16 ms·
Mattermost: Open-source, on-premises, Slack alternative
- mosselman 11y agoCool :). It would have been nice to see some more screenshots or product videos in order to get a feel for it.
- DoubleMalt 11y agoNice project but the documentation is a bit terse (yet). We like https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat atm. Things that would be essential for me to use it in a company are - LDAP or OAUTH integration - Hubot integration I'm not sure Zapier integration cuts it for use cases where I want a self hosted solution.
- vishaldpatel 11y agoWill there be plugin support so teams can share their add-ons?
- mijoharas 11y agoAgreed, without a list of the features, or something to show what useability is like (does it support markdown? code highlighting? e.t.c.) it's tough to evaluate it. Kudos to them for open sourcing it. It does look nice in the small pictures they have of it.
- volent 11y agoI don't really get why there is so many Slack alternatives coming up these days. On every post like this there is tons of comment linking to other Slack alternatives, it's not like this is gonna be _the_ Slack-alternative. Here is a non exhaustive list : RocketChat : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9624737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9624737 Let's Chat : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9040841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9040841 Friends : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9461504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9461504 Gitter : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6739074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6739074
- jsmthrowaway 11y agoSlack's success inspires derivatives and, in this case, a direct copy. Review the screenshots. Before you get excited about Mattermost as the hosted Slack you've been waiting for, think hard about the AGPL licensing.
- nzseth 11y agoWhy would that be a problem?
- jsmthrowaway 11y agoI haven't worked for a company in four years that permits the installation of AGPL software because the ramifications are still unclear and largely untested. MongoDB asserts, for example, that just using MongoDB doesn't require you to do anything, even though the license text is in clear contradiction to the assertion. I do not think MongoDB understands its own license. Chris DiBona has spoken in public about Google's reasons, but he was kind. I cannot discuss other experience I have publicly, so I'd simply suggest doing some research on the large unknowns in deployment of AGPL software underneath a proprietary Web service somewhere, and then think about all the integrations you'd wire up to something like a Slack derivative. I am not a lawyer and would strongly suggest consulting one before using AGPL software anywhere in your infrastructure, at all.
- drummer32 11y agoI don't understand you reasoning at all. What could be the problem with using a chat software that is released under AGPL?
- jnbiche 11y agoBecause almost certainly engineers will want to integrate an on-premises system into their existing system, and that will trigger the AGPL for all the systems that are network-connected to the AGPL system. Unless you are sure that your engineers will know to not try to integrate the AGPL software with any of your existing systems, I agree that people should just stay away.
- timdorr 11y agoHere's the code: https://github.com/mattermost/platform https://github.com/mattermost/platform From the look of the screenshots ( http://www.mattermost.org/70-2/ http://www.mattermost.org/70-2/ ), I'd say there are some copyright concerns with the styles. This isn't a Slack alternative, it's a Slack clone. That's very problematic from a copyright stance. Why not create your own design style? Gogs had (has?) this same issue: https://github.com/gogits/gogs/issues/1069 https://github.com/gogits/gogs/issues/1069
- chii 11y ago> That's very problematic from a copyright stance why? they didn't copy slack (i assume) - it just looks similar. Slack doesn't (and shouldn't be allowed) own a look and feel, as long as the implementation of it is cleanroom.
- nieve 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_dress#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_dress#United_States I have no idea if Slack could actually win a case, but in the US (where both companies appear to be headquartered) they do have some rights to look and feel as part of trademark law.
- chii 11y agoInteresting. There's potential for that as a basis for a civil suit, but i really doubt that the open source alternative could really be argued as trying to misrepresent or cause confusion as to the origin of the product. It'd be a hard case.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- joesmo 11y agoI think you misunderstand copyright. You can't copyright a style, only a specific implementation thereof. Unless you're accusing Mattermost of copying code directly from Slack (which you wouldn't be able to tell from a picture), there is no copyright violation.
