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Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

@sytse - this is huge. You can move the YC internal slack to gitter as well ;)

But seriously - people are willing to throw money for an enterprise gitter - especially after https://medium.freecodecamp.com/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-w...

Look at the number of people begging Discord to take money from them - https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-...

gitter always had search working - discord just got it recently.

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Thanks Sandeep. We assume that it is easier to charge money to enterprises than open source communities. If we see strong adoption and feature requests from the enterprise we'll consider adopting an open-core model and charging for it. For now the adoption is mainly from open source communities and we think of our costs as a marketing expense.

Do you know of any enterprises using Gitter?

No - because, like discord, gitter makes it a point to make privacy very hard to set up. This is fairly deliberate and is the reason why enterprises have a hard time adopting it.

Why not use Mattermost for something like this? We ship it with GitLab Omnibus and it's open core.

https://about.mattermost.com/

EDIT: Previously said open source, open core is the correct term.

Mattermost is open core and not open source.

It's the gitlab vs github stand - self hosted vs hosted saas.

Gitlab is incredible... but I really cant host right now. Same for mattermost.

I do believe that the ability to run a fairly large hosted system at scale and with incredible performance is what the gitter guys bring to the table.

Can you explain how Discord makes privacy hard to set up? Servers by default are private (No one can join or even see the server unless they are invited to it). You can disable people's ability to create invites with a 3 clicks.

(disclaimer: work at Discord & fishing for feedback about how we can make this easier)

So, this is related to another comment I made. We are not hosting our own. We want to throw money at discord bringing in enterprise like features in its hosted version.

I linked to a ticket - if you follow that trail, there are many more.

Sandeep, it's interesting that you view it that way, but it was never our intention to deliberately make privacy hard. When creating a new room, you can choose to make it public, private and optionally allow anyone from your GitHub org to join your private room. See http://imgur.com/jIb8EKA

It's definitely true that the product focus on Gitter has always been more on public rooms. That's because the focus of our company has always been on the network of public communities, rather than enterprise features, which we feel are well represented in the market by other great products like Slack, Mattermost, etc.

(Background: I'm CTO/Cofounder at Gitter)

Additionally, would love to hear your feedback on what you think we could change in Gitter to make privacy easier and less frictionless.

I completely understand and respect that. It was not a complaint - but cognizance that you had a certain philosophy in mind.

Forget slack - look at hipchat which has far simpler privacy controls. The ability to create an organization (NOT linked to GitHub), per channel permissions is all that's needed. Hipchat makes this dead simple.

Lots of different people will have different requirements - some people will need Active Directory even, but essentially the only two things needed for enterprise messaging is permissions and search.

> people are willing to throw money for an enterprise gitter

Isn't that just Slack?

The point of the first link is that free Gitter is already better than free Slack, so companies would be willing pay to have guaranteed support/uptime/etc from Gitter.

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