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Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

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Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#161

Post by lectrick »

jerrac wrote: post #138
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…

I actively avoided IRC for years. I still avoid it whenever possible. And I've been developing and sysadmining for the web for more than 10 years now. Frankly, it boils down to that I just don't like it. I'm more interested in getting better at programming, or learning about containers, or some other useful thing, than trying to figure out IRC's odd interface. Chat isn't something I should have to think about. It sho…

You can master IRC with a few basic commands. In fact I rarely have to use anything more than /join, /leave and /msg . /me for announcing an action. That's about it.

(It probably helps that a lot of in-game chat interfaces use a lot of these same commands, as I'm a gamer as well as a programmer.)

There's a pretty nice web interface to IRC called irccloud.com which also persists your connection (so you can simply log onto irccloud.com somewhere else, and entire history is preserved).

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#162

Post by mgkimsal »

ve55 wrote: post #64
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.

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…

> 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.

That's a pretty narrow view of 'slightly technical'.

These days, we've got generations of people who can manage their own email account setup, install web apps and mysql databases, configure zapier to connect multiple apps together within a few minutes. I know dozens of people who do things like this all day long for their clients.

I'd call all these people more than "slightly technical", but there's no way on earth they'd be qualified to set up and administer an IRC server.

You need far more than "slightly technical". "Slightly technical" sets you up for disaster. And... it's not 'trivial' to understand what's going on and how to manage it.

I agree, though, it should be trivial. It's just not.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#163

Post by vjeux »

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 usage stats are really bad. Steady decline from 1 million users in 2003 to 400k in 2012. In a time where we're talking about communication apps with hundreds of millions of users, not even having a million is pretty telling to me.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/24/irc-is-dead-long-live-ir...

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#164

Post by GPGPU »

This is a silly argument. You can extend it to "Please don't use cellphones for FOSS projects" because some big evil Corporation owns your cellphone company and your cellphone isn't "open source." And certainly don't drive your car, which contains hundreds of patented items and closed source software to your FOSS programming job! And don't let anyone with a pacemaker or hearing aid work on your project either! There's closed source software in that!

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#165

Post by tabbott »

brazzledazzle wrote: post #81
tabbott wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I've been meaning to give Zulip a try. How many users can it handle? Less importantly: What would you say its biggest missing feature is vs Slack? And conversely what does it bring to the table that Slack can't touch yet?

Other answers address the big user experience advantages (e.g. threading) that it has over Slack, but there's a bunch of smaller features we have that I don't think Slack does (e.g. you can configure regular expressions to automatically linkify patterns like T123 to link to your bug/ticket tracker).

In terms of features Slack has that Zulip doesn't, I think the biggest ones are features that Zulip has today on zulip.com (which isn't taking new users) but you can't easily setup for your own Zulip server (e.g. the Android app doesn't support talking to a custom server without patching it yourself, mobile push notifications aren't available with your own server, etc.). Contributions on those things are welcome -- they're all relatively easy problems for someone with some mobile experience.

In terms of features that aren't just missing configuration in the run-your-own-server model, I'd say the biggest one is that Slack has a really slick onboarding experience and it has more slick integrations. It's hard to compete on onboarding with a company with like a hundred engineers, but I don't see the integrations piece as being a long-term advantage for Slack -- they're easy to write and I expect the open source community to produce a lot of them for Zulip over time.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#166

Post by BoxFour »

detaro wrote: post #118
BoxFour wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehh, as someone your age (a couple years younger even), I have a completely different take on IRC. It's incredibly intuitive because it's so similar to all the other chat clients we grew up with (presumably because they're based on IRC). Sure, figuring out bouncers and build bots is a little tricky at first, but so what? That's the fun part. It's kinda fun digging into the IRC protocol and figuring out how it works.…

Same age group: Which chat systems were similar to IRC, but not to Slack, outside of IRC clients? And just because someone doesn't want to spend the time fiddling with IRC bouncers, IRC bots, getting clients to display things nicely doesn't mean that they are a bad developer. Just that they have different priorities for their time than you. I'm not saying that Slack is perfect or frictionless, but neither is IRC. And…

> Which chat systems were similar to IRC, but not to Slack, outside of IRC clients?

Slack is very similar to IRC at its core, so I'm not sure I see what you're asking here. I meant that IRC isn't foreign or alien to anyone who's familiar with chat clients - the basic concept of servers and channels and nicknames is pretty universal.

> And just because someone doesn't want to spend the time fiddling with IRC bouncers, IRC bots, getting clients to display things nicely doesn't mean that they are a bad developer.

I feel like I covered this point already:

> And ok, if that's not fun for you, there are plenty of really "click and install" tools for you (e.g. ZNC is super easy to setup).

> And especially if you don't do it all the time, getting people set up to work with Slack is way easier than IRC.

