Thanks Sandeep. We assume that it is easier to charge money to enterprises than open source communities. If we see strong adoption and feature requests from the enterprise we'll consider adopting an open-core model and charging for it. For now the adoption is mainly from open source communities and we think of our costs as a marketing expense.
No - because, like discord, gitter makes it a point to make privacy very hard to set up. This is fairly deliberate and is the reason why enterprises have a hard time adopting it.
Sandeep, it's interesting that you view it that way, but it was never our intention to deliberately make privacy hard. When creating a new room, you can choose to make it public, private and optionally allow anyone from your GitHub org to join your private room. See http://imgur.com/jIb8EKA
It's definitely true that the product focus on Gitter has always been more on public rooms. That's because the focus of our company has always been on the network of public communities, rather than enterprise features, which we feel are well represented in the market by other great products like Slack, Mattermost, etc.
I completely understand and respect that. It was not a complaint - but cognizance that you had a certain philosophy in mind.
Forget slack - look at hipchat which has far simpler privacy controls. The ability to create an organization (NOT linked to GitHub), per channel permissions is all that's needed. Hipchat makes this dead simple.
Lots of different people will have different requirements - some people will need Active Directory even, but essentially the only two things needed for enterprise messaging is permissions and search.
Can you explain how Discord makes privacy hard to set up? Servers by default are private (No one can join or even see the server unless they are invited to it). You can disable people's ability to create invites with a 3 clicks.
(disclaimer: work at Discord & fishing for feedback about how we can make this easier)
So, this is related to another comment I made. We are not hosting our own. We want to throw money at discord bringing in enterprise like features in its hosted version.
I linked to a ticket - if you follow that trail, there are many more.
Do you know of any enterprises using Gitter?