Apologies for the late blog post! I’m hosting an event this week, and things got a bit hectic during the preparations. If you’re here searching for fixes to contribute—tough luck, my page is perfect! But on the bright side, you ARE in luck because you’ve discovered this post and can attend the event! 🤗🤗🤗

I think we are sticking with Mattermost

So far, I am very pleased with the dynamics of my team: we all are quite picky when it comes to choosing a projet and yet not picky to the extent of a complete loss of touch with one another. We are strongly considering Mattermost at this point, since:

• It supports programming languages that interest us.

• Lots of diverse issues to work on.

• It’s a larger project compared to Music Blocks, offering more challenges.

• The contributor community is great, and responses are quick.

• There is abundant documentation for contributors, and many issues are “up for grabs” – meaning if you claim one, it’s yours!

• As contributors, we don’t need to host Mattermost on our own external servers; we can simply test it locally—a huge A+.

• There are plenty of memes about Mattermost’s occasional finicky nature, which suggests there’s ample room for improvement.

Yeah but what about…

Now, some issues and concerns to keep in mind are:

• Future Open Source Status: How long will Mattermost remain open source? I recently stumbled upon a Reddit post suggesting that with each new version, Mattermost appears to be shifting away from open source and leaning towards closed-source ideologies—a definite concern for us.
• Licensing Issues: While evaluating the project, I noticed that Mattermost doesn’t use a single, unified license. In addition to MIT, GNU, and Apache, they also offer a commercial license, which leaves us with some unanswered questions.
• Dependency Management: If we do stick with Mattermost, we need to ensure we have the correct versions of Go, Node.js, and any required libraries (like libpng). This can be challenging—especially on macOS and ARM-based machines, which, as far as I know, all three of us are using.

Is there hope?

Of course there is:

• I started a discussion post for Professor Klukowska about the licensing issue to make sure we’re on the safe side.
• All three of us have decided to complete the developer setup by this Thursday. We’ll attempt to fix this issue locally and then discuss how manageable it was, epsecially since this is an “easy” difficulty issue.