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Comment by jbm | Hacker News Reader

The real premium version of Microsoft Teams will be the one that doesn't crash my Google Chrome window every 30-45 minutes.

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That's why we're building FossTeams [1], an open source client for Microsoft Teams (:

The idea is to have a backend [2], powered by a library [3] that does the heavy lifting and a / multiple frontends to be used with that (e.g: CLI[4], Web frontend[5], Flutter app[6]).

We're looking for contributors! If you hate Teams and want to improve an Open Source version, PRs are welcome (:

[1]: https://github.com/fossteams

[2]: https://github.com/fossteams/fossteams-backend

[3]: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-api

[4]: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli

[5]: https://github.com/fossteams/fossteams-frontend

[6]: https://github.com/fossteams/fossteams_gui

I don’t think it can be really improved as long as Microsoft can sell this slow unstable piece of crap into all the big corporate by shameless bribing.

I used to work in a big corporate, suddenly all teams has to change to MS team even the current software works just fine. I just decided to quit.

That's why this uses the same client ID as Microsoft Teams and connects to the same backends.

Don't get me wrong, the Teams servers aren't the fastest out there - but processing a 50 MB JSON with Javascript (well, Angular) is probably not needed at all if your goal is just to see a chat message. We do that heavy lifting on the server side (that anyways runs locally on your PC), so that the client can get the messages without all of the mess.

You're brilliant martyrs, but it's such a shame that Teams is just universally accepted as a new enterprise thing. I've never really seen such an anticompetitive move by Microsoft in the last decade, but Teams has taken on both Slack and Zoom and friends and they shove it "for free" down their enterprise customers' throats. It's crying out for a competition authority investigation and a compulsory breaking up -- not just a FOSS client.

Of course, but in the meantime since we can't change the situation (me and others who have been forced to use Teams) you have to stop the bleeding for those who are truly suffering from M$ + Management's decisions

Can you elaborate on this point a bit? It seems to me that you are saying Microsoft should not be allowed to release their own version of Slack and Zoom for free. I don't see the argument for that, especially since Microsoft itself has in the past released free software that does essentially what these other tools also do, and largely inspired them (Skype, for example).

Sure.

> It seems to me that you are saying Microsoft should not be allowed to release their own version of Slack and Zoom for free.

That is exactly what I'm saying, because it is against EU competition law as Microsoft has a dominant position in the market -- the "plain English" guide to competition law simply states: [1]

  If your company has a large market share, it holds a dominant position and must take particular care not to:

   •    charge unreasonably high prices which would exploit customers
   •    charge unrealistically low prices which may drive competitors out of the market
   •    discriminate between customers
   •    force certain trading conditions on your business partners

Microsoft does arguably all of these with different products to some level. Zoom, Slack, Discord etc are all paid-for products with a cost that, prior to February 2020, companies paid for separately. Microsoft then came along with Teams and released it as part of a certain tier of M365 subscription for free. Whilst Zoom and friends have not been driven out of the market, they have suffered as a result of it and what was a burgeoning industry, including with "freemium" or "paid support" FOSS models like Jitsi, have suffered as the corporate behemoths of the world use Teams. The real proof of the pudding is the fact that most users hate Teams: it's widely regarded as being not as good as its competitors and yet is massively used. Why? Monopolistic business practices.

[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/selling-in-eu/competit...

Thank you for the clarification.

I understand where you (and the law) are coming from, but when it comes to software it is hard to say what are "unrealistically low prices". Slack and Zoom also have free tiers, so how is it unrealistic for Microsoft to offer that as well? Looking at Google for example, would you say that they should be forced to charge for their services to reflect their costs? I doubt that either of these would be a good thing.

> it as part of a certain tier of M365 subscription for free.

So is it free or not? If it's part of a subscription, it's just included in the cost. The subscription already included a whole suite of different software, what makes Teams special in that regard? Who decides that Teams is a separate product and not just a feature of the O365 product?

These are all good questions, and you could have asked them about IE and Windows – where it was found to be anticompetitive behaviour. The answer to "who decides" is the national competition and markets authorities of the EU's member states, or the EU's competition commission. The main issue from a legal point of view is whether Microsoft is exploiting its dominant position in business services to make its competitors suffer unduly, if it was not dominant in another area – which you could make an argument for, in my opinion.

What sets this project apart from the MS Graph API? Are there any API features that Graph does not have?

