Did you read the quarter-million-line license for your Slack app?

https://mastodon.mit.edu/@Eggfreckles/114825126857396420

by leakycap • 10 months ago

104 57 10 months ago

mastodon.mit.edu

leakycap4• 10 months ago

And we provide these apps with data and collaboration we rely on for our business or clubs day-to-day?

Time to rethink.

nettlin• 10 months ago

This file does not contain the terms of service of Slack. Rather, it contains the software licenses of third-party code that is embedded in Chromium, which in turn is embedded in the Slack app. Every dependency has its own license, which is why the file is so big (800× Apache-2.0, 237× MIT, 59× LGPL, and so on).

zahlman• 10 months ago

Why can't it deduplicate matching licenses?

throwup238• 10 months ago

The legal department doesn't want to take that chance.

Uehreka• 10 months ago

I think it might be the case that licenses often include the authors’ names in the “this code is copyright of so-and-so” (as you can see, I Am Not A Lawyer) section, which might be considered part of the text of the license, thereby making it a requirement to include the full license text for each dependency.

gpm• 10 months ago

Are you sure it doesn't*?

* When we treat different versions of say, the MIT license, with different names and copyright years inserted, as different licenses.

I have to imagine the file would compress extremely well though... I'm more curious why they don't use compression.

s20n• 10 months ago

That's how it is done in debian packages. The full text of each license is only mentioned once and given an identifier which is then used to link the license to the relevant copyright statements.

For example: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/highlight/-/blob/94ee6559155...

sneak• 10 months ago

I imagine it does precisely that when gzipped for distribution.

hmartin• 10 months ago

Title of this post is blatantly misleading for using the singular 'license'.

JdeBP• 10 months ago

This is BSD Licence Hell, and for about 10 years I've being doing what miniscule part I can do to ameliorate it. Debian people are trying to do their parts, too.

* https://debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1....

neuroelectron• 10 months ago

I can't really understand the point of using Slack. There's so many free alternatives.

guerrilla2• 10 months ago

Someone also explain to me how gamers of all people can live with Discord when the thing barely works.

greenavocado• 10 months ago

Wait until you find out both Ukrainian and Russian military were using Discord to communicate

jbaber• 10 months ago

When I installed matrix, I thought it was an example of FOSS UI being crummy. Then I found out they were actually doing a good job of emulating discord.

bigstrat20032• 10 months ago

Because it actually works pretty well most of the time. I'm not sure where you get "barely works" from, but that's not remotely my experience or the experience of anyone I know. And of course, network effects are strong so that keeps people using it even through the occasional hiccups.

As for how it got its foothold, it comes down to having an easier onboarding than the solutions it competed with. With Mumble (or Ventrilo, etc) someone has to pay for a server. Then you have to download the client, get the host and port to connect to, enter credentials, and so on. Repeat for every server you might join. With Discord, once your account is set up you just click on a link and join the server. You don't even have to use the client if you don't want; you can join from the browser just fine. I don't think the friction of using previous solutions was actually bad, but it was enough to give Discord an edge even without the integrated chat+voice angle (which is something that those other programs never did and still don't do).

chillfox• 10 months ago

Because when Discord released it had less impact on game performance than any of the other solutions at the time. And these days it’s still great, so only a fantastic solution will be able to replace it. But maybe in a few more years of enshitification it will be easier for something new to be better than it.

ProAm• 10 months ago

One throat to choke... is why. Enterprise grade sales and support.

throwaway20222• 10 months ago

Would you happen to have a stack ranked list of favorites off the top of your head?

bigstrat20032• 10 months ago

If you mean for individuals, it's because that's what their job uses. If you mean for the companies deciding to use Slack, it's because most companies significantly prefer to pay someone for a supported product than use a free product which they have to have their own staff support.

wilg4• 10 months ago

This is simply downstream of open source working as intended. It's also not a problem, and also there's no good solution.

leakycap4• 10 months ago

It's also not a problem, and also there's no good solution.

I have worked with people who have this attitude and I wonder how they're doing these days.

I hope they haven't ran into any problems they cannot simply dismiss as not problems that don't have solutions.

wilg4• 10 months ago

I didn't claim that there are no problems, just that this isn't one?

GuestFAUniverse• 10 months ago

My first computer had a 10MB HDD. * I could program with it comfortably (e.g. Turbo Pascal). * I could play with it (Civ, Day of the Tentacle with a few tricks, ...) * I could run a office suite. * I could communicate via mail and newsgroups

In short: all problems back than could be solved at home.

And yeah, I know that barely anybody cares _how utterly_ wasteful software has become.

theideaofcoffee• 10 months ago

But think of the dEvElopEr exPeRienCe! They may have to slow down on the rate they are shitting things out to actually learn a native system/UI toolkit, or, gasp, write it a few different times for different environments! Thats gonna affect some bonuses for sure.

JED3• 10 months ago

honestly the slack app store and it’s ridiculous policies makes publishing apps completely unworthy of the time investment. after having published numerous apps across dozens of marketplaces, I would advise everyone to avoid apps.slack.com at all costs. slack is beyond the maximum bloat threshold in virtually every aspect imaginable, TOS and licensing most especially. build elsewhere

hliyan2• 10 months ago

We need to return to a world where we primarily own things, not rent them. If the software executable can be thought of as a machine, we should be able to own the version/instance of it we purchased the license for. We may not own the intellectual property, but we should have enough ownership to install it on a personal cloud computer we own and run it until such time we need to upgrade it.

kristianc2• 10 months ago

Buy Campfire instead? https://once.com/campfire

piskov• 10 months ago

It’s free and under MIT (though no too long ago this wasn’t the case)

shomp• 10 months ago

Campfire needs 64GB RAM for 10,000 users, that surprises me, I would think we could get to 10k users with far less RAM.

sealeck3• 10 months ago

https://zulip.com/ is a pretty excellent chat program that can be self-hosted

hliyan2• 10 months ago

Zulip self-hosted is billed monthly. Still a form of rent. You don't own the version you bought perpetually.

jagged-chisel• 10 months ago

… personal cloud computer we own

I can only read this as an oxymoron

Flatterer3544• 10 months ago

An alternative to look into, https://element.io/ using Matrix, especially if encryption is preferred.

Did you read the quarter-million-line license for your Slack app?

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