91–100 of 499 posts
Most people don't use software because of the driving philosophy behind it — they use it because it solves a problem of theirs.
If a tool is the best one for the job, you should use it. And if Slack has a substantially better UI for communication, maybe developers of IRC clients should try to build a better UI rather than complain about adoption of Slack.
There are an increasing number of plausible FOSS alternatives to Slack out there like Zulip, Mattermost, LetsChat, RocketChat etc. Classic IRC simply doesn't compete in terms of the featureset, glossy clients and web-dev friendliness. However, most of the FOSS Slack clones miss one vital point: they just provide a random custom API to their clients which may not even be published. Despite being FOSS software they're not actually promoting Open Communication - they are just building yet more silos that fragment your conversation history and contacts/contactability even further. If you want to pick your own client, or pick your own server, or interoperate with other comms networks (other than naive bridging), you're generally out of luck.
This is why I personally believe it's vital to support open standards for communication like Matrix.org or XMPP or IRCv3, and build glossy clients and services on top, so that rather than being locked into a single server & client from any given project, we retain the freedom to pick the clients, servers, services and service providers that we want rather than being forced into using particular ones for particular communities. A good start would be for the Zulips and Mattermosts of this world to federate with Matrix or XMPP out of the box, even at the lowest-common-denominator functionality set, to support open communication rather than causing yet more fragmentation.
[Disclaimer: I work on Matrix.org]
Slack is a tool, like a debugger or IDE, which aren't all open source.
If you are working on a government project with secret clearance, then these issues make sense. Otherwise, the article feels like it has more of a "whippersnapper" message.
I just also want to make the argument that github is a walled garden, so is google code. They're proprietary systems that we're able to use and take advantage of. I use github and I love it, but it can still have the same potential issues as slack.
All that being said, I've personally been doing more things on a private git server and less things on GitHub.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of the better reasons for opting for open-source alternatives to new technologies. If you have a single person that is even slightly technical, it should be trivial to set up your own IRC server, and then you get complete control over all of your own information. Even with that, you still can choose from a multitude of servers, services, clients, bots, client scripts, bouncers, and so on. Anything common…
Good luck pretending than "setting-up your own IRC server" is easier than not having to care about such a thing, and that most people really enjoy to have to "choose from a multitude of servers, services, clients, bots, client scripts, bouncers, and myriad of bots" instead of just going to https://slack.com/downloads The article does not even discuss the fact that projects that opened a slack community with a big inc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, ha…
Freenode sometimes does get a lot of abuse, which is a shame. Some networks definitely do have better anti-spam and anti-botnet functionality, but I don't think most users ever even notice this. Even on Freenode, most channels will go without problems like botnets or channel takeovers for most or all of their life. If you're running your own irc server, you'll probably never notice anything. If you do, it's as simple…
is there a way for me to, instead of using a server password, use something like OAuth so that I can grant access to the server based on my companies central login database? otherwise, every time someone leaves the project, we have to rotate the server password...
I just also want to make the argument that github is a walled garden, so is google code. They're proprietary systems that we're able to use and take advantage of. I use github and I love it, but it can still have the same potential issues as slack.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Freenode sometimes does get a lot of abuse, which is a shame. Some networks definitely do have better anti-spam and anti-botnet functionality, but I don't think most users ever even notice this. Even on Freenode, most channels will go without problems like botnets or channel takeovers for most or all of their life. If you're running your own irc server, you'll probably never notice anything. If you do, it's as simple…
> it's as simple as adding a server password is there a way for me to, instead of using a server password, use something like OAuth so that I can grant access to the server based on my companies central login database? otherwise, every time someone leaves the project, we have to rotate the server password...