What are you referring to here by "getting people setup"? Like a corporate environment? It's fairly easy to setup bouncers and the like in a corporate environment using tools like chef, etc. I really don't feel like this is a strong argument for a corporate setting.

If you mean on a personal level for individual contributors to get up and running on contributing to FOSS, sure it's not 100% frictionless - but pretty much. Again, there are lots of bouncers that can be setup with If the argument is that it takes an extra ten minutes to install ZNC vs. Slack, then I dunno - I guess I don't see that as very much friction when the tradeoff is using non-free software.

> I really find these discussions half amusing and half depressing

I feel the same way, but for different reasons. It's a little depressing to me how averse people are to spending 10 extra minutes to use FOSS, usually under the guise of "I have different priorities." I thought developers in the wild would at least be slightly more willing to invest the time, especially post-Snowden, to use FOSS. I guess that was just a college pipe-dream of mine.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#167

Post by incepted »

I understand the urge of certain people to fight Slack but if you think irc is a legitimate alternative, you probably don't understand the problem enough to offer a suggestion.

More credible alternatives would be Hipchat or Gitter but anyone who has used these two tools know that they are still way, way behind Slack in functionalities and user friendliness.

Slack is succeeding because it's a great tool.

Want to beat it? Create a better tool and people will migrate to it for its merits, not because it's open source.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#168

Post by CamperBob2 »

sdegutis wrote: post #104
ChuckMcM wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really resonate with this position. IRC is open source and it has had problems FOR DECADES. IM programs from third parties add genuinely useful features which people clearly want. So rather than call for a general boycott of Slack (a negative approach) why not call to fix IRC?

IRC is just a well-established and battle-tested server/client protocol. I'm eager for the day when a competing open source server/client protocol emerges and takes over. I imagine all it would take is a really good reference implementation server and client that everyone can just start using, right?

IRC is just a well-established and battle-tested server/client protocol.

Every time it loses another user to a proprietary platform, it loses another battle. Is that what "battle-tested" means?

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#169

Post by BoxFour »

andreyf wrote: post #142
BoxFour wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehh, as someone your age (a couple years younger even), I have a completely different take on IRC. It's incredibly intuitive because it's so similar to all the other chat clients we grew up with (presumably because they're based on IRC). Sure, figuring out bouncers and build bots is a little tricky at first, but so what? That's the fun part. It's kinda fun digging into the IRC protocol and figuring out how it works.…

I don't think you sound like an elitist prick, but rather the kind of person that enjoys tinkering with technology for fun. Perhaps unfortunately, this view is no longer representative of most people working in technology, and definitely not all of the users of Slack.

I think that's true, but I also think it's a little silly to contribute to FOSS but be unwilling to spend the extra time to use FOSS.

I guess it's kinda just sad to me that you'd be unwilling to spend the time to use FOSS while you're contributing to FOSS. If it was incredibly costly, sure, but IRC? I dunno.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#170

Post by heavenlyhash »

Come to the Matrix! [1]

- Open! Free on both the beer|culture axis!

- Modern! (There's actually control structures in the protocol. Imagine: a chat protocol that's actually ascii safe! (Yes, yes, unicode too: the joke is, IRC isn't even ascii safe.))

- Many platforms! (The matrix.org site has a full client list; I'm personally using it via a linux desktop client (that also works on windows and mac), the web, my ipad, and my android phone.)

- IRC bridged. (I use it constantly in this mode. It's a better IRC experience than any other IRC client I've used, honestly. Even in rooms with 100s/1000s of people. Consistent logs, instantly accessible from multiple computers/clients, no need to set up bouncers, and so on.)

- File uploads, images, videos. All of it. A friend streamed me a video from his halloween party last night via the Matrix client on his iPhone. It worked.

- Did I mention it even supports webRTC? That's right: it's also a completely functional skype replacement. (Yes, pending your browser's support and all that jazz: that said, it's a more complete product than most of the other webRTC demos floating out there.)

The entire protocol is just... good. On the nerdier deep end of things: It's the first federated chat standard I've seen proposed that actually has reasonable message IDs baked in and loose timing systems that's both available during a partition and can reach consistency afterward (messages list their last-seen messages, and so act like vector clocks, an accepted good solution to problems in CAP territory). You could actually take two systems with clock skew and have them reach a single, reconciled view of the world, even after netsplits. Compared to IRC (or XMPP) this is either magical or a deep relief, or both.

I discovered Matrix while I was in the process of writing a chat client of my own for XMPP. I abandoned the project (and XMPP, as well, though that's a subject all its own [2]). Matrix already did everything I ever wanted. Really, really well.

Not affiliated; just a happy user who's never found any better platform for communicating openly.

---

[1] https://matrix.org | https://vector.im

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772968

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