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Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

We need to return to a world where we primarily own things, not rent them. If the software executable can be thought of as a machine, we should be able to own the version/instance of it we purchased the license for. We may not own the intellectual property, but we should have enough ownership to install it on a personal cloud computer we own and run it until such time we need to upgrade it.

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https://zulip.com/ is a pretty excellent chat program that can be self-hosted

Zulip self-hosted is billed monthly. Still a form of rent. You don't own the version you bought perpetually.

According to https://zulip.com/plans/#self-hosted, the only things you get by upgrading from free self-hosted (which is absolutely offered) to paid self-hosted is to remove the limits on mobile notifications, which is a service that Zulip as an organization has to run and which therefore has an inherent cost, plus access to various forms of customer support.

Explicitly mentioned is that all Zulip features are included in the free plan.

The self-hosted offering is notably described as 100% open source software in the tab heading above all the plans, paid or free. https://zulip.com/help/zulip-cloud-or-self-hosting confirms this interpretation. It’s as owned as any other open source software. https://zulip.com/self-hosting/ even confirms that the self-hosted offering is the same software as Zulip Cloud.

The mobile push notification service is also open source and can be self-hosted for free, although this requires recompiling the mobile apps with a different secret and distributing the modified apps to the desired mobile clients. Zulip has no way around this due to Google and Apple’s push notification security models.

Can they use https://unifiedpush.org/ on Android (as an option, not insread of FCM)?

You could certainly propose it to them (especially with a PR that includes code), or patch it into your local copy if they decline. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google wouldn’t allow that in the Play Store-compiled version of the app, but I don’t know.

Yeah, I think it’s quite common to have a “Google Play version” and an “F-Droid version” with different implementations behind build flags. Not sure if it’s required though – I can see some UnifiedPush providers in the Play Store, at least.

As I said, I don’t know whether Google minds UnifiedPush or not. Maybe they don’t.

It's open source? https://github.com/zulip/zulip

You do have to pay for a server, but that's kind of inevitable (as in: a server is required to run most chat software, so someone will have to rent one).

Buy Campfire instead? https://once.com/campfire

It’s free and under MIT (though no too long ago this wasn’t the case)

Yeah, I see you're right. I had in my head it was around a $200 fee?

You aren’t wrong. Up until a couple of weeks ago it was $299. Once. Forever. That was the whole idea. Very cool that they open sourced it. MIT license too.

https://x.com/dhh/status/1963675999012552970

https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire

299USD. It became free merely two weeks ago.

https://nitter.net/dhh/status/1963675999012552970

Campfire needs 64GB RAM for 10,000 users, that surprises me, I would think we could get to 10k users with far less RAM.

well it is rails

> … personal cloud computer we own

I can only read this as an oxymoron

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