Comment by micromacrofoot
25 days ago
This seems like a poorly hashed out plan, but I do have some sympathy...
in the face of competitors with many more employees and seemingly endless piles of VC money, how do open source projects like this fund themselves? What could Mattermost do instead? Should they take more money and race everyone towards the same cliff?
Are projects like this doomed to a small niche of people who understand the implications (and meanwhile can't contribute enough to ensure development keeps pace)?
Everyone else is just going to keep using Slack, and arguably outside of these niche concerns, it's a better funded and higher quality product.
It's not really open source project. They always gated a bunch of features, require CLA (so even if someone does contribute, boom, your code is theirs and they will probably close it down behind enterprise license if it is useful enough), and have pretty complex licensing scheme https://docs.mattermost.com/product-overview/faq-mattermost-...
> Everyone else is just going to keep using Slack, and arguably outside of these niche concerns, it's a better funded and higher quality product.
They had niche when their lite enterprise license (just basic LDAP and some other small features) was $2.5 per user.
Now they are basically on slack pricing, why would anyone bother...
yeah they certainly can't beat slack with slack pricing - low pricing is the biggest moat vc funding gets you (and you can just fill it in after you outlast the competition)