- jsmthrowaway 11y ago> Teams who can’t use SaaS rely on cryptic, decades-old technologies. As an example, the US Army uses myIRC to order missile strikes "myIRC" doesn't exist. The name of the protocol is IRC. The name of a popular Windows client is mIRC. WikiLeaks called their leak "mIRC logs," which is where this trope came from. The United States military (not just the Army) uses Internet Relay Chat for a whole lot of C2. It runs on a network, both IRC and IP, dedicated to the purpose. Given how long IRC has been in existence, that they've been doing it since the early 90s, that the use case is the perfect ideal for IRC, and that the average modern Web app is less reliable than my last Datsun, I have a hard time finding incredulity at sticking with something that works. Even beyond that, IRC is text-based. It is not cryptic. An IRC client is a common first software project. About twenty lines of Go gets you a bot. You can make IRC look exactly like Mattermost with a week of hacking in your favorite framework of choice, and then you're not reinventing fanout. Entire products have been built atop IRC. Even beyond that, guess how many protocols are decades old in just the software development workflow for this product. Pretty tired of "that's old, let's do it better," even though I hate finding myself on this side of defending IRC.
- KaiserPro 11y agoIRC federates easily, requires minimal resources, and is vastly more efficient when it comes to bandwidth usage. (you'll notice this over satellite links) plus it works in screen natively
- Dowwie 11y agoHow many open source slack alternatives before someone writes one that actually utilizes the IRC protocol? Is there a defensible argument against using IRC?
- vidarh 11y agoThe IRC protocol isn't pretty, and there are plenty of incompatible server implementations, but if you're controlling both the server end and the client end it's certainly where I'd start. My first thought when I saw Slack was "someone did a pretty web irc client finally, cool" (I have no idea if they use irc internally? but it seemed such a direct match)
- synchrone 11y agoAlso, there is http://getkaiwa.com/ http://getkaiwa.com/, with roughly the same features, open protocol and a built-in LDAP. Hubot integration is also possible.
- hitlin37 11y agocan i run it on Linux?
- aidos 11y agoHaving a look around the code it's a web based front end (using react) with an api written in Go behind the scenes. From that it sounds like you should be able to run it in Linux (but I haven't installed it myself, just had a peak at the src).
- icebraining 11y agoIt's available as a Docker container, so yes, it can run on Linux (with or without Docker).
- soasme 11y agoBetter to have slack-compatible APIs.
- tracker1 11y agoOne thing I really like and appreciate is that there's a dockerfile right in the root of the project, which makes spinning up a container a relatively nice experience... haven't run it or looked into the code though... that just struck out at me... Looking at the dockerfile, it seems pretty big, and it also strikes me slightly that they have dependencies on node, ruby and go, along with mysql and redis. The UI appears to be react based.. not sure what's running in ruby.
- ctolsen 11y agoI definitely appreciate projects having Dockerfiles included, but yeah, that's not a good one. They should simply include instructions about how to link it to MySQL/Redis, or use something like docker-compose. The way it's done now makes it inherently unscalable. Also, there are so many steps that it makes pushing an image to a Docker repository a massive pain.
- pibefision 11y ago+1 for a Docker Compose file
- sehr 11y agoLooks like it's only being used for their scss files.
- sciurus 11y ago
- tyrion 11y agoI tried to spin up the docker container locally and it worked until it had to send me a mail for registration. Looking at the README it says that it does not work if my ISP is blocking port 25, which I don't think it is. But anyway I created a droplet on digitalocean and ran the container there, but "MySQL init process failed." I would love to try this project, or at least try a demo deployment somewhere :)
- aargh_aargh 11y agoMe too, mail didn't arrive. Not possible to continue.
- javiercr 11y ago> We’re a YC-backed indie video game company releasing an open source alternative to Slack. Don't want to troll you guys here, but if you're a video game company why are you spending so much time building a Slack clone? I was expecting some short of explanation in your blog post like "we did this because this serves as a core piece of our company for X reason and Slack didn't fit our use case for Y reason".
