
Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects - ipozgaj
https://drewdevault.com/2015/11/01/Please-stop-using-slack.html
======
publicfig
It's really difficult for me to take this point seriously if the only proposed
alternative is IRC. I understand the benefits of IRC for FOSS and have used it
many times in the past, but there's a reason why projects are adopting Slack
over IRC. It's easier to use, it deals with on/offline states a lot more
gracefully, it allows joining and inviting to rooms much easier, it has a
clean and easy to use design and it's available pretty much anywhere using the
same interface without having to install a client through their web interface
(which is the exact same as their app interface). Along side that, there are
hundreds of other minor to major features (File Sharing! Ticketing/build
integration! Link Previews! Editing a message after it's sent!!!) that make it
much more useful for many use cases than IRC. I think there is definitely room
for competition with Slack for FOSS projects, but trying to pretend like IRC
is that ultimate solution will ignore the problem completely.

~~~
davexunit
When you, as a free software project maintainer, rely on proprietary software
for your infrastructure, you send a bad message of "I expect my free software
to be good enough for you, but your free software is not good enough for me."

A lot of the features you mention are better served by email, and I am
completely opposed to editing messages after they are sent (chat is append
only!) There are IRC bots for ticketing/build integration, and they were
around long before anyone used Slack!

But ultimately, even if Slack has more convenient features, we cannot rightly
use it because it doesn't respect our freedom. Centralized network services
are increasingly removing our control over how we communicate, and we _must_
reject them for our free software projects. The ethical _replacements_ (not
alternatives, because Slack cannot be considered as an option) aren't going to
get better if people aren't using them!

~~~
susi22
Linus Torvalds uses Google+ extensively to communicate.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Linus has never been like... a Stallman-esque bastion of software freedom
obsession.

~~~
ktRolster
Linus also spends a lot more time communicating via mailing list. Google+ is
like a side thing for him.

~~~
petepete
Yes, and his G+ posts are seldom Linux-related.

------
tyre
Things I care about:

\- User experience. In 2016, I'm not using the hacker's AIM to collaborate. I
know many people love it, but there are seriously better options. Syntax
highlighting inline and file attachments that Just Work are fantastic.

\- Product development. I want products I use to be continually improving. Not
yearly but weekly. If something breaks, I don't want to fix it because I'm not
here to build a chat program or manage one.

Things I don't care about:

\- Closed Source. A dedicated team paid to work on the product full time,
financially incentivized to expand the ecosystem is a major plus.

\- A walled garden. This sounds like the same as #1. Slack allows many
integration points, including chatbots that can be programmed to do anything.
I'm not sure it is that closed off.

There is a reason large teams collaborate over Slack as opposed to IRC. If IRC
filled people's needs, they would use it. It doesn't.

~~~
davidw
> \- Closed Source. A dedicated team paid to work on the product full time,
> financially incentivized to expand the ecosystem is a major plus.

> \- A walled garden. This sounds like the same as #1. Slack allows many
> integration points, including chatbots that can be programmed to do
> anything. I'm not sure it is that closed off.

Give it time. You'll come to realize that there are some good reasons - many
of them quite grounded in practicality - why those of us who have been around
for a while place some value on these things.

~~~
vulpino
Then name them.

I realize this sounds caustic, but to say "Well, you're wrong" without giving
adequate reasoning beyond "I've been around a while, so I know better"
contributes nothing to the discussion.

~~~
wstrange
Loss of message history for one.

Open Source projects can not afford to pay for archiving Slack messages. A lot
of important discussions will vanish.

~~~
Bjartr
If writing a bot is a reasonable solution for IRCs shortcomings, then writing
a Slack bot to do long term archiving of messages is also reasonable .

~~~
st3v3r
Slack's ToS specifically prevents doing that. Which, is reasonable, as if
that's what they're selling, how would they make any money?

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Author here. There's not much to say here that wasn't said last time, but here
are some retrospective thoughts on this post:

\- Probably would have come across better if I didn't pitch IRC as better than
Slack in general, but only that it's better for FOSS projects. This blog post
wasn't meant to shame Slack in general, even if it kind of did in the end.

\- Importantly, Slack has come out as saying that they don't want big public
projects to host themselves on Slack. It's really just not a good use-case for
Slack to put a FOSS project on it.

\- In hindsight, a lot of the FOSS-friendly alternatives (Matrix, Gitter, etc)
are quite good and I should have put more effort into researching them and
discussing them in my article.

It's probably too late to steer the discussion, but please remember that my
post addresses the use of Slack for _FOSS projects_ , not in general.

