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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

#301

Post by enraged_camel »

mempko wrote: post #273
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…

> In many cases, things are popular because they are better/easier for a given audience. Which is the horse and which is the cart? Slack is easy because it got resources to be easy. Those same resource could have invested time to make IRC just as easy. There is no inherent reason why IRC cannot be just as simple. The reason slack is popular is because it got pushed hard and lots of money went into making it easy and…

This is like saying Apple products are popular because Apple has a great marketing team, as opposed to because said products are genuinely easier to use (they "just work") than their alternatives.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#302

Post by nickysielicki »

simias wrote: post #154
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 wit…

What people here aren't getting is that IRC and a listserv aren't still used because they have the most features or are the most brilliantly designed pieces of software for the job, it's the best because it's a standard.

I have IRSSI always running in a remote screen session. I read many mailing lists. It's not just my personal preference, it's part of my workflow. When I hit a problem, my immediate reaction after consulting the docs or google is to ask a question on a relevant IRC channel or hit up a mailing list. I don't think I'm the only one that works like this, either.

So asking me to use hipsterchat or slack or gitter or trello or whatever means another another client, and not one that's going to replace my other client, but in addition to it. That's not good. If it had some amazing features other than emoji and fluff, I'd be open to it. But they really don't. People get work done with IRC and a listserv, and that's all that matters.

Let's be honest, Trello and Slack have taken off because young developers aren't familiar with this system and are taking to a new one. And maybe in a few years they will become the norm and my argument will no longer be valid because my workflow will change.

But until that point comes, I agree wholeheartedly that it's a bad choice for FOSS communities, on top of the fact that these are paid services and you're locked out of control of your communications if they decide it's better for their bottom line. That alone seems antithetical to the idea of free software.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#303

Post by nickysielicki »

tptacek wrote: post #252
donatj wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your company puts private information on a server that has a 6667/tcp sitting out on the Internet? I'm guessing it does not, and setting this server up was considerably more irritating than just spawning off another t1.micro and apt installing IRC onto it.

So put in an iptables rule that restricts it to their network and make people remote in to use their client. Done and done.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#304

Post by KirinDave »

rhizome wrote: post #278
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'm thinking a huge part of the difference between Slack and IRC audiences has to do with the $340MM Slack has raised. If someone gave "IRC" a quarter of a billion dollars, the differences might not be so obvious.

How do we even measure the value that had been donated to various irc technical efforts over the last 26 years? Millions if dollars in person-hours is probably not unfair to imagine.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#305

Post by lmm »

mbillie1 wrote: post #207
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. 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.

In a free market with well-informed participants, argument from popularity is entirely legitimate.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#306

Post by KirinDave »

mempko wrote: post #273
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…

> In many cases, things are popular because they are better/easier for a given audience. Which is the horse and which is the cart? Slack is easy because it got resources to be easy. Those same resource could have invested time to make IRC just as easy. There is no inherent reason why IRC cannot be just as simple. The reason slack is popular is because it got pushed hard and lots of money went into making it easy and…

It seems very unfair to the thousands of people who have donated time, money, and services to IRC over its life span to dismiss it as not having gotten value.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#307

Post by thegeekpirate »

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.

Slack has 1.1 million users _total_ (http://www.fastcompany.com/3047819/with-over-1-million-users...), meanwhile Twitch uses IRC, and has ~3.3 million per day alone (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/29/twitchs-viewers-reach...), using stats taken eleven months ago while more than doubling its monthly viewer numbers every year.

Freenode isn't the only network out there =)

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#308

Post by plorkyeran »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #296
tptacek wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC messages have CRLF message delimiters (and ASCII space field delimiters) and no quoting mechanism in the protocol. They're delivered over a long-lived synchronized TCP stream. Does it just happen that no 8-bit sequence people normally want to send on IRC ever manages to collide with 0D:0Ah? I haven't seen unicode messages on IRC channels, but I don't spend much time on IRC anymore, and so this is interesting new…

Yeah, IRC is generally UTF-8 with some Windows-1252 mixed in.

Shift-JIS is still the most common encoding for Japanese channels (but not being able to embed ODOA isn't an issue there either).

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#309

Post by stephenitis »

mbillie1 wrote: post #207
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. 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.

It is a open market of tools out there... if IRC fulfilled the need and developed features that people really wanted they would be there.

Why does gchat, snapchat, whatsapp, fb messenger exist if AIM had been fulfilling the need of the market?

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#310

Post by mgkimsal »

geggam wrote: post #276
mgkimsal wrote: post #162

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. 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 withi…

I think the meaning of "slightly technical" on hacker news should be a bit more than an enduser skillset. Technology isn't easy. Pretending it should be causes problems.

somewhat agreed, but I sort of think folks here get a bit insulated and have an inflated view of what "trivial" is. I've done a lot of sysadmin stuff for years, and web work for 20. Setting up an IRC server for me would not be 'trivial' either. Earlier this year I was told by several people that setting up an icecast server was 'trivial' too - anything but, ime.
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