- a13xb 11y agoThey probably pivoted. ;)
- tacone 11y agoThey probably had to build similar stuff for some of their games perhaps.
- it33 11y agoMattermost team here, You guessed it, Mattermost is the 3rd version of what started as a portal/community site for our players (first version was forum-like, the second was Facebook-like, Mattermost is now HipChat/Slack-like).
- javiercr 11y agoA blog post with that story would be interesting!
- 11y ago
- UserRights 11y agono ldap?
- richmarr 11y agoUnlike Slack, Mattermost is open source... Teams suffer when SaaS companies lose focus. Since it’s open source, Mattermost can endure through its community. If quality declines, anyone can fork the code and take stewardship. Open source and focus are the wrong arguments here. (a) Mattermost is built by a video game company, so there is no focus to start with. (b) Moving from a SaaS product to a self-hosted open source component runs against the process of commoditisation so is ultimately only ever going to be of niche value. After all, why spend scarce and expensive engineering time setting up, maintaining, and potentially having to fork a product, when you could just pay $however-much/month and not have to worry about it.
- ville 11y agoFunny you say that, given that the company that built Slack (originally named Tiny Speck) was also a video game company initially. :)
- amandine 11y agoThe problem of SaaS is having your company data stored by someone you have to trust... So I reckon it depends on your use case: if I'm a small company who doesn't want to bother running/maintaining the service then I'm more than happy to hand it over to someone else and trust them. If I don't want to trust anyone with my data I'd rather have something simple to deploy and run myself. The same way that having a closed client prevents you from customising it to fit your needs but can be helpful if you had no intention to do so in the first place.
- it33 11y agoMattermost team here. Thank you!! This feedback is awesome. Working on some replies...
- flyosity 11y agoWhy don't you work on an interface that isn't a nearly exact copy of Slack's before you work on some replies. Copying their functionality is one thing but copying their look and feel is not only pathetic, but against U.S. intellectual property laws. You guys made the equivalent of a Chinese knock-off product. And why not focus on your startup instead of working on cloning other team's hard work?
- ywecur 11y agoThere are many slack alternatives out already, as volent has pointed out. What I'd like to see is one that is based on Tox technology. Having a decentralised network would be much better as it would remove all costs of self-hosting.
- mempko 11y agoIt is more oriented towards real time and spontaneous conversations, but my Firestr project is a p2p chat/app platform. I am working on the idea of more persistent conversations. Check it out, it is still alpha but works well. I am always open for help to make it more awesome too. http://firestr.com http://firestr.com https://github.com/mempko/firestr https://github.com/mempko/firestr
- ywecur 11y agoHos does your network work? Is it compleatly distributed, like Tox or does it rely on nodes?
- vijayrawatsan 11y agoAre you planning to open source you android client as well?
- uniclaude 11y agoThat's all good, but the differentiating factor of Slack over Hipchat & the like is how well it integrates with everything your team is likely to use. It works seamlessly with Github, Trello and IRC. I don't mean to devalue this product at all, but This is not a viable Slack alternative, it's a generic (and good looking) communication tool. This said, I commend the open source approach, it could probably help the product evolve towards something much better and integrated.
- pluc 11y agoYou know what else is a great open-source on-premises Slack alternative? Most IRCds.
- coldtea 11y agoYou know what is nothing like Slack in functionality and you'd knew if you have used Slack? Most IRCds.
- pluc 11y agoI use Slack everyday, and I disagree.
- LinuxBender 11y agoI've run numerous IRCd's for decades. They are completely stable and scale to 10's of thousands of users per VM. I can't even remember the last time I had one crash. There are already tons of integrations for IRC. It is just difficult to get people to understand the simplistic beauty of IRC. People like "shiny", as mobile phone addictions have proven. There are not many great web front ends for IRC that are secure at the same time as being shiny.
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoAwesome to see more companies questioning Slack, and developing their own solutions!
