Remote communications are essentials to Open Source communities and have been traditionally the strongholds of free implementations of solutions like mailling lists, IRC and XMPP. But with the rise of HTTP based chat protocols we seen the proprietary empire striking back and for the sake of ease of use and accessibility we gave up the freedom of our communication backbones. For convenient upbringing we even hooked up our beloved Open Source communities with freemium plans from SaaS providers that don't support our communities and rather do bar gaining on basic features like chat history.
With Rocket.Chat there is an actual Open Source implementation of a HTTP chat solution that keeps the convenience while still empowering the freedom. In collaboration with the Debian/Ubuntu community they even made upbringing of self hosted instances a breeze and reconquered some abandoned strongholds back in companies and communities. Within the Drupal galaxy we started loving Rocket.Chat as an upstream that accepts changes and patches and also let us built DrupalChat as central Rocket.Chat instance for our community.
Let's continue this Open Source romance here with a BoF including our dear Rocket.Chat folks joining this conference <3
