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Thank you, that PDF is incredibly depressing. By the way, well done on sameroom. I came across your product while working on the stuff I mentioned and it looks

Thank you, that PDF is incredibly depressing. By the way, well done on sameroom. I came across your product while working on the stuff I mentioned and it looks like an incredibly useful thing. I really wish you would open source it, though. (Or at least open source some libraries for talking to the protocols you deal with. Especially Hangouts.)

rekoros 11y ago
Thank you! We're so paranoid about getting shut down by Google (Hangouts, no API), Microsoft (Skype, no API), and Facebook (Messenger, no API) that we're not only not open sourcing any of our implementations, we're not even providing a commercial API in fear of having to deal with some form of abuse. That said, the night is young. We hope to eventually gain enough leverage to get the big guys to listen to us.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Ok. It's kind of good to hear the barrier to open sourcing is more legal than commercial. That means it's fixable :) Can I ask you some details on how you went about working with Skype and Hangouts? Did you do the reverse engineering yourself? These are protocols several popular open source projects have been trying to support for years and haven't succeeded. Can I also ask you about your tech stack/languages you used for Sameroom?
  - rekoros 11y ago
    We implemented them ourselves, and it took quite a bit of work. Our magic weapon is Erlang, which is a wonderful language for working with protocols, and a wonderful runtime for working with many things happening at the same time. The other magic weapons are the Cowboy webserver and the Gun http client -- both written by Loïc Hoguin. Loïc doesn't work for us, but we've been sponsoring him financially for over two years (https://medium.com/@abs/what-we-learned-from-sponsoring-an-open-source-developer-for-a-year-4438568a1cfd#.xnljstik2 https://medium.com/@abs/what-we-learned-from-sponsoring-an-o...). Our frontend doesn't really matter as much, since it's just a dashboard, but we use TypeScript with Flux and React (it's been great).
    - seivan 11y ago
      Care to share your webpack config for getting React and TypeScript to play ball? I'm collecting a bunch to try to figure out what works best.
      - scrollaway 11y ago
        You can take a look at ours: https://github.com/hearthsim/joust https://github.com/hearthsim/joust
      - jlarky2012 11y ago
        That's actually interesting topic :) Right now we use gulp and gulp-typescript. So far, I like approach that is used in https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScriptSamples/tree/master/es6-babel-react-flux-karma https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScriptSamples/tree/master/e... but I'm not sure if we are going to use it any time soon. As far as gulp config, what we use is pretty much close to gulp-typescript README examples
        seivan 11y ago
        Thanks! Yeah it's hard to find good UP TO DATE reading material on this. I genuinely appreciate this.
    - derefr 11y ago
      I was just considering advocating within my employer (Cloudant, i.e. clustered-CouchDB-as-a-Service) to back Loïc too. CouchDB is still stuck in the past with Mochiweb, and while switching that out for Cowboy 1.X would be a nice-to-have, getting our hands on a stable release of Cowboy2 (i.e. "the HTTP/2 version") would let us optimize Couch's replication story immensely. I've just been trying to set up a single trivial Event Stream HTTP/2 loop_handler with the Cowboy2 master, and it's really just not there yet, so we could probably give him a push.
      - rekoros 11y ago
        That would be great - I can put you in touch if you're not already (andrei@sameroom.io).
- vvanders 11y ago
  Reminds me of the story around AIM/MSN wars from back in the day. http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/21/5635488/msn-messenger-vs-aol-aim-chat-wars http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/21/5635488/msn-messenger-vs-a... https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/ https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/
  - pyre 11y ago
    Or how AOL's Oscar protocol got updated at one point to start requesting chunks of the AOL IM binary as authentication against open sources clients (because they couldn't distribute AOL's binary with their client).
    - khc 11y ago
      Do you have a source for this?
- quadrangle 11y ago
  Sounds like you just need the AGPL
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    Licensing has nothing to do with this.
  - WoodenChair 11y ago
    Yeah because if you open source something under the right license, no abuse happens... What percentage of GPL violators has the FSF prosecuted? Or anyone else for that matter?
    - chei0aiV 11y ago
      The FSF isn't about prosecuting people, but about getting GPL compliance. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm... Unfortunately working on GPL compliance is expensive, I would encourage anyone who cares about copyleft to support the Software Freedom Conservancy's efforts. https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/ https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
- zanny 11y ago
  There are actually FOSS implementations of Hangouts wrappers (Hangups) Skype wrappers (SkypeWeb for libpurple) and Facebook wrappers (purple-facebook) and even a telepathy wrapper for the Facebook protocol. Nobody is getting sued yet, and Pidgin supports all of them nowadays.
yborg 11y ago
Not sure what is so depressing here. According to the chart, a total of nine listed networks died in 50+ years, this is actually astoundingly low. And all IRC implementations are "interoperable" in the sense that a single client that implements the protocol can connect to any of them, this chart seems to be padding things a lot by calling every IRC server network a "chat service". A number of them also have or have had interconnects with each other in the past.
- chejazi 11y ago
  The depressing aspect is the accelerating fragmentation caused by more custom protocols entering the game. Supporting them all as the space grows will only get more cumbersome.
- tlrobinson 11y ago
  Surely there were networks that went defunct before 2011. That's probably when they started paying attention.