~~~
stephenitis
> Slack has come out as saying that they don't want big public projects to
> host themselves on Slack. It's really just not a good use-case for Slack to
> put a FOSS project on it.

I'm curious and need help finding a link to this source.

~~~
solicode
There might be better sources, but here are two that I know of:

[https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-...](https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-
is-moving-to-discord.html)

[http://blog.freecodecamp.com/2015/06/so-yeah-we-tried-
slack-...](http://blog.freecodecamp.com/2015/06/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-we-
deeply-regretted-it.html)

------
eddieroger
One problem that they failed to address in the Slack over IRC section is a
damn near non-existent barrier to entry. I've introduced people and small
teams to IRC. I've also introduced people to Slack. IRC is just different
enough, even when introduced to a team of technologists who grew on AIM and
the like. Consider the onboarding experience - I emailed someone a link to a
Slack channel, and before I heard back from them they'd signed up on my
account and, unsolicitedly, downloaded the mobile client and were chatting
with me. My setup time was nil, and there was no training. Sure, they could
have downloaded Colloquy to their Mac and iPhone, and entered the settings,
and hoped for the best, but I'm almost positive it wouldn't have gone so
smoothly. That doesn't even include time to configure a bouncer for
persistence. It's just anecdata, sure, but it counts for something, and helps
to explain Slack's explosive growth.

~~~
kuschku
That’s why things like IRCCloud or Quassel exist.

They can sign up with IRCCloud (or any quassel-as-a-service provider), and
instantly be online.

Webinterfaces, clients for all platforms, and bouncer is integrated.

Seriously, there are modern solutions for IRC, use them.

~~~
eddieroger
But why? Now I've got more than one set of accounts to manage, and sign up
for, and troubleshoot when things go awry. Slack solves that problem for me,
and they do it for free.

------
tptacek
Previous thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541)

~~~
baldfat
Still worth repeating USE IRC :)

~~~
underwater
IRC's time has passed. There's a reason that these alternatives are winning.

~~~
_cudgel
> There's a reason that these alternatives are winning.

Yes, and that reason is that the current crop of up-and-coming developers have
the same problem as past generations: They'd prefer to implement their own
solutions vs. looking to the past.

Slack just happens to be the current darling in group communication. At some
point, someone will make something that will change the fad-diet to The Next
Big Thing.

~~~
baldfat
And IRC will still be there :)

------
ltbarcly3
If you don't want to use Slack for FOSS projects then don't, but if you do, go
for it. This is what OSS is all about, Freedom, use what you think is right.
Diversity is good, maybe people leaving IRC will lead to innovations in IRC
that address it's 20 year old deficiencies that have never been addressed.

~~~
ipozgaj
OSS (as the name suggests) is about *openness", and that's exactly the point
where Slack is falling short and what the article is about.

~~~
mbrock
GitHub is also a proprietary walled garden, and it's pretty much the nexus of
open source today, much like SourceForge was before. At any given time there
seems to be a minority that really cares about open infrastructure while the
majority just wants convenient stuff on a free tier.

~~~
adamors
It's hardly a walled garden when you can take your entire repo (including
commit history etc.) and go to another provider or go with your own git
server.

~~~
mbrock
Sure it is. How do you get your issues and wiki into another Git server?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Wiki is something you should have a local copy of.

That said, GitHub wikis are just git repositories. You can clone them like
this:

[https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki-
pag...](https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki-pages-
locally/)

As for issues, it's only a little bit trickier - you'll have to use GitHub
API, like this:

[https://api.github.com/repos/hotsh/rstat.us/issues](https://api.github.com/repos/hotsh/rstat.us/issues)
(from [https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-export-backup-GitHub-
issues](https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-export-backup-GitHub-issues))

~~~
mbrock
I didn't know that. You still have the problem of mapping the user
authentication though. Moving a big repository and giving users the right
permissions seems pretty tricky. Do you know of any successful migrations away
from GitHub?

