Call only in DMs is a massive step backwards!

[Tampa]

I get that you all want people to move to the licensed plans to make back the money from all the capital investment, but actively paywalling existing features without actually upgrading them is disgusting practice. It's a sure-fire way to get users to not upgrade their installations or even downgrade them. Trying to force small teams to hand over hundreds per month just for communications is a great way to drive them back to the competition. You want to paywall stuff? Make it worth it! You want to sell licenses? Scale them properly with team size and revenues. Otherwise, there goes the userbase, which by the way contributes to your success through open source, so maybe have a bit of respect towards them!

[glouton]

I can not agree more with @Tampa

We're a tiny team of 3 with one third of the members who doesn't like Mattermost already and with whom I'm struggling to explain that it's great.

Now this...

[steccas]

I agree, this is really shameful

[rtfm98]

I totally agree. It's a shame to restrict already existing (!) features for users without valid license! I'd get it if this was a restriction from the beginning of Mattermost Calls, but this is total crap. This won't help you to reach your goal of getting more paying customers. Indeed, they will just migrate to other solutions as soon as possible.

To claim group calls are a feature that aren't used so much as calls in DMs shows, that you don't know what most of your users are doing the whole day.

I'm really disappointed.

[novo-github]

Is there any alternative for this? I tried jitsi-plugin before, but is not available in 'official plugins' anymore. Its not the best, but a work around.

[Tampa]

@novo-github You can stay on v9 and even roll back from v10 still, though you may have to nuke the plugin manually so it installs the previously packaged version. Outside of that, the harder approach is to fork the plugin and reverse the changes, which means maintaining a fork and manually deploying it each version change to make sure it stays fixed.

Been a couple days since this went up. Over on reddit the discussion also ended with the supposed CEO offering to hear comments, but not saying anything on what's going to happen. I suspect they'll be just waiting it out and ignore the complaints as is tradition. So if any of you folks want this actually reversed, make sure to keep putting them on blast for it.

After all as they say themselves "We are open to feedback and share our ideas constructively and respectfully." So maybe some of the higher ups can chime in as to what the thought process was behind this abomination of a decision: https://mattermost.com/about-us/

[Nyralei]

I totally agree with this. Also this sets a precedent and who knows what else will be paywalled.

[markatk]

This is such a disappointment. We are a small team using mattermost because we use gitlab. Removing an already implemented feature for free users "in order to focus supportability and quality on licensed servers" does not make any sense. How does it impact licensed servers by blocking an existing feature for unlicensed servers (which do not get support anyway).

I think this will be the decission to drive us away from mattermost. If we need to pay to get the minimum featureset we need to work we will ultimatly choose a competitve product which offers way more features for less money.

I really do support the open source movement and I am willing to pay for software but not like this. There is so much potential and many missing features and opportunities to bundle features in licensed servers for good reasons. This is not the way to convince me to pay.

[Tampa]

Seeing as there seems to now be radio silence, which is probably an attempt to let the whole thing blow over, how about this.

https://gist.github.com/Tampa/090bb7ff89c0e15a4570b6c4d9de7736

Anyone with some experience in golang can probably verify if this will work or not, or could just test it. Reversing just the commit that made the change might be enough. Kinda surprised there hasn't been a public fork yet, but that's probably the next step here.

[codingPotato21]

Extremely frustrating, Its a big step back. Someone might make a fork if it's possible or even maybe a new plugin that is similar in functionality.

Currently, we updated to V10 but using the old calls plugin version which is working just fine for us so far. However, we cannot update to a newer plugin version so it might stop working when we update mattermost in the future.