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Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

drewdevault.com

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Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#231

Post by morgante »

jarek wrote: post #216
morgante wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I'm "slightly" technical and I have absolutely no interest in setting up an IRC server for my project or company. That's time better spent on developing our offerings. While I have no doubt I could set up a server, I also have no doubt t…

Sure, but ve55 said "trivial", not "interesting" or "worth the time." It just means that you value your data and its ownership a certain way and your time a certain way. Also note that a for-profit company will have that balance in a different spot than a FOSS project.

To be clear, I don't think it is "trivial." I am technical and I definitely don't think setting up and maintaining a usable IRC server is trivial.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#232

Post by davexunit »

Completely agree! I see free software projects depend on proprietary tools all the time and it is very frustrating. I often see projects using JIRA or asking companies like JetBrains for gratis licenses to proprietary development tools, and now I'm seeing Slack more frequently. I will not participate in your free software project if you depend on SaaSS or proprietary software to get work done.

The company I work for uses Slack, and luckily there is an IRC bridge to connect to so I can keep my workflow in Emacs rather than having to use a clunky web interface, but there are many special Slack things that they don't render correctly in plain text form so I feel like a second-class citizen. If this is the future of text-based communication, I don't want to participate.

I like IRC. I like that things aren't centrally logged by default. I like the bots that I've been interacting with for many years (that I find to be better than whatever Slack bot I've come across, by the way.) I like Freenode as an IRC network. I like the variety of clients available (I prefer ERC, a client written in Emacs Lisp.) Could we use some sexy web clients to get less technical people on board? Sure! Should we use a proprietary, centralized, surveillance system until someone else fixes IRC issues for us? No way! We must reject Slack because it isn't a tool for the people, but a tool for profit.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#233

Post by KirinDave »

donatj wrote: post #187
astazangasta wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

My company runs our own private IRC server on an EC2 instance and once it was set up I don't believe we've needed to touch it since.

How very lucky of you.

I hope you have a repeatable provision, AMI, static IP linked to a tcp loadbalancer and autoscaling group in the event AWS rotates out your instance.

And of course, the same goes for your logging and search and file sharing infrastructure. And of course, similar caveats exist for the database said features use.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#234

Post by tptacek »

Hello71 wrote: post #203
harryh wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until very recently Slack had spent essentially nothing on marketing. It spread because, in the words of pg, they built something people want.

alright, then replace "marketing" with "pretty pictures and rounded corners".

Isn't this roughly what people used to say about Apple?

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#235

Post by lojack »

Hello71 wrote: post #196
orofino wrote: post #136

Allow me to shout into the void for a minute here... 1. Slack is a well-designed interface for allowing teams to communicate via chat. 2. Slack is easy to install is use on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. It Just Works™. 3. Slack doesn't require me to install IRC somewhere. Which also means I don't have to worry about how people gain connectivity to said server when outside the office. 4. Slack has whimsy. Fun colors, mes…

> 1. Slack is a well-designed interface for allowing teams to communicate via chat. subjective. I consider a bloated web interface taking several tens to hundreds of megabytes of RAM compared to a text-based interface taking less than 100 kB to be poorly designed. > 2. Slack is easy to install is use on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. It Just Works™. spelled wrong, and IRC clients are harder to configure only because ther…

Most non-technical users don't care how much memory their chat client takes up as long as it works. They also don't care what server they need to connect to as long as they can communicate with the people they need to — less is more in this case.

Slack has its fair share of flaws but design and ease of use are not among them.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#236

Post by tptacek »

spdustin wrote: post #211
mbillie1 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I'd just like to point out that this argument ("if were so great, everyone would already use/do ") is just a slightly different form of the ancient appeal to popularity argument and is entirely fallacious.

Respectfully, I disagree. In many cases, things are popular because they are better/easier for a given audience. I'm a smart guy, have managed (and continue to manage) many, many UNIX-based services, and have run several IRC daemons in my life. I still use Slack for internal use, and for our students. What makes Slack (and its ilk, though the title of the post makes a bias against Slack clear) so great is that it's s…

I don't think you're going to find evidence for the argument that IRC is more popular than Slack. IRC's user base is declining, Slack's is growing, and the numbers we have now suggest that Slack is already much more popular.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#237

Post by KirinDave »

tptacek wrote: post #236
spdustin wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, I disagree. In many cases, things are popular because they are better/easier for a given audience. I'm a smart guy, have managed (and continue to manage) many, many UNIX-based services, and have run several IRC daemons in my life. I still use Slack for internal use, and for our students. What makes Slack (and its ilk, though the title of the post makes a bias against Slack clear) so great is that it's s…

I don't think you're going to find evidence for the argument that IRC is more popular than Slack. IRC's user base is declining, Slack's is growing, and the numbers we have now suggest that Slack is already much more popular.

But back before the WWW saw non-trivial deployment, IRC was the #1 use of bandwidth on the internet! Something from the 90's must still be true today!

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#238

Post by KirinDave »

rando289 wrote: post #153
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.

It's an observation in the context of the article in question, not a statement in an argument, you buffoon.

The article acts as if we just don't know the "benefits" of IRC and then proceeds to list a bunch of very questionable benefits.

I know all about IRC. I think it's a tire fire that won't go out. Sort of like perl, UNIX signal handlers, and systrace.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#239

Post by Sanddancer »

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.

Not only is there IRC, which many people have talked about, there is also chat over XMPP, which is how I prefer to use slack. The alternatives are worse in connectability, because they restrict you to one narrow range of clients and protocols, instead of letting you choose the right client for the job at hand. People use services like slack because they don't want to have to give a shit about communications, they just have something that works.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#240

Post by KirinDave »

Hello71 wrote: post #188
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…

> Oh, and did you know that with modest, low volume channels (>200 source? or at least names of networks/IRCds? freenode at least has 19 channels with more than 1000 users currently, and one with just barely more than 2000. ##linux 2072 :It's official! We're now Linux.Chat! | Channel website: http://linux.chat | Pastebin: http://paste.linux.chat | Spammers or trolls? use !ops ". | For op assistance, join ##linux-ops…

We nearly broke EsperNet with about 500 users which were proxies into Minecraft servers. We used a Minecraft mod called EiraIRC. The constant connection and traffic from these users required a fair amount of interaction and management between us and the staff. And Espernet is not a small network by IRC standards.

The problem is that all traffic has to be carried to all nodes brokering connections for a channel. When you have a LOT of traffic this gets onerous.

You CAN scale these channels. But it requires some experience and most people never even consider that there might need to be action taken. The Freenode admins know what they're doing, and I respect them enormously for keeping freenode as responsive as it is on what amounts of a 25 year old, bad implementation of a distributed algorithm.

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