I will always cheer on someone building something cool, but here's the problem I have: Everyone wants to build an open source alternative, no one wants to make money. What is wrong with making money? Money is great -- it lets you buy clothes, food, shelter, water, and even a night out on the town or two. We need to be able to make money on software again, not just have user data be the product. This is partly to blame on the FOSS zealots. Sure they say it's "just fine" to make money on your software, but they never seemed to offer a method that is based in reality.
I 100% agree with you. I want this product to make money so that I can devote my full time to it.
The basic functionality will always be free without ads and tracking. But there will also be a very affordable ($1-2/mo) premium plan. I haven't yet decided what it's going to have. Most likely an ability to add more than 5 accounts or multiple accounts on the same platform (e.g. 3 Slack profiles).
- I have a paid+OSS app for amateur radio geolocation on Google Play myself. You can download the APK from the homepage or just directly buy it for some bucks.
Don’t price your service so low! Anything below $5/mo gives the perception of having little value to offer. Plus you’re gonna lose a fat percentage to credit card processing.
Well he didn't say he wasn't going to earn money from the project, just that the client is free. There are many ways to monetize something and the benefits of starting with free is that you get biggest growth and then you can find your "whales" and learn how to profit from them.
It doesn't seem like the parent wants to build an open source alternative. I remember reading about it over half a year ago (back then it was supposedly written in Go rather than C if I remember correctly) where there was also promise of open sourcing it.. His website also seems to indicate he now wants to go the route of SublimeText, so the open source promise should probably be interpreted as "I'll release the source code after I abandon the project, whether it takes one or ten years"..
FYI, I have nothing against closed source projects, but every discussion about eul.im seems to include the promise of open sourcing the project, which I'm sure is a great marketing ploy.
It's going to be open-sourced at some point, just not now.
What I meant is I'm building an alternative client that gives people a lot more freedom. For example, you can use XMPP as your primary messenger, and still communicate with your teammates via Slack.
You can also have access to all your history and a much, much better instant search.
In the future, an IRC/XMPP gateway will be built in as well.
Opening a project early to contributors can end in mixed milestones, and the project may never archieve an "stable" status.
I might not be using the best words, so I'll give examples: Dolphin, the GameCube/Wii emulator did not release it's source code until the program's structure was mature enough to start adding thirth party code without disrupting the project's core codebase.
Congratulations, we really need leaner IMs and from what I see it looks great!
If it supports some important features like file uploading, pinning and seeing pinned threads, etc. to reach Slack feature parity I'll surely take a shot.
Are you using QT for cross-platform compatibility or some other toolkit?
Well, Qt would still take up that space. It's just that on those platforms it's likely installed elsewhere and used by enough other things that it's closer to the "general userland size" category than it is to any one "specific application size".
It doesn't have the 10 000 messages limit, it's very light (~100 KB) and fast:
https://eul.im
I recently started working on it full-time, so I expect a stable release to be out this month.