rekoros 11y ago

Thank you! We're so paranoid about getting shut down by Google (Hangouts, no API), Microsoft (Skype, no API), and Facebook (Messenger, no API) that we're not only not open sourcing any of our implementations, we're not even providing a commercial API in fear of having to deal with some form of abuse. That said, the night is young. We hope to eventually gain enough leverage to get the big guys to listen to us.

scrollaway 11y ago
Ok. It's kind of good to hear the barrier to open sourcing is more legal than commercial. That means it's fixable :) Can I ask you some details on how you went about working with Skype and Hangouts? Did you do the reverse engineering yourself? These are protocols several popular open source projects have been trying to support for years and haven't succeeded. Can I also ask you about your tech stack/languages you used for Sameroom?
- rekoros 11y ago
  We implemented them ourselves, and it took quite a bit of work. Our magic weapon is Erlang, which is a wonderful language for working with protocols, and a wonderful runtime for working with many things happening at the same time. The other magic weapons are the Cowboy webserver and the Gun http client -- both written by Loïc Hoguin. Loïc doesn't work for us, but we've been sponsoring him financially for over two years (https://medium.com/@abs/what-we-learned-from-sponsoring-an-open-source-developer-for-a-year-4438568a1cfd#.xnljstik2 https://medium.com/@abs/what-we-learned-from-sponsoring-an-o...). Our frontend doesn't really matter as much, since it's just a dashboard, but we use TypeScript with Flux and React (it's been great).
  - seivan 11y ago
    Care to share your webpack config for getting React and TypeScript to play ball? I'm collecting a bunch to try to figure out what works best.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      You can take a look at ours: https://github.com/hearthsim/joust https://github.com/hearthsim/joust
    - jlarky2012 11y ago
      That's actually interesting topic :) Right now we use gulp and gulp-typescript. So far, I like approach that is used in https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScriptSamples/tree/master/es6-babel-react-flux-karma https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScriptSamples/tree/master/e... but I'm not sure if we are going to use it any time soon. As far as gulp config, what we use is pretty much close to gulp-typescript README examples
      - seivan 11y ago
        Thanks! Yeah it's hard to find good UP TO DATE reading material on this. I genuinely appreciate this.
  - derefr 11y ago
    I was just considering advocating within my employer (Cloudant, i.e. clustered-CouchDB-as-a-Service) to back Loïc too. CouchDB is still stuck in the past with Mochiweb, and while switching that out for Cowboy 1.X would be a nice-to-have, getting our hands on a stable release of Cowboy2 (i.e. "the HTTP/2 version") would let us optimize Couch's replication story immensely. I've just been trying to set up a single trivial Event Stream HTTP/2 loop_handler with the Cowboy2 master, and it's really just not there yet, so we could probably give him a push.
    - rekoros 11y ago
      That would be great - I can put you in touch if you're not already (andrei@sameroom.io).
vvanders 11y ago
Reminds me of the story around AIM/MSN wars from back in the day. http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/21/5635488/msn-messenger-vs-aol-aim-chat-wars http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/21/5635488/msn-messenger-vs-a... https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/ https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/
- pyre 11y ago
  Or how AOL's Oscar protocol got updated at one point to start requesting chunks of the AOL IM binary as authentication against open sources clients (because they couldn't distribute AOL's binary with their client).
  - khc 11y ago
    Do you have a source for this?
quadrangle 11y ago
Sounds like you just need the AGPL
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Licensing has nothing to do with this.
- WoodenChair 11y ago
  Yeah because if you open source something under the right license, no abuse happens... What percentage of GPL violators has the FSF prosecuted? Or anyone else for that matter?
  - chei0aiV 11y ago
    The FSF isn't about prosecuting people, but about getting GPL compliance. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm... Unfortunately working on GPL compliance is expensive, I would encourage anyone who cares about copyleft to support the Software Freedom Conservancy's efforts. https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/ https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
zanny 11y ago
There are actually FOSS implementations of Hangouts wrappers (Hangups) Skype wrappers (SkypeWeb for libpurple) and Facebook wrappers (purple-facebook) and even a telepathy wrapper for the Facebook protocol. Nobody is getting sued yet, and Pidgin supports all of them nowadays.

yborg 11y ago

Not sure what is so depressing here. According to the chart, a total of nine listed networks died in 50+ years, this is actually astoundingly low. And all IRC implementations are "interoperable" in the sense that a single client that implements the protocol can connect to any of them, this chart seems to be padding things a lot by calling every IRC server network a "chat service". A number of them also have or have had interconnects with each other in the past.

chejazi 11y ago
The depressing aspect is the accelerating fragmentation caused by more custom protocols entering the game. Supporting them all as the space grows will only get more cumbersome.
tlrobinson 11y ago
Surely there were networks that went defunct before 2011. That's probably when they started paying attention.