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Spectrum, an Open Source Alternative to Slack

The community chat platform Spectrum has released its code under an open source license. This allows users to host and develop the software themselves.

Since February 2017, the makers are working on their community chat platform Spectrum. So far, there was only one hosted version, now the code has been released under the open source license BSD 3-Clause. This allows users to host the chat software themselves and operate them as a slack alternative, for example.

An announcement states that the software is definitely being actively developed, and new developers are being sought in the same breath. Above all, the creators want to create transparency about their development and be able to accept feature suggestions even better.

Spectrum has a different approach than Slack

Users can find communities on the Spectrum website, such as Sketch.

In the hosted version, there was a slightly different approach than Slack pursues. Spectrum is for communities, so all established groups are public and indexed in a search. However, there is no limit on search, message count or channels and users.

For example, the Spectrum pricing model offers features pay, while an additional presenter or private channel costs $ 10 per month, but is billed based on actual usage, so the full monthly fee does not have to be paid for daily use.

The code and a documentation are on Github, where users can participate in the development and find information about their own hosting. Thus, there are, for example, Rocket Chat or Mattermost another open source alternative that can be operated on its own server.

 


Also published on Medium.

Published inApps
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