

Introducing Kikuchat: The Self-hosted Team Chat Solution - vlucas
http://kikuchat.com/

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mtogo
It makes me sad that people are reinventing the IRC and XMPP wheel, and doing
it poorly. Want your own version of this, with a bit less effort, but free?

1\. Install an XMPP server

    
    
      $ sudo apt-get install prosody
    

2\. Install a web frontent

    
    
      There are dozens. Here's one for example: http://amiadogroup.github.com/candy/
    

3\. Congratulations, you just saved yourself $199.

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mgkimsal
Ummm... I just tried the 'candy' demo - there's no options for file sharing
from the candy interface. Maybe there are in others, but I'd have to go
test/try out there - this one says it does it already.

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pstadler
You could easily write a plugin which enables file sharing.

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samarudge
Interesting, are there any user limits on the purchased version?

Also, do you have any data on hardware requirements? The software requirements
are only PHP and MySQL so I'm guessing it's not doing anything like in-memory
caching and it'll need to hit MySQL quite a bit to generate the chat. How does
it perform under 100 users? Or 1000? or more?

~~~
vlucas
There are no software limits on users. It all depends on what your hardware
and connection can handle.

The Groupon dev team helped us beta-test it a bit, and it handles 100 users
well with decent hardware on Apache (they were using an EC2 instance, though I
am not sure what size). You could probably go up to around 300 or so without
issues on Nginx and PHP-FPM, but I'm not sure you would be able to get to 1000
without adding memcache or load balancing.

We are looking into making a pure node.js version with websockets if there is
enough interest, though the price point for something like that would likely
be higher. We are happy to provide support and additional feature development
(like memcache integration) as needed. Just send us an email if you require
anything custom, and we can work out the details.

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benwerd
I'm really interested in this kind of "view source" business model. Is it
working for you?

There's a strong case for self-hosted apps, particularly in enterprise and
school environments, and it feels like open source shouldn't be the only model
for that (it's not easy to run a business based on open source software). I'm
glad to see that people are trying different approaches.

Best of luck!

~~~
vlucas
The jury's still out on whether or not it will work for us - we just launched
today! :)

This software sales model isn't new, but at the same time it is not widely
used. Most people either go for hosted offerings or encrypt the source code.
The viewable source code model is the same one that vBulletin and ActiveCollab
use, for instance.

~~~
jontas
I would love to see some kind of live demo.

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j_baker
Why would one want to spend $200 on this instead of using IRC or Jabber?

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vlucas
Same reason people use Campfire and Hipchat?

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j_baker
I'd like to point out that this doesn't answer my question. I mean, you're not
selling Campfire or Hipchat are you?

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foobarbazetc
I think you're vastly underestimating the market for this software.

If it's even _almost_ as good as Campfire or Hipchat, people will buy it
because most companies don't want their employees communicating via third
party services where shit is archived.

I've been looking for something like this for a while now. I won't use
Campfire or Hipchat due to the reasons outlined above (and I don't trust 37s
or Hipchat to know how to secure their customer data), and I don't want to use
Hipchat's shitty AIR apps.

TL;DR: This product deserves to exist. :)

~~~
haro
100% agreement. I think there is a huge market for this, I hate Air apps, and
the main thing that bothers me is manually managing users in Campfire. Haven't
dug in enough yet, but if Kiku has some LDAP/AD integration... specifically
CAS integration, then I'm interested.

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dmix
Had me until I read "PHP".

~~~
vlucas
Unfortunately, PHP is still the easiest thing for most people to setup and
use, so that's what we went with for a self-hosted option. We are strongly
considering a node.js version that would allow a lot more users. Is that
something you might be interested in?

~~~
mgkimsal
Shouldn't be 'unfortunate' - PHP is a perfectly fine for this sort of thing.
You can address the 'ultrascalable/node/nginx/caching/i've-got-2-million-
users-on-one-server-running-on-my-ipod' type of user demands after you're
profitable with this first version.

The 'self-hosting' thing shouldn't even be just about saving money - there's a
strong case to be made for security/privacy by self-hosting this sort of
software internally.

~~~
vlucas
I say "unfortunately" not because of PHP, but because other languages like
Python and Ruby are still not as widely used. PHP's "upload-and-go" approach
is a big reason for its wide success.

~~~
mgkimsal
Cool :)

