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Comment by antioedipus | Hacker News Reader

The open-source Mattermost intentionally lacks a couple of pieces of basic functionality to push you to pay, like the ability to stop regular users from deleting channels, and no way to set a reasonable password policy that requires more than 5 characters.

Mattermost (and specifically their CEO, who is vigorously replying to messages on this thread, but probably won’t engage with this one) haven’t responded positively to requests to include these basic features:

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/5935

As far as I’m concerned, Mattermost isn’t any kind of a competitor to free-tier Slack until these issues are resolved. This exact thing has turned more than one team I’m on away from Mattermost.

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This is, fundamentally, the Open Core business plan, which Mattermost is executing quite successfully. You get all the marketing benefits of being "open source", but few IT departments will use your software in production without buying the enterprise license, so you get most of the revenue you'd have had if you were closed source.

Folks have different perspectives on Open Core. It's definitely a lot better from a freedom perspective than proprietary software, so I don't want to be too down on it. But it isn't really FOSS, and I think the difference is important, which is why Zulip is following the commercially more difficult path of 100% FOSS. Even obviously enterprise features developed entirely by our paid team, like SAML authentication are FOSS, and our plan is for it to remain that way forever.

It's commercially more difficult because it means right now we have users at governments and Fortune 500 companies and whatnot who've reached out to tell us they how much they love Zulip, but nonetheless aren't paying us anything. On the flipside, Zulip has been very successful in building a large community of volunteer major contributors (some handy stats are in our release blog posts, e.g. last week's https://blog.zulip.org/2019/12/13/zulip-2-1-released/). I don't think that would have happened had we taken Mattermost's aggressively Open Core approach..

(I lead the Zulip project and company)

I really hope this model works out for you, I absolutely adore Zulip. At my company, we have the option of self-hosting, since you've made it so easy, but I intentionally keep us on the free plan so we can start paying when we can afford it, to support you.

Zulip is one of the few pieces of software that I think are unquestionably worth their price (some others being Gitlab and some sort of SIP provider, e.g. OnSIP).

Mattermost CEO here,

Thanks for the feedback, replies on both issues posted:

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/5935

Please let us know what y'all think?

The password policy was added to Team Edition back in June, 2018.

>Mattermost isn’t any kind of a competitor to free-tier Slack

Mattermost isn't intended to compete with Slack's free tier.

The open source version of Mattermost is focused on software builders and operators who want a flexible, open, collaboration platform that works with their tools and workflows. Here's more on Mattermost Chatops as an example: https://mattermost.com/blog/introducing-mattermost-chatops/

Very often we're deployed in high security environments and private clouds where internet-based services can't easily go.

I can't really tell for the github issues you posted what was done about these two issues.

I don't really feel like reading all that just to figure it out.

Did you resolve both of the issues brought up by OP or not?

(Answering: "The password policy was added to Team Edition back in June, 2018.", isn't the same as answering, "the free tier allows passwords of length >5 characters.")

Sorry about that. Thanks for the feedback. It is very helpful. Trying again:

1) Enforcing password requirements for end users was put in free tier last year - Here's why, with a link on how to use it: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/5935#...

2) Non-admins are still able to archive channels they belong to but did not create - Here's why: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320#...

3) I need to work on speaking more concisely, here is another version of #2 from an HN user who puts things more simply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21824219

Does this help?

Sure, thanks! I'm not panning you or your product.

I'd love for there to be a viable alternative to slack that is more (if not entirely) open.

As I’m reading it, Mattermost (as source) is released under the AGPL, which makes it both legal and ethical (indeed, they have explicitly consented to allow you to distribute modifications) to stub out all the license checking and enable all of the enterprise functionality without any payments, tracking, or phone-home.

It seems to me this is the point of free/open source software: anyone can improve it and make it more functional and distribute those improvements. The first logical improvement, to me, is removing the unnecessary license checks that disable useful features of the software.

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/...

Yep, and this is why the AGPL is not for protecting your IP, only for ensuring that the code remains open forever.

I believe they store the enterprise specific code in another git repo that has to be checked out, for one (from reading their Makefile).

The binaries they release (including that code) are MIT licensed according to their readme, which means that modifying those should also be no problem.

This is true, you could probably edit out the publickey and then generate your own license pretty easily.

It is legal and ethical to remove the parts you don’t like, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay for it. You’re not required to, but if you find it useful you could consider it a donation.

Regular users cannot delete other people's posts and channels, but they can indeed archive any public channel.

I run a mattermost server for a Free Software project. We have over 2000 users, but around 300 monthly active users, 100 daily. I worry about it sometimes, but trolling in our community is pretty rare.

> Mattermost (and specifically their CEO, who is vigorously replying to messages on this thread, but probably won’t engage with this one) [emphasis mine]

Aside from being wrong, this seems needlessly argumentative and rude.

Now that I read my comment again, it is clear that I was being more inflammatory than was necessary.

Thank you for calling me on it.

(As an aside, this is one of my highest upvoted comments ever, which perhaps says something about what gets internet points on HN.)

In my experience, the competition is pidgin slash outlook communicator slash whatever brain dead enterprise messaging app. Not slack (or hipchat or...). Mattermost has seen a lot of adoption atthe Big Dumb Corps I’ve seen.

That’s my take on the market at least. I’d buy stock in it if I could.

The open-source version also lack any data retention option, meaning that your only option is to let the database grow indefinitely; you can manually delete stuff from the db, but last time I've checked that was not recommended.

Deploying Mattermost is not ideal, as the server requires write access to its JSON configuration file and will overwrite it from time to time, which makes using any configuration manager pointless: after upgrading mattermost you have to fetch the "updated" configuration file from your server and import it back into your configuration manager (and since it's JSON you might get different key sorting and indentation offset).

Despite the above I like Mattermost and I've been regularly using it for more than 1 year, basically for free.

In 5.10 Mattermost added the ability to move the configuration to the database, which solves the issue of having a config.json file. This also has the advantage of versioning your configuration in the database which makes rolling back changes very easy.

FWIW, Restya seems to be coming up with another Jira & Slack alternative https://restya.com/core-jira-slack-alternative Looks like it will also be an open source

If there is enough interest, we at polyglot.network can add those missing functionalities and maintain that fork. We have already done the same for certain other OSS software as enhancing open-source software for paying corporate clients IS our business model.

I know of a place that tried Mattermost, realized it was crappy demoware (their words, not mine), and dumped it for another solution.

It doesn't really have a place even doing open source works (no real controls), nor in the corporate world... unless you pay.

I have to agree with their assessment of demoware.

Another one, if you want your free local instalation to be able to push notifications to your mobile app it needs to go through their http (non-https) proxy. At this point this might be more damaging than not providing the option at all.

You can set it to push only that a message was sent, redacting the user/channel and content.

Well, then there is even more open sourced alternative than Mattermost: https://github.com/tinode/chat

It looks like somebody has engaged in those issues over there. Probably because of this comment.

disable the endpoint in your reverse proxy

use sso/ldap/ad (paid?) etc

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