If you've followed Beeper, you know that roughly 50% of our product is already open source (https://github.com/beeper). You can run your own Matrix server and use our bridges, or self-host the bridges and use Beeper clients (https://github.com/beeper/bridge-manager). For all intents and purposes, Beeper _is_ the rejuvenated and very open Pidgin.

Automattic is a fantastic home for us. We needed a home (or new investors) to keep working on Beeper.

> 50% of our product is already open source

What parts are closed source? Are there any plans to open them up?

> Automattic is a fantastic home for us. We needed a home (or new investors) to keep working on Beeper.

Is the added investment necessary to scale out specific features, or is it to address challenges related to profitability?

What he meant was they were running out of money.

Since now you have more resources, do you plan on open sourcing your whole solution, or will Beeper still be "half" open source? As far as I'm aware you still cannot use the Beeper client with your own self-hosted Matrix instance, and there's quite a lot of Beeper-only features that never became Matrix spec proposals. Is there a plan to make these features available to the whole Matrix ecosystem? Should I be worried that open source development of the mautrix bridges will cease, to focus on a commercial product?

The only thing the beeper client itself brings over your garden variety matrix client is a coat of paint. It’ll make group chats between you, your friend and the bot that’s forwarding everything look like a private chat. Or the chat between a phone # and you will look like the contact name and you and are talking (and if that contact changes so will the chat).

Basically beeper’s open source contribution right now feels like it’s hit a point of no return. I say this as someone who contributes to one of the bridges on my free time. I now know enough about it to feel confident that spending time contributing is time well spent _if_ you’re ok dispensing with the creature comforts the beeper app provides. What I mean by that is that you can always run bridges against your own matrix instance using any of the other open source clients.

It’ll be ugly as hell, but it will work. What we really need to worry about now are the platforms messing with our ability to take our data off of their systems and into our own. There are a million ways to otherwise hack the existing open source matrix clients to make them look however we want.

FWIW, Pidgin is still very much alive, we even had a release in February... Also not sure what "very open Pidgin" means as we're 100% GPLv2 but whatever.

I haven’t used pidgin in years but does that Teams plugin really work? I’ve seen projects try to integrate it into matrix and drop off because it was too hard.

Works for me!

Although I'm the plugin's developer, so I may be a little biased :D

It did last I knew, but I don't use teams so I don't know for certain.

You are one lucky person and I envy you.

Yep it's a great place to be especially when the CEO from a company punches down on a volunteer project on the day that CEO sold their company for 125 Million USD... /s

Haha sorry I meant lucky as in not having to use Teams.

Yeah I know, I was just using the opportunity to vent some frustration :)

Is 125 m the actual number? I would be surprised if they got more than 10.

That's what tech crunch and others are reporting https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/wordpress-com-owner-automa...

Wow, almost half of Automattic's annual revenue!

Grim, I apologize. I spoke too soon. I didn't mean to offend you or demean pidgin. I was reacting too harshly to the parent.

Thank you for apologizing.

Also worth noting that some past Automattic acquisitions have also been open sourced, e.g. Pocket Casts back in 2022. There's a LOT of stuff in the >900 Automattic repos on Github: https://github.com/orgs/Automattic/repositories

Mission accomplished, he successfully monetized your anti-apple sentiment into a nice little payday and walked away hundreds of thousands of dollars richer. And all it took was burning down hackintosh.

Geohot moment - publicizing and monetizing a known exploit at the direct expense and risk of a non-profit community built around it.

I mean, best HN spirit and all, dude got fucking paid, but it’s an incredibly shitty move on a personal level.

> but it’s an incredibly shitty move on a personal level.

Shitty to whom, on a personal level? Tim Cook? People really aren't kidding when they say HN is the orange Macrumors, huh?

> at the direct expense and risk of a non-profit community built around it.

I don't know where you learned the definition, but iMessage is not a non-profit product. It's not even an open one.

Clearly he means that it's shitty for people who relied on the exploit, but without monetizing it. When Beeper started monetizing it, obviously Apple had to close it, and hobbyists suffered.

As someone that knows people that use Matrix bridges, I feel confident that 99% of those people would blame Apple and not Beeper. Either the exploit is bad and Apple would have shut it down regardless, or it's benign and Apple is trying to secure their manifest destiny. The monetization aspect of it feels completely tangential when there is no sanctioned "free" route anyways.

I think it's a bit naïve to suggest that Apple weren't coming after the Hackintosh exploits for their own unrelated reasons to be honest, and they absolutely knew what they were.

Those exploits have existed for 10-15 years, they are as old as the hackintosh community.

There is a difference between commercial exploitation and hobbyist usage - just like with legacy emulation vs pirating. And no, apple really hasn’t come down despite knowing it exists, and probably wouldn’t have without beeper.

> they are as old as the hackintosh community.

Serial spoofing is, but Apple cracks down on that too: https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/t9p5ff/psa_usin...

It's really not fair to say that the scene was "just fine" up until Beeper went commercial. In those 10-15 years, there were a lot of changes intended to segregate Hackintoshes from Macintoshes.

> There is a difference between commercial exploitation and hobbyist usage

What damages would Apple claim? That people didn't buy iPhones to use their insular and potentially-illegal messaging service? That they abused the same resources that millions of unknowing users exploit for free daily?

It's Apple's call to pull the cord whenever they want, but it's also entirely their decision to keep iMessage a walled garden. It's impossible for you to redirect the vitriol towards Beeper when the only thing they did "wrong" was sell a solution to an Apple-designed problem.

> What damages would Apple claim?

They don't need to claim any damages, this is not a legal question, they can just close the loopholes.

> the only thing they did "wrong" was sell a solution to an Apple-designed problem.

No, the issue is not that they are "solving an Apple-designed problem" (whatever that problem may be), it's that they did it by leeching off of Apple's infrastructure.

Beeper's solution didn't overhelp themselves to Apple's infrastructure, though. They used iMessage like a legitimate user would, and then charged customers for the automation. If that's leeching, then thousands of iOS and Mac users around the world are also leeching off Apple's service too.

I won't contest that it's Apple's decision how to present iMessage. The idea that Beeper killed iMessage spoofing is a hysterical assertion though, when people will readily admit that it was Apple's double-standard keeping it alive in the first place.