- andmarios 11y agoOnce a month an “insert something tech-related here” company releases an open source slack clone. While I am grateful to all you guys, how much free time do you have to work on these clones instead of your main product? I've tried so far let's chat and rocketchat and I liked them. I will give a spin to mattermost and I am sure I will like it too. I think the one that matures first, will be a big hit because we need a slack clone —as evidently shown. But also as with any other open source / free software project it will need commitment.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- hhaidar 11y agoLet's Chat is actually three years old :P
- solve 11y agoBefore you disparagingly call it a "clone" and "not their main project", consider that free products often go on to crush their expensive first-to-market predecessors. The strategy of first seeking to monopolize the user-base, and then afterward heavily monetizing it is a very well proven long term strategy by now. The overnight success of Slack and some other SAAS companies may give some people the impression that this strategy is suddenly irrelevant. It may not be.
- caustic 11y ago
- shmerl 11y agoSo, can it be used as an improvement over XMPP? A new IETF standard may be?
- ryanSrich 11y agoWhat a horribly uncreative rip off. That may sound harsh but I'm a bit floored that this is getting so much attention...but YC right? Reproducing functionality and growing an idea is fine. It's the blatant disregard to UX and UI where this company has literally pixel for pixel ripped off slack.
- tadfisher 11y ago> It's the blatant disregard to UX and UI where this company has literally pixel for pixel ripped off slack. I'm finding it hard to parse this sentence. Are you saying ripping off Slack is the blatant disregard, or are you saying Slack pioneered a blatant disregard for UX and UI?
- ryanSrich 11y agoSorry about that. What I meant was that Mattermost is blatantly disregarding their UI/UX by just ripping off Slack. If design was that easy we'd all have the same looking/feeling/functioning product.
- pbreit 11y agoMattermost looks to me like it departs from Slack UI more than some of the other clones I've seen (Rocket Chat, for example).
- it33 11y agoMattermost team here, There's been a number of questions of what's coming from Mattermost, and how we design things. I wanted to share some raw, unpolished work we have of what's coming up. It's a feature called "App Center" that we're working on to support 3rd party applications. It's just a Google Doc of our early design that we're sharing on Hacker News to get feedback: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s6vrticxgz9PsxePQ-dFrsKpwImAjn7KdL4uaioEEns/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s6vrticxgz9PsxePQ-dFrsKp... Would you find this interface interesting for building 3rd party apps? What do you like about the design? What do you wish we changed? There's a couple 1st party Apps we'd start with, like an Admin Console and a Custom Web App. We're thinking there could be a marketplace for 3rd party workflow apps. Example: create an "Expense Report" app where a user can upload the photo of a receipt from lunch from their phone and type "#expense #meals" and have a 3rd party app create a labeled expense report that would be viewable in App Center. Would love to hear thoughts from the community. This is an early idea, it's just a Google Doc right now. Your input would help shape it.
- bitsweet 11y agothis is how you earn revenue as an OSS platform company (once you get it in the hands of everyone aka build a network)
- eltondegeneres 11y agoDoes it have email notifications? That's a killer feature missing from most Slack replacements.
- brazzledazzle 11y agoSome of the comments here are... aggressive.
- pbreit 11y agoHelp: anyone able to get it going on Mac with Kitematic? Does it set up mail server that can get email to my Gmail account? I signed up but didn't get an email. Are emails dumped somewhere or possible to lookup whatever I need to get started?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- DiaaAttia 11y agoDid you know that One fifth of the planet speaks Chinese?. Mandarin Chinese is the mother tongue of over 873 million people, making it the most widely spoken first language in the world, you can find more information through http://preply.com/en/chinese-by-skype http://preply.com/en/chinese-by-skype
- AnonJ 11y agoSuch self-hosted services might help us a lot, as Slack is currently blocked in China already. I think the two main reasons are that the Chinese government is unable to inspect the data at will, and also they fear sensitive data being leaked to the US government easily, which is actually quite legit. No interest in politics nonsense and having full control over your own sensitive data is probably the best possible thing to do.
- ChicagoDave 11y agoWhy is there no package? I have to use docker? Why? Why? Why?