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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

#321

Post by dijit »

tptacek wrote: post #293
rhizome wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you gave "IRC" a quarter of a billion dollars, we'd have the world's most complex ncurses UI, and a security ACL system whose complexity would rival X509. And normal people would still use Slack, because Slack was able to make simple design decisions that benefit the overwhelming majority of users but piss off Unix nerds like us.

don't be naive, IRC was the simplest solution to a problem 25~ years ago, now systems have changed and things must be thrown away.

that's just the nature of the beast, x.509 is also very old- but old things should be fixed or replaced with better alternatives, slack just fixes a usability problem.. but trades all privacy and freedom for that.

Personally it's not enough, but google has a massive market share because normal people do not consider that their data or freedom has any worth.

at least google is pro-free market in the way that you can extract data out later and migrate, I don't see slack being able to offer that reasonably. (or their incentive to allow it)

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#322

Post by njharman »

briandear wrote: post #210
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…

Not sure why I would want to self host what is effectively a phone system. I have actual products to build. We could ease time self hosting source control as well -- to what end? I have members of the team spending time (and thus money) setting up something that pleases people philosophically but really adds zero value -- in fact, it actually costs money (through very expensive developer time.) I don't get the point…

> Not sure why I would want to self host what is effectively a phone system.

Because you work in an industry were security matters. Such as banking, healthcare, government, government contracting, or any business with more than a couple hundred folks.

Because you provide support and want to customize / integrate that with rest of your data/systems to provide superior service to customers.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#323

Post by sdegutis »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #168
sdegutis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

By "battle-tested" I meant it has lots of patches/updates to the protocol to protect against certain kinds of attacks. Any new protocol would have to go through the same "battle-testing" before it would be reliable enough.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#324

Post by jsprogrammer »

KirinDave wrote: post #227
jsprogrammer wrote: post #223

>That the reasoning is fallacious doesn't make the conclusion incorrect. This is trivially true by the [material implication, modus ponens, modus tollens, other name, etc] truth table. However, if you study the truth table a bit longer, you will realize that you should stop reading any text which contains fallacious or self-contradictory logic. While the conclusion may be "correct", it is correct despite all of the o…

Indeed. So if someone doesn't actually make a claim, but then another party begins to rebut said claim as if it were part of a formal argument, that's called a Straw Man Argument or "Burning a straw man" colloquially. That's what you're doing. We should identify it, target it, and destroy it. Actually I don't really think that it should be destroyed. It's human nature. We find any post-facto justifications for our gu…

It should be logically destroyed; the full path of destruction should be visible to all though.

You have claimed a Straw Man, but in my 20 second analysis, I do not believe you have identified it. (as in, quote the actual text containing the Straw Man)

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#325

Post by mbrock »

tptacek wrote: post #251

If you don't want to use Slack for open source projects because it's closed-source, fine. That's a reasonable argument. If you don't want to use Slack for open source projects because Slack is in fact pretty bad at those workloads, fine. I agree! I think Slack does a pretty bad job at any group application where most of the people communicating don't already know each other. Where you go off the rails is in suggestin…

"Awful" technologies can still be fulfilling.

I mean... Hacker News is pretty "awful."

Maybe the things that you claim make IRC "awful" actually have weird benefits in terms of community. Kind of like how HN is kept intentionally awful, to keep out the losers or whatever.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#326

Post by dijit »

KirinDave wrote: post #233
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.

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.

how very sarcastic of you.

This is the realm of systems administrators, if you can't read a 20 line config file then sure, run slack..

but for a biggish company that values security and publishes NDA's like mine, an IRC server is a better solution.

however, Project Managers fucking -love- emoji and sending word documents across the planet.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#327

Post by dijit »

notwedtm wrote: post #249
Hello71 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This whole response reads like it was written in the 90's. Most people don't care if something takes up 10's of MB's of RAM when new PC's are shipping with 16-32GB standard. Your comparison of what amounts to ASCII art versus Slack's rich-media embedding reads like it is straight out of a Fortran developer's "I'm still relevant" handbook. You even offer up AOL and ICQ as counter examples! If we're going there, I gues…

people will care when things consume memory when you consider that chrome takes 2G by itself, xcode/VS take on average 2-4G on-top.

everyone thinks memory is free but machines are still shipping with 8G in the mid-high end.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#328

Post by [deleted] »

mike_hearn wrote: post #250
netcan wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree, though I'm not sure financial incentive is the reason. Open source has really shown that financial incentive is (A) complex and (B) not the only thing that motivates people. If you look at open and closed source across a lot of categories, I think it's more common to see OS "win" where the product is more objective. When it come to more subjective problems like UX, it seems to be more difficult. If…

What you're trying to say is that open source works best when there's little or no design work involved and little or no product vision required. Linux is a canonical example: it's simply a clone, design wise, of a plain old UNIX. The product vision was "copy UNIX". Where the wheels fell off Linux is the moment it got ahead of the UNIX legacy (i.e. modern desktops) and started having to compete with Windows, so sudde…

[deleted]

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#329

Post by antidaily »

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

No one's arguing against using it for your company. Ok, the article is for some reason, but that doesn't invalidate the main point.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#330

Post by seanmcdirmid »

njharman wrote: post #319
enraged_camel wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that is why Apple is so popular. They are a marketing monster! They sell a "lifestyle" and they do it extremely well. They tell you to "Think Different" (as long as it means buying an apple product). They tell you one button is easy and the best. They tell people what to think and (some) people think that.

Yet they spend less on marketing then most major tech companies. One could just argue they spend their marketing budget well, but you have to wonder.
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