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If 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 yo
by erohead 3y ago
If 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