The open-source Mattermost intentionally lacks a couple of pieces of basic functionality to push you to pay, like the ability to stop regular users from deleting channels, and no way to set a reasonable password policy that requires more than 5 characters.
Mattermost (and specifically their CEO, who is vigorously replying to messages on this thread, but probably won’t engage with this one) haven’t responded positively to requests to include these basic features:
As far as I’m concerned, Mattermost isn’t any kind of a competitor to free-tier Slack until these issues are resolved. This exact thing has turned more than one team I’m on away from Mattermost.
This is, fundamentally, the Open Core business plan, which Mattermost is executing quite successfully. You get all the marketing benefits of being "open source", but few IT departments will use your software in production without buying the enterprise license, so you get most of the revenue you'd have had if you were closed source.
Folks have different perspectives on Open Core. It's definitely a lot better from a freedom perspective than proprietary software, so I don't want to be too down on it. But it isn't really FOSS, and I think the difference is important, which is why Zulip is following the commercially more difficult path of 100% FOSS. Even obviously enterprise features developed entirely by our paid team, like SAML authentication are FOSS, and our plan is for it to remain that way forever.
It's commercially more difficult because it means right now we have users at governments and Fortune 500 companies and whatnot who've reached out to tell us they how much they love Zulip, but nonetheless aren't paying us anything. On the flipside, Zulip has been very successful in building a large community of volunteer major contributors (some handy stats are in our release blog posts, e.g. last week's https://blog.zulip.org/2019/12/13/zulip-2-1-released/). I don't think that would have happened had we taken Mattermost's aggressively Open Core approach..
I really hope this model works out for you, I absolutely adore Zulip. At my company, we have the option of self-hosting, since you've made it so easy, but I intentionally keep us on the free plan so we can start paying when we can afford it, to support you.
Zulip is one of the few pieces of software that I think are unquestionably worth their price (some others being Gitlab and some sort of SIP provider, e.g. OnSIP).
The password policy was added to Team Edition back in June, 2018.
>Mattermost isn’t any kind of a competitor to free-tier Slack
Mattermost isn't intended to compete with Slack's free tier.
The open source version of Mattermost is focused on software builders and operators who want a flexible, open, collaboration platform that works with their tools and workflows. Here's more on Mattermost Chatops as an example: https://mattermost.com/blog/introducing-mattermost-chatops/
Very often we're deployed in high security environments and private clouds where internet-based services can't easily go.
I can't really tell for the github issues you posted what was done about these two issues.
I don't really feel like reading all that just to figure it out.
Did you resolve both of the issues brought up by OP or not?
(Answering: "The password policy was added to Team Edition back in June, 2018.", isn't the same as answering, "the free tier allows passwords of length >5 characters.")
As I’m reading it, Mattermost (as source) is released under the AGPL, which makes it both legal and ethical (indeed, they have explicitly consented to allow you to distribute modifications) to stub out all the license checking and enable all of the enterprise functionality without any payments, tracking, or phone-home.
It seems to me this is the point of free/open source software: anyone can improve it and make it more functional and distribute those improvements. The first logical improvement, to me, is removing the unnecessary license checks that disable useful features of the software.
The binaries they release (including that code) are MIT licensed according to their readme, which means that modifying those should also be no problem.
It is legal and ethical to remove the parts you don’t like, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay for it. You’re not required to, but if you find it useful you could consider it a donation.
Regular users cannot delete other people's posts and channels, but they can indeed archive any public channel.
I run a mattermost server for a Free Software project. We have over 2000 users, but around 300 monthly active users, 100 daily. I worry about it sometimes, but trolling in our community is pretty rare.
> Mattermost (and specifically their CEO, who is vigorously replying to messages on this thread, but probably won’t engage with this one) [emphasis mine]
Aside from being wrong, this seems needlessly argumentative and rude.
In my experience, the competition is pidgin slash outlook communicator slash whatever brain dead enterprise messaging app. Not slack (or hipchat or...). Mattermost has seen a lot of adoption atthe Big Dumb Corps I’ve seen.
That’s my take on the market at least. I’d buy stock in it if I could.
The open-source version also lack any data retention option, meaning that your only option is to let the database grow indefinitely; you can manually delete stuff from the db, but last time I've checked that was not recommended.
Deploying Mattermost is not ideal, as the server requires write access to its JSON configuration file and will overwrite it from time to time, which makes using any configuration manager pointless: after upgrading mattermost you have to fetch the "updated" configuration file from your server and import it back into your configuration manager (and since it's JSON you might get different key sorting and indentation offset).
Despite the above I like Mattermost and I've been regularly using it for more than 1 year, basically for free.
In 5.10 Mattermost added the ability to move the configuration to the database, which solves the issue of having a config.json file. This also has the advantage of versioning your configuration in the database which makes rolling back changes very easy.
If there is enough interest, we at polyglot.network can add those missing functionalities and maintain that fork. We have already done the same for certain other OSS software as enhancing open-source software for paying corporate clients IS our business model.
Another one, if you want your free local instalation to be able to push notifications to your mobile app it needs to go through their http (non-https) proxy. At this point this might be more damaging than not providing the option at all.
Mattermost (and specifically their CEO, who is vigorously replying to messages on this thread, but probably won’t engage with this one) haven’t responded positively to requests to include these basic features:
https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320
https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/5935
As far as I’m concerned, Mattermost isn’t any kind of a competitor to free-tier Slack until these issues are resolved. This exact thing has turned more than one team I’m on away from Mattermost.