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Exciting day for Beeper! It all started here on HN 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278
by erohead 3y ago
Exciting day for Beeper! It all started here on HN 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278
- gwerbret 3y ago> Exciting day for Beeper! Congratulations on your successful exit, but is it actually an exciting day for Beeper? Your product has been assimilated into something of a behemoth, whose goals (in spite of the text of your announcement) aren't necessarily those of a free and open internet through open communication protocols. Do you foresee a five-year timeline in which anti-monopoly legislation forces an opening up of the WhatsApp/iMessage/Messenger walled gardens? And if that were to happen, do you foresee Beeper still existing as a standalone product? Do you foresee there actually being a need for Beeper versus, say, a rejuvenated (and very open) Pidgin? Yeah, neither do I...although I do prefer to be optimistic.
- erohead 3y agoIf you've followed Beeper, you know that roughly 50% of our product is already open source (https://github.com/beeper https://github.com/beeper). You can run your own Matrix server and use our bridges, or self-host the bridges and use Beeper clients (https://github.com/beeper/bridge-manager https://github.com/beeper/bridge-manager). For all intents and purposes, Beeper _is_ the rejuvenated and very open Pidgin. Automattic is a fantastic home for us. We needed a home (or new investors) to keep working on Beeper.
- okennedy 3y ago> Automattic is a fantastic home for us. We needed a home (or new investors) to keep working on Beeper. Is the added investment necessary to scale out specific features, or is it to address challenges related to profitability?
- Grustaf 3y agoWhat he meant was they were running out of money.
- nextaccountic 3y ago> 50% of our product is already open source What parts are closed source? Are there any plans to open them up?
- xinayder 3y agoSince now you have more resources, do you plan on open sourcing your whole solution, or will Beeper still be "half" open source? As far as I'm aware you still cannot use the Beeper client with your own self-hosted Matrix instance, and there's quite a lot of Beeper-only features that never became Matrix spec proposals. Is there a plan to make these features available to the whole Matrix ecosystem? Should I be worried that open source development of the mautrix bridges will cease, to focus on a commercial product?
- heyoni 3y agoThe only thing the beeper client itself brings over your garden variety matrix client is a coat of paint. It’ll make group chats between you, your friend and the bot that’s forwarding everything look like a private chat. Or the chat between a phone # and you will look like the contact name and you and are talking (and if that contact changes so will the chat). Basically beeper’s open source contribution right now feels like it’s hit a point of no return. I say this as someone who contributes to one of the bridges on my free time. I now know enough about it to feel confident that spending time contributing is time well spent _if_ you’re ok dispensing with the creature comforts the beeper app provides. What I mean by that is that you can always run bridges against your own matrix instance using any of the other open source clients. It’ll be ugly as hell, but it will work. What we really need to worry about now are the platforms messing with our ability to take our data off of their systems and into our own. There are a million ways to otherwise hack the existing open source matrix clients to make them look however we want.
- rw_grim 3y agoFWIW, Pidgin is still very much alive, we even had a release in February... Also not sure what "very open Pidgin" means as we're 100% GPLv2 but whatever.
- heyoni 3y agoI haven’t used pidgin in years but does that Teams plugin really work? I’ve seen projects try to integrate it into matrix and drop off because it was too hard.
- rw_grim 3y agoIt did last I knew, but I don't use teams so I don't know for certain.
- fencepost 3y agoAlso worth noting that some past Automattic acquisitions have also been open sourced, e.g. Pocket Casts back in 2022. There's a LOT of stuff in the >900 Automattic repos on Github: https://github.com/orgs/Automattic/repositories https://github.com/orgs/Automattic/repositories
- paulmd 3y ago[flagged]
- talldayo 2y ago> but it’s an incredibly shitty move on a personal level. Shitty to whom, on a personal level? Tim Cook? People really aren't kidding when they say HN is the orange Macrumors, huh? > at the direct expense and risk of a non-profit community built around it. I don't know where you learned the definition, but iMessage is not a non-profit product. It's not even an open one.
- Grustaf 2y agoClearly he means that it's shitty for people who relied on the exploit, but without monetizing it. When Beeper started monetizing it, obviously Apple had to close it, and hobbyists suffered.
- talldayo 2y agoAs someone that knows people that use Matrix bridges, I feel confident that 99% of those people would blame Apple and not Beeper. Either the exploit is bad and Apple would have shut it down regardless, or it's benign and Apple is trying to secure their manifest destiny. The monetization aspect of it feels completely tangential when there is no sanctioned "free" route anyways.
- Mindwipe 2y agoI think it's a bit naïve to suggest that Apple weren't coming after the Hackintosh exploits for their own unrelated reasons to be honest, and they absolutely knew what they were.
- paulmd 2y agoThose exploits have existed for 10-15 years, they are as old as the hackintosh community. There is a difference between commercial exploitation and hobbyist usage - just like with legacy emulation vs pirating. And no, apple really hasn’t come down despite knowing it exists, and probably wouldn’t have without beeper.
- COGlory 3y agoCongrats on the new position and future of Beeper. I think Automattic will be a great home and I've been impressed with what they've done with other projects as well. Are you planning to continue using Matrix to underpin Beeper? Now I just wish there was convenient way to screen my Beeper notifications without having to take my phone out of my pocket every time it buzzes...
- spxneo 3y agoCongratulations! Must be an absolute thrill
- bigiain 3y agoHopefully a more "exciting day" for the users than when Pebble sold out to Fitbit...