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Comment by aftbit | Hacker News Reader

Who is building the open-source Slack? Four things are needed:

1. Good support for multiple active clients, including mobile. If I see a message on desktop, I shouldn't get notified on mobile. If I read on one client, when I reconnect on another, it should show me the convo starting where I left off. Etc etc.

2. Eternal history (ideally configurable by users/channels) with decent search.

3. A few basic bells-and-whistles over IRC: preview images, allow file uploading, snippets, emoticons, profile images for users.

4. Multiple "team" / server support in the client.

I had high hopes for http://shout-irc.com/, but it ended up falling short in a number of areas. Notibly, its plugin support is not very good, so it's quite hard to add the sorts of features that I mentioned.

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https://matrix.org and https://vector.im

There's a community forked version with more active developers, features, etc here: https://github.com/thelounge/lounge. Plugin support is still sparse, but there is a packages[0] POC branch, along with a wiki page detailing the ideal plugin/extension/package system[1]

[0] https://github.com/thelounge/lounge/tree/packages [1] https://github.com/thelounge/lounge/wiki/Package-system-desi...

http://www.mattermost.org/ is doing it

Yup, been looking into it the last couple of days because Slack is devilishly slow in China, and it seems to cover most of the stuff you'd want from slack plus the things GP mentioned. Really cool stuff.

Technically Mattermost is very interesting. Unfortunately I cannot figure out their licensing scheme and business model. The license file mentions several licenses: AGPL, Apache 2, and the MIT license. They seem to apply separate licenses to binaries that they publish vs the open source repository. Is there an implied open core business model somewhere? How do I know when Mattermost Inc will show up and demand money for a proprietary license because I've misinterpreted what parts of the mattermost software is AGPL licensed?

https://github.com/mattermost/platform/blob/4ae72ad1a878fdf1...

Why not ask them to clarify?

Mattermost is explicitly a self-hosted solution. Their license does not appear strange to me; you can either use their builds, or build from source and adhere to the AGPL.

The android client is very annoying to use as it doesn't follow the standard android UI guide lines. Can't swipe in the menu etc.

https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat

Rocket chat is awesome. It even has giphy integration!

Well it would need a good design too. Let's not say that just piling on features would lead to success. Too many open source projects have already had that perspective... It needs to be fun to use with no learning curve and continue to be fun months down the road.

Try us: https://actor.im

Although it's not open sourced, you should check out discord (https://discordapp.com/). Although our niche is gamers, lots of people use Discord for tons of other things. We've got all those things except search (but we're working on it!)

(disclosure: i work there)

Discord is great. We use it at my company.

Search is sorely lacking. Tab complete is buggy. But it's really great.

Really wish you'd open source it.

It'd be nice if you all had a stronger story for how you're going to stay afloat long term. "Stickers, lol" isn't very much of one.

Exactly, a bunch of friends tried to move a chatroom from Skype to Discord, and I blew them off, because I didn't want to move my communication to an app from a company just hoping to get bought out by Twitch probably and shut down within a year. A closed source service with no business model isn't something anyone should even try, much less use.

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