Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects • Hacker News Board

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#151

Post by lectrick » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 5:36 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #41

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, ha…

irccloud.com (disclaimer: I'm a subscriber) addresses a number of the deficiencies of standard IRC.

A lot of the other deficiencies are a consequence of any decentralized, open resource, due to "tragedy of the commons" effects. Those will always require active admin participation to resolve.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#152

Post by res0nat0r » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 5:37 PM UTC

astazangasta wrote: post #149

KirinDave wrote: post #130

If IRC were good enough to handle the needs of small software company communication, people would use IRC . Sitting here pretending everyone just doesn't know about a 20+ year old technology is comical. The "IRC Features" section bugs me, too. Unless you run a private IRC server IRC has a long, tortured history of design-based security difficulties. Gone are the days of netsplits permanently owning channels, but the…

>Unless you run a private IRC server IRC has a long, tortured history of design-based security difficulties. So run a private IRC server? This is a weird caveat, like complaining that angelfire is an insufficient web platform and you have to run your own http server to do well. There are a billion IRC clients, libraries, and bots out there. There are IRC servers in most distros. There are JS servers in NPM. Why not u…

Companies are using Slack because they explicitly don't want to have to deal with this and would rather someone else take care of their chat infrastructure, and with more features.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#153

Post by rando289 » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 5:38 PM UTC

KirinDave wrote: post #130

If IRC were good enough to handle the needs of small software company communication, people would use IRC . Sitting here pretending everyone just doesn't know about a 20+ year old technology is comical. The "IRC Features" section bugs me, too. Unless you run a private IRC server IRC has a long, tortured history of design-based security difficulties. Gone are the days of netsplits permanently owning channels, but the…

> If IRC were good enough to handle the needs of small software company communication, people would use IRC.

Given A and B, if A were good enough, people would use A... What if B is better? What if both are good enough?

You go on as if your first sentence stands up on it's own. It makes no sense at all.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#154

Post by simias » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 5:38 PM UTC

KirinDave wrote: post #130

If IRC were good enough to handle the needs of small software company communication, people would use IRC . Sitting here pretending everyone just doesn't know about a 20+ year old technology is comical. The "IRC Features" section bugs me, too. Unless you run a private IRC server IRC has a long, tortured history of design-based security difficulties. Gone are the days of netsplits permanently owning channels, but the…

IRC is used by many projects small and big and I've used it in a few companies as well, it's not like it's an absurd concept.

I don't know if Slack is better or worse (I've never used it, I thought the title was talking about Slackware linux which seemed odd) but you draw a much bleaker portrait of IRC than what I experience day to day using it extensively.

Now if you want to talk about mailing lists I might side with you...

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#155

Post by jgalt212 » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 5:38 PM UTC

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.

> another closed-source, proprietary, walled-garden service and hand over all of our private intra-company communications to a private third-party

Amen to that. Our company yet to transition away from using Salesforce, but we greatly restrict its use for the reasons above, and one day will move completely away from it.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#156

Post by bdcravens » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 5:39 PM UTC

And yet the author links to his Github profile.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#157

Post by lectrick » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 5:39 PM UTC

ash wrote: post #69

Some open source self-hosted alternatives to Slack: * Rocket.Chat ( https://rocket.chat/ ) * Zulip ( https://zulip.org/ ) * Mattermost ( http://www.mattermost.org/ ) * Let's Chat ( http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/ ) Oh, and by the way, you could have your own Rocket.Chat instance running in Sandstorm in about 30 seconds: https://sandstorm.io/apps Update. And I would love to see a modern federated chat protocol…

Matrix looks interesting!

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#158

Post by bitJericho » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 5:40 PM UTC

vjeux wrote: post #135

ve55 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct, I understand why most people don't want that, and thus also why Slack is so hugely popular. I'm primarily thinking about technical people who actually do want this (such as what's referred to in the article, people working on open source projects or who otherwise require things not offered by slack).

You underestimate how much effort it is to mantain a service running. I setup a irc logger for React and it would go down every other week, I was pinged at random times by people saying it was down and either needed to drop everything I was doing to fix it or let it be broken for a while. I want to spend my time working on React, not be a sysadmin for the irc bot. I switched to botbot.me and it's been always up and w…

Services went down for me sometimes on a private IRC server. I setup a cron to check for failure and start if needed. Took 10 minutes.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#159

Post by cillian64 » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 5:40 PM UTC

jarek wrote: post #125

tw04 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's that it never gained a groundswell in the US. In Europe, and I can think of sweden and norway in particular, there were all sorts of completely technically illiterate people on IRC. Their friends just showed them how to download the client and connect.

Yeah, nothing about IRC is intrinsically difficult . There's some things that are much easier on Slack, like archive search, but how many people actually use that? If you tell people something is hard to use, they'll believe you. If you tell them how to use something, they'll use it...

The really big thing for me is persistence. If you want your client to stay online when you are not, things get very painful. Bouncers are a pain to setup, command-line IRC clients are awful, and I've seen countless people horribly confused by screen and tmux.

With slack, persistence comes for free. The only thing I've seen that comes close is irccloud, which is in my opinion an excellent competitor to slack. In the end my organisation went with slack because it's nice to have everything grouped and billed to the organisation, as well as being even simpler for end users to join.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#160

Post by jedberg » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 5:40 PM UTC

This is the perfect counter example to "Open source is better". IRC has been around for 20+ years. But a company that is just a few years old blows it away feature-wise. Sure, you can do all the same stuff in IRC, but look right at the article for why you wouldn't. The answer to every "missing feature" in IRC is to install some extra software and then maintain it.

I'm don't want to waste time doing that, I've got products to build and maintain.

The closed source option is better because they have a financial incentive to keep it that way. And I'm happy to pay for that because it saves me time and lets me work on things for my customers instead of myself.

I'm a huge fan of open source and used to be a zealot about using open source to run my business. But I've started to see the light in my old age.