I have built an alternative Teams client for smart glasses using only MS Graph and Azure Communication Services and it can already do most interactions related to chat/meetings/org etc.

It's not using the MS Graph API and it's copying what the Teams Desktop client is doing.

This gives you a way to run an alternative client in corporations where you don't have the possibility to use third party apps. On top of that, since it's not using the Graph API, we might get better features that will take long time to be available in the Graph API.

I think it's funny that casual hobbyists can easily outproduce Microsoft's supposedly world class engineering organization. It's not even a question in anyone's mind either. You guys know you're going to beat them (or already have), everyone here takes it as a given, even the engineers at MSFT probably know it.

Even if they try to stop you guys, they probably won't be able to pull it off unless they can manage it in court

Why is that funny? I think it is normal that a hobby team working in a silo on an alternative client with a low amount of users move faster than a full engineering organization working on a mass rolled out product used in corporate environment all over the world.

For a new feature the hobby team can just hack away for a few nights, push the release and they are done.

The engineering org needs to plan and coordinate the feature across multiple teams (web app, desktop app, mobile app, Graph, teams admin panel, o365 admin panel,...) and then make sure it fits well into the rest of the MS infrastructure (policies, permission scopes, IT admin controls, licensing, auditing,...). Legal might need to be involved.

And then after aligning all those teams and waiting for each team to prioritize and do the work it needs to get into the MS roadmap as well going through the usual stages (private preview, public preview, General Availability). And once it hits GA it needs to be supported for many years.

I love you. Thank you for this.

Honest question, asked in good faith. What's your plan when for when the "cease and desist" letter is going to come in?

We'll see. We're doing nothing more than using undocumented APIs and in the end these clients are not competing against Microsoft Teams (but actually bringing / keeping more user base there). On top of that, we provide the code as MIT, so Microsoft can reuse the code for themselves.

If they still send a cease and desist letter, we'll probably comply and make sure the code is archived somewhere for people to continue / use the project (:

TL;DR: I would consider a cease and desist a success, and hope that Microsoft reuses the code

I appreciate your efforts, because Teams is so terrible, but I'd love to avoid yet another chat application with its own UI. Pidgin is great for consolidating many of these walled garden chat services (e.g. Discord/Slack) into a unified UI, do you have any plans to develop a libpurple plugin?

Once we have a solid base library, it can be included as a plugin everywhere. We've had already requests for a Weechat plugin [1], and Pidgin / Matrix are good candidates too.

[1]: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli/issues/2

I get so tired of what would seem like very simple things breaking in Teams. All this last week I've been recording conference calls with Powerpoint. I understand there's a recording function within Teams, but it started out singleplayer with no one watching the demonstrations of my processes. Anyway, Teams will pop up notifications while I'm recording and it didn't used to. Hell, I'll be sharing my screen in Teams and it will show my notifications over the screen share.

So far I've been lucky that nothing surprising has been leaked to others or wound up in recordings, but this didn't used to happen.

The real premium version of teams would actually show people on the other end of the call what my side says I'm sharing.

Or one that works in Firefox without disconnecting you at random when you try to make a video call or join a conference.

Or a Windows app that doesn't crash and fuck up all the time. Or a Mac app that doesn't crash and fuck up all the time. Or a Linux app that isn't total and complete garbage. It's such a steaming pile of shit to try to do basic things with, but they're spending time on this shit.

I don't use Teams as a daily driver, but I would be a candidate for a paid upgrade pack that made it have the polish one expects from an app built by a public company. In particular, the emoji are terrible.

At this point, I'm way past hoping to see any polish.

I'd be happy if they improved the responsiveness. Say to the level of MSN Messenger 20 years ago, even though I'm running 2022 hardware.

For some reason, intra org Teams calls slow down Office (from outlook to Excel) down significantly at my place. Teams, outside the call, becomes basically unusable. Funny thing is, when having calls with people outside the org, everything is running just smooth and fine...

In my case, I mostly use Linux, so I use the online versions of the office apps, except for Teams. The other day I installed the local clients on a newish computer (11th gen i7, win 11) and was shocked by how sluggish Outlook felt.

I understand the online versions lack some features, but for my use-case they are great.

My private daily is Linux, too. It is dual boot, mostly for gaming and because I am too lazy to figure out wireless scanning under Linux. Libre Office runs under Linux, school teams, some fames and scanning under Eindows 10. Plus, I can keep my kids stuff seperate from mine for the most part.

Facts. Unfortunately, this could very well be a pipe dream.

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