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That’s a great recommendation, thanks! The pay per use model seems very fair and I like their approach to sustainability matters very much.

Thanks! Will have a look

While I totally agree that this should be the case, I’m not sure it really works. Voluntary participation is among the first things to be cut when it comes to monetary gain maximization, and is often not even considered. And in some instances, like the publicly funded research institute I work at, there’s no funds dedicated to voluntary contribution to open source projects.

Using it for years and am fully satisfied. Basically, any imap client capable of encryption will do.

Checked again. Beeper will be running “local bridges”. Once these are implemented into a modular system, there is not really a need for a local chat protocol in my understanding. The matrix connection can simply become another bridge and a Beeper server for Beeper chats would basically be yet another matrix server.

https://blog.beeper.com/2024/06/04/2024-beeper-roadmap/?ref=textscom

The FAQ says that “all integrations were implemented in-house using the Texts Platform SDK”. Whether that sdk is a derivative of the Matrix protocol? No idea. Texts.com does not offer connections to matrix, which kind of suggests it’s not 🤷🏼‍♂️ We will have to see whether the announced unified app will be running a solution based on Matrix or not.

Not exactly what was asked but a thought as I’ve been considering the same. After merging with Texts.com, Beeper seems to be redesigning the bridge architecture. I read that the implementation will move towards running the bridges on the client device so that the decryption is happening in the RAM of the end user’s machine rather than the server. In that case, the mentioned security problem will be at least partially resolved. Self-hosting the bridges is already possible now. One will still have to trust Beeper, though. As I am using their software already, it looks like there’s no reason, yet, to mistrust them.

There’s many pathways to get there. In my case it’s a classic science career. Whether that is better for the WLB is likely open for debate. 🙈 There’s a growing understanding in science that there’s a need for tenured scientific programmers supporting the compute infrastructure and development. These roles are quite rare though and thus there is tons of competition. Long story short: It’s a challenge. The good thing is that there’s many jobs out there with the meaning we seek.

I’m involved scientific programming tasks (climate models) and we are largely using a mix of prototyping, feature-driven, and big bang models. It’s a result of the requirements for our work. Important is, that our “user base” is extremely small and in the beginning of a project mostly ourselves. The required features are given by the scientific questions and timelines dictated by project timelines from soft funding. Iterations are thus mostly more like “that didn’t quite work, I need another method” kind of arguments. Hence, the implementation of modular and fast evolving design is important and often we try to build our software such that fast development can be done on individual models.
Sometimes theres an idea on how to solve a problem more efficiently or with better performance. And then it’s all about coming up with any proof of concept.

Finally, there is not really anything like a management in our line of work. The professor is usually satisfied if the results work out and papers go out quickly. The rest ist largely up to the group of devs.

The initiative to build FOSS alternatives for the administration in Europe goes back years. In a nutshell: Corporate software is getting very expensive for the administration and poses security risks. As an alternative, FOSS Software is put together to replace the administrative systems. The reason there is so many news now is that the first Software bundles are being released and are coming online in databases.

To give that more context: The BundesMessenger is developed for secure communication in the German army (named Bundeswehr in German). So it’s most likely not only about cash but also about security. It’s e2e encrypted, can be federated to several locations, etc. Seems a smart move to me. Edit: Actually I’m mistaken. It’s for the whole public administration. Not only the army. Not sure how I got that impression. Argument holds, though. 🙈

For some reason I don’t find it very bizarre. I’d even speculate that a random human mind isn’t any less weird. Surly, the pathways of my thoughts are often very bizarre. 😅