I haven’t seen any discussions on this here - but found Self-host Zulip and it’s basically an on-prem discord/slack that’s open-source and free under 10 users (for mobile notifications only - can have unlimited users). I’ve been using it on my proxmox server on an ubuntu LXC with main use case as my n8n message dump for a few months (native tool in n8n) and been enjoying it. They even have an iOS app which is nice.
How so? I don’t fully understand the difference - not being snarky.
Mobile notifications for organizations with up to 10 users is what’s free, technically you can have more than 10 users for free - you’ll just have to pay for mobile notifications beyond that.
You can self-host Zulip, and the self-hosted version is “100% open-source software” per Zulip’s own site. Zulip+1
Zulip’s commercial offering (Zulip Cloud) is separate from the open-source software: you don’t need to pay to run the open-source version, but there are paid plans for hosting, support, and services like mobile push notifications. The Zulip Blog
There’s your problem AI is dumb, be smart and use your own brain.
TLDR: Open Source never put an artificial restriction on usage. If the company limits the use of mobile notifications to 10 users, that’s an artificial restriction, therefore it’s not Open Source.
My dumb brain says that the software is Open Source as in the code is freely available and open for anyone to use, modify, and distribute.
Your point is that they have a restriction on the feature for mobile notifications, and can’t be open-source if there are limitations on how the software is used. I think that restriction is in place because they developed it to use their cloud relay’s for Mobile push, and that’s not free for them to host.
Personally I’ve disabled notifications for my deployment as I simply don’t need / want that, so a moot point (for me).
I’d imagine someone could clone the code and rewrite the mobile push to use their own relay for push notifications if they wanted to (since it’s open source software )
Both Google’s and Apple’s push notification services have a security model that does not support mutually untrusted self-hosted servers sending push notifications to the same app. In particular, when an app is published to their respective app stores, one must compile into the app a secret corresponding to the server that will be able to publish push notifications for the app. This means that it is impossible for a single app in their stores to receive push notifications from multiple, mutually untrusted, servers.
Zulip’s solution to this problem is to provide a central push notification forwarding service, which allows registered Zulip servers to send push notifications to the Zulip app indirectly (through the forwarding service).
The Server is indeed open source, you can fork it and come up with a better way of implementing the push service. But open source does not mean you can force some one to host a service for free.
That’s great clarification @mietzen - in Dutch_Master’s defense I hadn’t specified the mobile notification only limitation when I originally posted (I’ve since edited) and I’m guessing he just saw ‘10 user limit’ and presumed it meant a user limit cap in general.
AI is dumb, be smart and use your own brain.
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