Comment by constantius
25 days ago
They're now a defense contractor, the copy on their website sounds like military cosplaying.... Probably chasing the stupid profits of Anduril and Palantir, and doing the old open source rugpull in the process.
Zulip (for Slack) and Wekan (for Trello) are good replacements, save yourself the ethical and technical worries.
So so weird that we live in a timeline where Anduril and Palantir are military contractors of the US and other governments.
I know it’s somewhat of a tired observation by now but I still wonder every time how badly you have to misread LOTR to name your company after the witch kings cursed surveillance artefacts.
I wonder when the first weapons manufacturing company calls themselves Angmar or Uruk-hai.
The names are really dope though I have to give them that…
> I know it’s somewhat of a tired observation by now but I still wonder every time how badly you have to misread LOTR to name your company after the witch kings cursed surveillance artefacts.
Have you considered that it is not "misread", they just see themselves on Saruman side ?
Sauron’s side, surely? Or else there is a need for a whole different question of “how badly you have to read LOTR...”
Do you guys really think Gondor was a democratic society with privacy laws?
"Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus"
It was a Mike Judge type joke, aka ha-ha only serious.
I know it’s been said but Anduril is the sword wielded by Aragon, forged from the shards of Narsil which defeated Sauron.
And the Palantiri were artifacts given by the Elves to the greatest race of Men to govern their kingdom. No connection to the witch-king (except some post-Tolkien video game).
I don't think they misread it, I think they just liked sauron more than the good guys
Not to be "that guy" but Anduril is Aragorn's sword and is the most good-guy good-thing that could ever be fantasized about. It's used to defeat Sauron. And the Palantir stones are not "the bad guys tool", they were made by the Elves in ancient history and a few of them wound up in the bad guys hands. Misread LOTR indeed!
I specifically referred to the witch kings surveillance artefacts with misreading. I don’t think their creation story is mentioned in LOTR, other than that they are extremely powerful and dangerous.
But you are right of course about Anduril and if you take the whole silmarillion as background. I never really liked that part though
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Yes, but the elf who created them is quite a tragic character himself. To the extent that his own mother chose to die after giving birth because she knew how much sorrow he would eventually bring. So I'd be careful to not paint them as a good thing either.
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> I wonder when the first weapons manufacturing company calls themselves Angmar or Uruk-hai.
Luckily/unluckily, AngMar is one of those shady medical subcontracting firms instead...
I guess they are named after the founders (Angie and Mark) - but still an eerie coincidence…
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On Kanban, I would instead suggest cryptpad.fr.
Crucially, it's end to end encrypted.
You can self-host it, or pay for having it hosted (or use the hosted free tier).
Has other things in addition to kanban.
I got a 1 yr account.
https://cryptpad.fr/
> Crucially, it's end to end encrypted.
I don't think it's all that crucial for something that at most gets some ticket descriptions on it
It’s a whole office suite.
And even if you use it only for bug ticketing there are products that are big enough that it takes a long time to implement changes. You really don’t want outsiders to be able to read open bug tickets for security vulnerabilities you are working on fixing for example. And you also don’t want outsiders to read your planned features either, probably.
I think it makes perfect sense to use e2e encryption for bug tickets considering this.
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That's ok. You don't mind putting your life online, go ahead. To me it's crucial.
I just read the copy on Mattermost's website. I believe you can't go more cringe than this for a group chat application.
Wonder whether they do weapons integrations for this. Urgh.
Every software development organisation I've been in that used Mattermost built integrations with monitoring, build pipelines, LDAP queries and the like.
I'm sure organisations in war would do similar things, but with the tools of their 'craft'.
Unsurprising, given that the CEO of Element/Matrix is also selling and creating primarily to that end as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46379589
mIRC was used during GWOT for military. They just didn’t openly advertise it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147321
Knives were too, and yet I'm not calling people to use forks instead. There is a difference between military contractors and generic tools.
Edit: sorry, hotheaded reply. I assume you mean that the creator of mIRC was encouraging it (though it's not mentioned anywhere). I still.stand by my analogy, but I see your point given your assumption.
> I assume you mean that the creator of mIRC was aware of it and encouraging it.
Like most licensed software, it was likely licensed by “US Government” or “Department of Defense”. Plus, it was openly written about back in the day. It was well known. No clauses in their licensing to prevent its use for those purposes.
Comparing to Mattermost and amplifying the original comment, Mattermost website is openly associating with PlatformOne.
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What's GWOT?
Global War on Terror
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Ive seen MM instances across defense dev teams for quite a while specifically to avoid Teams bs in the air force, gov teams does not like mixing with other orgs. Now it seems they’re actually going for contracts and Ill bet great money are mostly funded by USAF. Im very, very surprised.