[EtDybNuvCu]

Discord's founders promised open-sourcing their client and API long ago. I don't think it'll ever happen. Still, it's great to see them contributing to the wider community.

I am deeply disappointed by Discord's approach to Free Software in general, although I understand that they deeply desire the same business model as Slack or Hipchat. It'd be nice if we could stop balkanizing chat already.

[devwastaken]

With their terrible response to modders and claiming that 'all mods are malware', and their flip-flopped response of them being "against the TOS", yeah, they're not going to open source anything. Just walk into the Discord Developers server and ask about modifying Discord, you'll get berated. Thats because the devs do it themselves.

Discord doesn't have the luxury of being a bought-out company like Curse client which makes money for Amazons other services. Discord is on its own, and as such has to make back their revenue. You can't make revenue unless you charge for something, and if people can build something better than the discord client (They can), then you're going to be hard pressed for features.

Remember it took Discord a year and half to actually implement video calls, when right from the start they advertised heavily that they were a 'replacement' to Skype. Took them two years to just have video embeds. Even still they have no proper administration system for servers. If you want to admin a server, you have to build and host your own bots for it.

And thats just the iceberg. It gets messier the deeper you delve into the personalities and inexperience this company has.

[AFNobody]

Yup. They all want to make money the same way and as a result Discord will knife it's users in the back sooner or later just like Slack has.

Better to stay away and donate time/money to open source competitors even if they lack network effects.