As a YC alum and co-founder of Mattermost, I often get asked by early stage YC companies about what it’s like to build a commercial open source business. With the start-up’s permission, we’ve started recording some of the Q&A sessions, transcribing them and sharing the more popular questions on the Mattermost blog in short form articles.
Our community has been at the heart of what makes Mattermost great since the earliest days. The first community members were people who were trying out the earliest versions of the platform, filing bugs and wanting to make feature improvements. Our open source community has grown, contributing thousands of pull requests, from new features and plugins to translations and documentation.
We’re excited to share that Mattermost has launched Open Source Fridays as a way to help our Engineering team have a structured opportunity to support and get involved in more open source projects inside and outside of Mattermost.
Earlier this month, Elastic announced that there would be upcoming changes to its open source licensing. These changes do not affect on-prem deployments of Elasticsearch. Since Mattermost Enterprise Edition uses Elasticsearch in its on-prem deployments, we felt it important to explore the reasoning behind Elastic’s decision, how the new license terms are different, and why there will be no impact on Mattermost users as a result of these changes.
If you were to survey the most productive teams, you’d find a common ingredient – efficient communication. That explains the rise of team collaboration tools in 2020 and mega deals happening in the industry, such as Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack. However, right after heavily adopting tools like Slack, companies might notice the downsides of such tools. We aren’t just talking about fearing that Slack will hand over your data to Salesforce.
Mattermost and Jitsi—open source, self-hosted alternatives to Slack and Zoom—now integrate! With the Mattermost Jitsi plugin, Mattermost users can now instantly launch secure Jitsi voice, video and screen-sharing calls, either on-prem with the self-hosted Jitsi software or via the cloud with Jitsi Meet.
Open source companies are amazing places to work for engineers. Your work is showcased to the world through private open source companies like GitLab and HashiCorp (makers of Terraform and Vault), and through public ones like Elastic, GitHub, and RedHat—all of which have enormous impact.
A lot will happen over the next 1,000 years, and the codebase for the Mattermost open source project will be along for the entire ride. On July 8, GitHub successfully deposited 21 terabytes of open source repository data in the Arctic World Archive, a (very) long-term storage facility located on the Svalbard archipelago in Norway near the North Pole.
Today marks five years since the start of the Mattermost open source project! We reflected on this exciting journey and reminisced about our missteps along the way. We’ve had many laughs and wanted to share them with our community.
