is young. We hope to eventually gain enough leverage to get the big guys to listen to us.

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Ok. It's kind of good to hear the barrier to open sourcing is more legal than commercial. That means it's fixable :)

Can I ask you some details on how you went about working with Skype and Hangouts? Did you do the reverse engineering yourself? These are protocols several popular open source projects have been trying to support for years and haven't succeeded.

Can I also ask you about your tech stack/languages you used for Sameroom?

We implemented them ourselves, and it took quite a bit of work.

Our magic weapon is Erlang, which is a wonderful language for working with protocols, and a wonderful runtime for working with many things happening at the same time.

The other magic weapons are the Cowboy webserver and the Gun http client -- both written by Loïc Hoguin. Loïc doesn't work for us, but we've been sponsoring him financially for over two years (https://medium.com/@abs/what-we-learned-from-sponsoring-an-o...).

Our frontend doesn't really matter as much, since it's just a dashboard, but we use TypeScript with Flux and React (it's been great).

Care to share your webpack config for getting React and TypeScript to play ball? I'm collecting a bunch to try to figure out what works best.

You can take a look at ours: https://github.com/hearthsim/joust

That's actually interesting topic :) Right now we use gulp and gulp-typescript. So far, I like approach that is used in https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScriptSamples/tree/master/e... but I'm not sure if we are going to use it any time soon. As far as gulp config, what we use is pretty much close to gulp-typescript README examples

Thanks! Yeah it's hard to find good UP TO DATE reading material on this. I genuinely appreciate this.

I was just considering advocating within my employer (Cloudant, i.e. clustered-CouchDB-as-a-Service) to back Loïc too. CouchDB is still stuck in the past with Mochiweb, and while switching that out for Cowboy 1.X would be a nice-to-have, getting our hands on a stable release of Cowboy2 (i.e. "the HTTP/2 version") would let us optimize Couch's replication story immensely. I've just been trying to set up a single trivial Event Stream HTTP/2 loop_handler with the Cowboy2 master, and it's really just not there yet, so we could probably give him a push.

That would be great - I can put you in touch if you're not already (andrei@sameroom.io).

There are actually FOSS implementations of Hangouts wrappers (Hangups) Skype wrappers (SkypeWeb for libpurple) and Facebook wrappers (purple-facebook) and even a telepathy wrapper for the Facebook protocol.

Nobody is getting sued yet, and Pidgin supports all of them nowadays.

Reminds me of the story around AIM/MSN wars from back in the day.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/21/5635488/msn-messenger-vs-a...

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/

Or how AOL's Oscar protocol got updated at one point to start requesting chunks of the AOL IM binary as authentication against open sources clients (because they couldn't distribute AOL's binary with their client).

Do you have a source for this?

Sounds like you just need the AGPL

Licensing has nothing to do with this.

Yeah because if you open source something under the right license, no abuse happens... What percentage of GPL violators has the FSF prosecuted? Or anyone else for that matter?

The FSF isn't about prosecuting people, but about getting GPL compliance.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...

Unfortunately working on GPL compliance is expensive, I would encourage anyone who cares about copyleft to support the Software Freedom Conservancy's efforts.

https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/

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