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Comment by amedvednikov | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to solve this walled garden problem by building a free native desktop client for Slack, Skype, XMPP, Twitter etc.

It doesn't have the 10 000 messages limit, it's very light (~100 KB) and fast:

https://eul.im

I recently started working on it full-time, so I expect a stable release to be out this month.

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I will always cheer on someone building something cool, but here's the problem I have: Everyone wants to build an open source alternative, no one wants to make money. What is wrong with making money? Money is great -- it lets you buy clothes, food, shelter, water, and even a night out on the town or two. We need to be able to make money on software again, not just have user data be the product. This is partly to blame on the FOSS zealots. Sure they say it's "just fine" to make money on your software, but they never seemed to offer a method that is based in reality.

Well he didn't say he wasn't going to earn money from the project, just that the client is free. There are many ways to monetize something and the benefits of starting with free is that you get biggest growth and then you can find your "whales" and learn how to profit from them.

Hi,

I 100% agree with you. I want this product to make money so that I can devote my full time to it.

The basic functionality will always be free without ads and tracking. But there will also be a very affordable ($1-2/mo) premium plan. I haven't yet decided what it's going to have. Most likely an ability to add more than 5 accounts or multiple accounts on the same platform (e.g. 3 Slack profiles).

It's perfectly fine to make money, nobody argues that. The point is that Open Source and making money don't contradict each other.

Examples:

- Conversations, the Android XMPP client, is GPL and sold on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conve... - There is also a paid hosted XMPP service on conversations.im.

- I have a paid+OSS app for amateur radio geolocation on Google Play myself. You can download the APK from the homepage or just directly buy it for some bucks.

- X-Chat, the OSS IRC client has a paid Windows version: http://xchat.org/windows/

You could OSS your app under whatever license you want, and still provide paid builds for any platform you want.

Don’t price your service so low! Anything below $5/mo gives the perception of having little value to offer. Plus you’re gonna lose a fat percentage to credit card processing.

To avoid credit card fees I was thinking about $12-24/year.

I don't want to charge a lot for a chat client, but these prices are not final. I know that charging too little is a mistake.

Open source and making money can be orthogonal

It doesn't seem like the parent wants to build an open source alternative. I remember reading about it over half a year ago (back then it was supposedly written in Go rather than C if I remember correctly) where there was also promise of open sourcing it.. His website also seems to indicate he now wants to go the route of SublimeText, so the open source promise should probably be interpreted as "I'll release the source code after I abandon the project, whether it takes one or ten years"..

FYI, I have nothing against closed source projects, but every discussion about eul.im seems to include the promise of open sourcing the project, which I'm sure is a great marketing ploy.

> I'm trying to solve this walled garden problem

By building a closed-source client?

Cool project; it's really impressive and I'd love to use once it gets stable, but don't you think your claim is a bit incompatible with your method?

It's going to be open-sourced at some point, just not now.

What I meant is I'm building an alternative client that gives people a lot more freedom. For example, you can use XMPP as your primary messenger, and still communicate with your teammates via Slack.

You can also have access to all your history and a much, much better instant search.

In the future, an IRC/XMPP gateway will be built in as well.

Why not now?

Opening a project early to contributors can end in mixed milestones, and the project may never archieve an "stable" status.

I might not be using the best words, so I'll give examples: Dolphin, the GameCube/Wii emulator did not release it's source code until the program's structure was mature enough to start adding thirth party code without disrupting the project's core codebase.

The premise is cool indeed, but are you really going to solve "this walled garden problem" with a closed-source application?

Looks VERY promising! I wanted the Linux alpha but doesn't seem like it's there yet :(

I'll be following this for sure <3

Thanks! Linux beta will be out this month. Right now I'm working on fixing bugs and crashes and implementing missing crucial features.

Wrapping up the Linux GUI bit will only take a couple of days.

Congratulations, we really need leaner IMs and from what I see it looks great!

If it supports some important features like file uploading, pinning and seeing pinned threads, etc. to reach Slack feature parity I'll surely take a shot.

Are you using QT for cross-platform compatibility or some other toolkit?

If I was using Qt, it'd be at least 25 MB, not 100 KB :)

It's all native.

Pinning is supported, just temporarily disabled. File support is not great right now. Only inline images are supported.

But the goal is of course to have full feature parity and more, so follow the development :)

A lot is going to be done by the end of March.

> If I was using Qt, it'd be at least 25 MB, not 100 KB :)

Not on Ubuntu/Arch/etc... :)

Well, Qt would still take up that space. It's just that on those platforms it's likely installed elsewhere and used by enough other things that it's closer to the "general userland size" category than it is to any one "specific application size".

Of course, that's what I meant, unlike at least as many copies of Chromium as electron apps.

Can you build it for all the 4 architectures supported by Windows (x86/x64/arm/arm64)? As it's not open source, recompilation cannot be done.

It's x86 right now, so it should run on x64. Is it possible to compile WinAPI apps for arm?

Yeah it is.

Looks cool, but do you have any intention on supporting macOS Sierra (or earlier versions)?

> You have macOS 10.12.6. The application requires macOS 10.13 or later.

The macOS bundle is not set up correctly right now, that's why it doesn't work on older versions of macOS.

Run it from Terminal for now:

~/Downloads/eul.app/Contents/MacOS/eul

I'll fix this in v0.31.

eul takes forever to start first time. maybe you should tell user in advance. I thought it couldn't start at all.

Yeah, it's a bug. Will be fixed soon. Shouldn't take too long unless you have a really slow connection. It downloads 300 KB of icons.

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