There are 102,500 members in the Slack right now (though not nearly all are active), and Hack Club is mainly focused on getting teens interested in coding. It needs to be approachable for non-technical teenagers. Also, as someone else said, we build many integrations around Slack, like how users update their password and SSH keys on a VPS through a Slack bot.
Hack Club had a $5,000/year contract with Slack (renewed in May iirc), but Salesforce just suddenly told them to pay $50,000 within a week and $200,000/year, without warning, or they would deactivate the whole workspace. That's how the HC founder told it in the Slack announcement, anyways.
Yes, but there has to be more to the story, that we're not being told. Without knowing why this organization was previously eligible for the discount, but no longer is eligible for that discount, we really don't know much at all.
Yup we agree and have restored the post. The extra background was helpful, plus the community response is clear from the thread and we try never to fight the community.
The title edit is standard practice though - the word "extorted" is too baity for HN's frontpage (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."). Making titles somewhat more factual/neutral is normal HN moderation. That's not a criticism of the OP, mind you! - we'd feel the same way too in their position.
By "editorialize" we mean changing a title to introduce spin, or cherry-picking one detail to bias the reader in the direction that the submitter personally wants, rather than reflecting the article as a whole (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45202136 for a recent comment about that).
In this case, that wasn't at issue. The operative clause is "unless it is misleading or linkbait". A word like "extorted" is too baity for HN's frontpage. This is nothing personal against the OP! It's actually better for them and for Hack Club if the HN title is relatively neutral while still conveying the critical information.
I've never used Mattermost before today. After checking out their site, I can see they are also a for-profit company. What does Mattermost offer that Slack does not, other than a bill lower than $195K/year?
Last time I checked they cripple the self-hosted version, asking to subscribe for enterprise plan here and there. Source: deployed their chat locally a couple of weekends ago. Overall, I liked their Slack clone, they this one was a red flag to me. Now I’m not sure we want to deploy this, but I know very little alternatives. Zulip, but it cripples its self-hosted version too. It allows just 10 mobile users (notifications). Maybe Matrix it is then, but it’s not very suitable for airgapped company-wide deployment.
> Maybe Matrix it is then, but it’s not very suitable for airgapped company-wide deployment
Element is literally built for airgapped company-wide deployments - this is precisely what https://element.io/server-suite is? It was originally built to install onto SIPRnet; it's been airgap-first since day 1.
Matrix is the protocol, so doesn’t do implementations (just like w3c doesn’t do web servers any more). But the distribution from Element indeed is self-host first, and doesn’t break stuff if you’re airgapped. The paywall (such as it is) is that features which empower the enterprise over the user are paid, whereas one which empower the end-user are FOSS.
What's your case for calling it open-core? The whole thing is AGPLv3, so... I'd call it FOSS with some components optionally being usable under Apache 2 terms
> Mattermost is an open core, self-hosted collaboration platform that offers chat, workflow automation, voice calling, screen sharing, and AI integration
Interesting. Notably, they also call themselves "open source" in the "About" of the repository. I'm not aware of any critical extensions which are closed-source. The change you've highlighted was made 4 months ago under a commit that gives no explanation: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/pull/31247/files , and the discussion there is private.
This mainly seems to relate to metrics and fuzzy search, though it's possible more will move here in the future (it looks like this is a relatively recent development). Until recently they also had experimental support for Bleve full-text search (now seemingly deprecated), but the elasticsearch enterprise feature seems to be the replacement (otherwise they use postgres's ILIKE for built-in text search)
So, all told, Mattermost was open source, and may be moving to open core. Which means now is probably the best time to create a community-maintained fork. The team edition, and almost all features, are currently still open source.
It sounds like the enterprise release is not open source? When someone above says "The whole thing is AGPLv3," I'm not sure everyone is talking about the same "whole thing"?
Is it? We've been using it self-hosted for years, together with GitLab. It meets all the needs of a small company, and is very pleasant to work with for devs too (i.e., basic Markdown just works, so you can post anything from code to log snippets in a sensible manner).
