[wyattk]

I view this like much of the rest of communications software (or even software in general). Over time, it tends to go to zero. It can be useful to compare it to video services or even personal messaging. In personal messaging, you have an insane amount of services like Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, GroupMe, Allo, Hangouts, iMessage, Signal, etc...

I could see something similar to Slack as a free, open source project. It could possibly develop out of something like Signal [https://signal.org/]. Making and supporting an open source solution can be a viable business too (e.g. CoreOS, Docker). I doubt that it would kill Slack either. It should be interesting to watch, and will benefit the end users as a whole through an improved Slack and/or a similar free option.

[hkjayakumar]

Mattermost[1] is an existing open-source[2] Slack alternative.

[1] https://about.mattermost.com/

[2] https://github.com/mattermost

[locusofself]

I have a few dozen mattermost deployments I maintain. It's great.

[darksim905]

Except they don't have an app you can install on your phone/desktop/laptop, last I checked. If I could also join a 'Mattermost' team from the Slack app so everything is centralized, I'd be happy as fuck.

[vith]

Looks like they do: https://about.mattermost.com/download/#mattermostApps

[darksim905]

this is neat! thanks, this wasn't a thing a year or so ago. Now if only I can figure out if I can add Slack teams without fucker or the reverse.