Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 499 posts

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#41

Post by scrollaway »

emergentcypher wrote: post #26

Please for the love of god just don't use Slack. We have learned absolutely nothing. Let's all jump on the bandwagon of another closed-source, proprietary, walled-garden service and hand over all of our private intra-company communications to a private third-party in another country. GREAT IDEA.

Agreed, but with that said... IRC has serious issues, and dancing around them or pretending they're not there is not helping. I talk a bit about them here:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JeromeLeclanche/posts/icC6gDToB...

The reason Slack exists and can be so successful yet entirely proprietary is a symptom that IRC is not good enough and that has to be fixed. It is the manifestation of the papercuts we, IRC users, have been having for a long time now. (late edit: If you are interested in fixing this problem, email me, see my profile.)

There are very promising efforts on IRCv3 (http://ircv3.net/) ongoing. I hope they eventually go live to the bigger clients and networks so that we may actually have a good foss alternative to slack (and I don't mean something like Mattermost. Like SirCmpwn said some comments below, having one browser tab per project REALLY SUCKS when you contribute to a lot of projects. I'm in over 20 channels myself, and I do my best to keep that number low...).

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#43

Post by programminggeek »

IRC kind of sucks. The experience is worse. That's why people keep making these different tools - Campfire, HipChat, Slack.

It's not just a technical thing. It's an experience thing. IRC is technically fine, just way too nerdy to be main line of business software these days.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#45

Post by tabbott »

vonklaus wrote: post #33

It is reasonable to raise the point that building FOSS software while using a closed piece of software as a core tool bears consideration. However, I am 25 and largely missed the boat on irc. I decided to start using it ~1 year ago. It is hard to use, but we will look at that in a minute. Often, we assume people have as clear an idea of what we are talking about as we do. That is often not the case. Let's explore IRC…

It's worth mentioning that Zulip (https://zulip.org/) is a new open source option that has basically all the features IRC/Slack does. So using open source tools for open source development doesn't have to mean dealing with IRC's limitations.

(I'm one of the Zulip maintainers; happy to answer any questions about it).

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#46

Post by [deleted] »

emergentcypher wrote: post #26

Please for the love of god just don't use Slack. We have learned absolutely nothing. Let's all jump on the bandwagon of another closed-source, proprietary, walled-garden service and hand over all of our private intra-company communications to a private third-party in another country. GREAT IDEA.

[deleted]

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#47

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

shubhamjain wrote: post #15

> has only one client I haven't used Slack's Gateway feature [1] but it seems Slack does allow you to connect with standard IRC and XMPP protocols. [1]: https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connec...

It does but you lose a lot of little features that other people using Slack will expect you to have and be able to see/interact with.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#48

Post by chris_wot »

syaz1 wrote: post #37
userbinator wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's mainly because the learning curve is too big for non-technical/busy people Really? Does using Slack not require opening a client application and logging in, like just about every other realtime messaging platform? I know many "non-technical" people who use IRC.

As opposed to IRC's NickServ, ChanServ, and their variants depending on the server? Expired nick, exposed passwords due to insecure authentication mechanism, no standard client, and so many more I can cite. I love IRC and grew up with it. But don't compare it to Slack for technical knowledge requirement.

I thought SASL integration was pretty secure!

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#49

Post by Zeebrommer »

mynegation wrote: post #32

There is a chance to repeat git success story. Remember what happened? 1. Everyone uses cvs or svn. 2. Bitkeeper comes along with a good DVCS, gets adopted by Linux. 3. Linus rants about closedness of BK, reimplements it as git. 4. Git takes life on its own gets wildly popular and makes way for many awesome things such as github and gitlab. Replace svn by irc and bitkeeper with slack. Figure out the rest.

www.matrix.org?
Post reply on HN