Setting up Mattermost was one of the best decisions we've made with regards to our tools.
Funny you would mention GitLab - I find it extremely clunky, especially compared to GitHub. Maybe GitHub is primitive in comparison, but it never makes me hunt for basic functionality and the search just works for about everything.
I afraid I nuked my installation already. There were insignificant features, like for their Playbook (or what the name is), where you are offered some extra feature, that goes with the enterprise plan. If I chose my self-hosted instance for some reason, I don’t really need that advertising in my interface all the time. I can understand the reason it’s there, but I don’t like it still.
First time I tested a self-hosted instance was a couple of weeks back. It was their official testing docker container. So perhaps there are versions without that, I don’t know. I assume you should be able to compile this without them, or at least fork the original project. Hence, I’m asking what’s about those banners in real world scenario.
Another Hack Club member here, this situation is hard on many of us since we built many of our projects around Slack integration, and we now have to rapidly re-code them so they don't break. It's not great, especially in the middle of the school week (reminder that hack club is a coding nonprofit for teenagers, so i have to go to school and have homework while doing this)
Skyfall have had awareness of this issue for months. If you're running a teaching service for kids, allowing this to hit the wall months later while telling the kids it's all someone else's fault is disingenuous and a poor example to set.
No I haven't, I literally learned about this 30 minutes before starting the blog post. I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption that your service provider will not 40x your bill with a week's notice!
How long have you had the bill alluded to in the top comment on this post? For how long have you been in communication with Slack? The top level comment suggests it might have been months, but at the very least it's been 3 weeks (since 29th Aug).
I'm not defending Slack here, but allowing this to hit the wall and then raising a stink online does everyone a disservice.
Edit: by "you", I mean "the organisation of Skyfall". It's already pretty clear from the number of people chiming in on behalf of the company that this problem has been handed out piecemeal.
> Then this spring they changed the terms to every single user without telling us or sending a new contract, and then ignored our outreach and delayed us and *told us to ignore the bill and not to pay* as late as Aug 29
From the top comment, if Hack Club was told to ignore it and not pay, I don't feel they are to blame.
"Blame" is a strong word, but I think it was a mistake to not plan a migration strategy as soon as Slack/Salesforce sent a $200k bill. Even if you have some agent telling you not to pay it, it's clear something is about to go very sideways.
It wasn’t slack, but I’ve had multiple vendors that I was in regular touch with, surprise me with pricing changes in the week(s) leading up to a contract renewal. Never quite this short notice, but definitely as little as 8 business days before the renewal was due.
Both times I’ve paid the new price for 1 year and cancelled. Both times our sales rep was surprised the next year when we didn’t renew.
In this case, it looks like Hack Club sat on a gargantuan bill for at least weeks and maybe months (see top comment on this post).
I'm not denying that what you describe happens, but in this case - ignoring the warning signs, letting the issue crash into a wall and then complaining online about it doesn't help anyone.
I get that regardless there were warning signs, but it honestly seems like slack either miscommunicated or flat out lied to them about the ability to address pricing. While in retrospect they should have started preparing to migrate away, it's human nature to assume good intentions and hope that things will work out well.
There's a couple of interpretations here.
1. The sales rep really thought they would be able to retain good pricing for them and it fell through, and at the last minute hackclub was blindsided by their inability to retain the pricing.
2. The sales rep thought that hackclub was likely to jump ship if they had time to plan based on the new pricing, and lied to them about the possibility of retaining pricing. And thought that by doing so they could force at least one year of higher cost.
3. Hack Club is misrepresenting their communications with Slack to drum up public approval.
My guess is that option 1 is the most likely, and the optimism of the sales rep ended up being a net negative, and human nature being what it is, Hack Club thought things would work out, and everyone is already busy so why borrow trouble.
As for complaining online, sadly it seems that bad press is the only lever that most people have as a forcing factor for companies these days. I honestly only had a Twitter account for a long time, just so I could complain about companies in public to get them to do the right thing, so unfortunately complaining online does actually help.
