I'm calling bullshit on you, your shenanigans and all of the blind idiots.
1. I can't download past versions and there's no current version to download till tomorrow. Why...
2. You have no github and hn history besides spamming the shit of eul and I can't trust no proprietary third party shit.
4. Do you really think you can open source something that could bite your ass legally (whatsapp)? Will you partially open source all of it minus whatsapp or what? If so say it instead of "ye ye I will open source it".
5. Do you really think anyone not stupid believes you can support so much shit and being native and 90 KB (version 0.27 coming tomorrow) when the past versions downloaded a GB?
You can't attack someone like that on HN, regardless of how bad you consider their software. We ban accounts that do this, so could you please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, and take the spirit of this site to heart when commenting here?
I don't want to ban you! But HN has the rules it does for a good reason: if people routinely break them, other users will do even worse. That way leads to the destruction of the site.
Think of it as an optimization problem. Even if all your points are correct, posting like you did above is to choose a local optimum (maximum sharpness for your points) over the global optimum (having an interesting community based on curiosity). That's a bad solution, especially since it's easy to make your substantive points in a civil way.
After checking out the guy and his project, it seems like he's really truly passionate about making minimal, fast software. I love it: I do a similar thing myself (I made the smallest, fastest CSS framework.) I can tell it in his comments and the effort he's put into this. It's a totally unique project, and as far as I can google, it's the only one of its kind. In a world of massive, bloated apps that eat gigs of RAM for breakfast it's a refreshing change.
The audience for something this minimal is fairly niche, and HN probably has the densest concentration of people for it. He's been mentioning it not very often, and only when it's relevant, which seems fair to me.
He's also clearly a very talented developer and put a ton of work into it. I have a feeling he'd like to make some money off it. I've been in a similar position myself, years ago: not sure whether to open-source or not because of the perpetual doubt in the back of your mind. I don't blame him: he's getting $11/month off Patreon.
The past versions thing doesn't matter IMO - after checking the Github, he says they don't work anymore. And the previous versions downloaded _half_ a gigabyte, apparently now it only downloads a few megabytes. Personally, the biggest thing that concerns me is the source: I'd have to see the source before I used it for anything.
Alex, if you'd like to talk about the world of FOSS, fast, minimal software, open-sourcing, and how to make money, feel free to send me an email - it's in my profile :)
As far as I can tell from the issues, previous versions of his software loaded the chat service in question's website in a browser, and then either applied a custom stylesheet to the webpage or attempted to extract portions of the HTML content for display.
eul.im literally never was minimal. He can keep saying it's minimal software, but until he produces something that both consistently works and doesn't consume orders of magnitude more storage than claimed, his words mean nothing. Again, current, literal reality is an issues page documenting myriad problems from crashes, blank screens, mangled displays, absence of advertised features, and claims of updated versions that still have not arrived.
Look, it's an issues page, and it's one-man free software. He's a few days late with the update for a free piece of software, so what? The dude's earning $11 a month on Patreon. Give him a damn break.
Not to be grumpy to you, but I'd like to defend him. He's got an extremely noble goal. Those that "get it" really get it, and those that don't don't. I'm fed up with using several different shitty closed source apps that take up gigs of ram at a time, and I've tried to write my own version of what he's done, and I've failed at it. It's incredibly hard. Particularly because the companies are locked in a neverending cat and mouse trying to stop apps like this.
Also, based on everything I've seen off of RAM/CPU usage while running there's absolutely no way he's using an embedded webpage. I'd be happy to be corrected here though.
I am quite familiar with one person free software projects. I use quite a few, and have released one myself. The variety and severity of problems in eul.im over such a short period of time is aberrant.
He claimed Discord support since 15/09/2017 - two months later, Discord support still wasn't available. He's been claiming since 28/09/2017 that he'd submit his app to Homebrew. As of four hours ago, he never said a peep to his mailing list about progress on the new version.
The app definitely used an embedded browser for authentication. That isn't speculation. He says the new version is rewritten to be a native app, as oppposed to what it was before. My assertion that the app used the browser for displaying content is speculation, but it is consistent with both the previous known behavior and the app's dysfunctions. The cool thing about software is that you can just examine the software to see what it does; too bad none of us will ever definitively know what his software did since he is deliberately hiding the previous versions from new eyes.
His history at best demonstrates incompetence. If the thing he is trying to do indeed is hard, than he is incompetent at doing a hard thing. One's reach exceeding his grasp is fine and necessary for personal growth - but in that case, do not lie and say you are delivering something you cannot deliver. If you are learning, say as much. Perhaps ask for help, perhaps keep previous attempts public so they can be analyzed by people trying something similar and by those with more experience. Perhaps upload your source code for the same reason. Do not put download links on your homepage that launch a popup saying there is no download.
Additionally, he's registered eul.im as a private company.
The registration info is trivially available by searching the company #(11072989) on his website. He is a Netherlands resident who registered eul.im as a one person UK software company. At least 10,000 other companies use the same postal address as eul.im. The software in question, as everyone agrees, has no revenue model, and isn't even currently available for download. [text on website reads "Download v0.27 (out on Feb 17, for real, no more delays)"]. This precisely fits the pattern of a shell corporation.
I did this to get the code signing certificate primarily. For some reason it's really hard to get a personal certificate, there's a lot of bureaucracy, and the notaries I talked to said they couldn't help me verify the documents.
I registered it online in the UK because it literally took 6 minutes. I'll register it in the Netherlands later.
It wasn't available for download because it wasn't ready :) Now there's a working download link.
>I can't download past versions and there's no current version to download till tomorrow. Why...
Because it wasn't ready yet.
> Will you partially open source all of it minus whatsapp or what?
Yes, that's an option.
> Do you really think anyone not stupid believes you can support so much shit and being native and 90 KB (version 0.27 coming tomorrow) when the past versions downloaded a GB?
The past version downloaded a browser (150-400 MB depending on your OS) for authentication, which was really silly. Now it doesn't.
And yes, it actually is a 90 KB app :) Of course it will grow as more features are added, but it will never be more than 1 MB.
It's on the roadmap for 2024