Make Discord Open Source

Comments

12 comments

  • Hyperclaw79

    Discord is actually a company product so it's pointless to make it open source. I personally would hate to see a lower quality clone of Discord which would be made possible by open sourcing discord.

    -11
  • oggy333

    Personally, i think that a version of discord without the store but its open source would be awesome!

    -6
  • nef

    Personally, I disagree. We don't need to see Discord App'd code, others just want too,

    -9
  • Puls3

    As long as Discord keeps going in this direction I see no need for it to be open-source, also the fact that it used their servers would definitely make this a no-go.

    -2
  • CodenameCookie

    Making it skinnable might be a happy medium.

    4
  • PITR

    Couldn't agree more CodenameCookie

    3
  • balakayallen

    Make the client open source and moddable, keep the servers closed source, maybe leave some parts of the client closed like the store and such.

    Making the client open source means the community can really push the limits to what discord can do. It wouldn't hurt Discord, it would make it better overall and allow for quicker bug fixes and upgrades.

    7
  • nef

    werethless12 superficially that sounds great. community development has its perks, however, this will also enable reverse engineering to be much easier, and could go catastrophic.

    -5
  • Shmalle

    Totally disagree, how about keeping the iconic and same design?

    -4
  • ForTombstone

    To be honest, I can understand why they keep their codes closed source. However, it is great if it can actually be modded, although it's not that related to this post.

    0
  • tomodachi94

    An extension system/themes (werethless12, thanks for this idea) and a store similar to the Chrome Web Store could be a good compromise...

    0
  • Prorok

    I logged in here specifically to call out a few users for their ridiculous arguments.

    First, Discord needs to become open source because Tencent is failing to spare the resources to accomplish several development goals. The programming community at large is full of volunteers who can help achieve them. One example is that Discord is unavailable for Windows on amd64 which is a real crying shame. It's also beyond reach for CPU architectures different than x86 and its derivatives such as ARM, which has already become a good alternative for x86 and comes in various quality products such as Microsoft Surface Pro X, MacBook M1 and a plethora of ARM SoCs.

    Second, being a company product doesn't make it special. The cargo cult of secrecy around corporate source code is really grotesque and impractical. I worked at Intel at some point in my life and my former employer understood very well that open sourcing its GPU and PMEM drivers was the way forward. Chrome, Android, Hadoop, .NET and Firefox are also huge company products and none of their parent companies lost a single dime because the technology is open source.

    Third is something I heard somewhere else which also makes me lose faith in humanity. Apparently Discord should be kept closed source because it has a store. That's like saying your browser should be closed source because you can use it to go shopping online and it sounds on par with Monty Python's greatest sketches. I cna imagine this would be a good half-measured attempt at hiding secret store credentials hardcoded into the client, but this kind of lunacy is ripe for abuse any time for anyone willing to disassemble Discord so it's not really a permanent fix.

    I would love to get my hands on the Discord client's source code just so I can make myself an amd64 and ARM64 client for free, out of my spare time after work. But I can't because there's no source code to speak of.

    1

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