------
Kinnard
There's a Free and Open Source Alternative to Slack called Mattermost:
[http://www.mattermost.org/](http://www.mattermost.org/)

~~~
it33
Thanks for the mention! Mattermost team here, just to add, there's an option
to use Mattermost as an IRC server via:
[https://github.com/42wim/matterircd](https://github.com/42wim/matterircd)

So if part of your team wants to stay on IRC and part wants to use Mattermost
with file sharing and messaging across PC and phone, and integrate with
Mattermost apps ([http://www.mattermost.org/community-
applications/](http://www.mattermost.org/community-applications/)) all that is
available.

------
ultramancool
An additional option which is now available is to host your own Mattermost
server. GitLab has integration for it even.

IRC is still my preference, but it takes a fairly technical person to
appreciate it and host their own server. If you're catering to more general
people, having 1 technical person spin up Mattermost in docker might be a good
solution.

~~~
amyjess
Does Mattermost solve the last problem with Slack listed in the article? This
seems to be the single most important complaint. Anything that can be
described "hey, it's just like Slack, except it's FOSS" is still going to have
that problem.

Namely, is it still intended primarily for intra-team collaboration, or can it
handle communication with the public as well?

------
jeena
> Slack makes it so that you can see what you missed when you return. With
> IRC, you don’t have this. If you want it, you can set up an IRC bouncer like
> ZNC.

So perhaps I'm hoding it wrong, but I've been using ZNC for a couple of years
and every time I forget to close Xchat at work and people keep talking, I
can't see what they said on my phone or at home. Also I can't scroll up nor
search for stuff which were said in the past.

For me that is the biggest drawback with IRC.

A sensible alternative, which I also was able to push at work, is Mattermost
[http://www.mattermost.org/](http://www.mattermost.org/)

Although I would love to see us using [http://matrix.org/](http://matrix.org/)
but I don't expect our customers to install their own instance so we could
federate any time soon.

~~~
kuschku
> For me that is the biggest drawback with IRC.

Ever heard of Quassel?

An IRC bouncer where the client integrates with the bouncer – just scroll up
to load more backlog.

Disclaimer: Am working on Quassel.

~~~
jeena
Hm nope, never heard of it. Does it work on my Sailfish OS phone, my Linux
laptop and on my iMac?

~~~
yarrel
Yes.

~~~
jeena
I can't find the Sailfish OS version but it is C++ and Qt so it might be
possible to migrate.

------
shylor
Honestly, my group uses Discord
([http://discordapp.com](http://discordapp.com)) now. We love it. It replaces
IRC and Teamspeak for us. Plus, I can get a user on the service in 5 seconds
just by sending a link to them.

It is mostly used for gaming, but coding with it is just as great. There are a
lot of public servers also for all sorts of things.
([http://discord.me/servers](http://discord.me/servers)).

The voice is what we love it for, chat is awesome during the day when some of
us are not able to talk over voice.

~~~
bsimpson
React moved to Discord after being kicked off of Slack for having too large a
channel. The Discord folks welcomed them in as a supported use case.

If your biggest concern with Slack is the invite-by-email hack, try Discord.

~~~
ValentineC
I've been playing around with Discord, but it seems like it lacks search and a
proper API. I'm looking forward to its potential though!

------
smt88
Why not Mattermost?

[http://www.mattermost.org/](http://www.mattermost.org/)

------
omginternets
If this post were titled "Please don't use OS X for FOSS projects" nobody
would take it seriously. I'm struggling to see the difference ...

~~~
cyphar
Because projects don't force you to use OS X or Windows or whatever in order
to contact the maintainers. Using Slack exclusively does force people to do
that.

~~~
omginternets
So? If you need to contact the maintainers, you're using Slack already...

This is much ado about nothing.

------
mwfunk
Open source is a form of software licensing that lots of people develop and
use for lots of different reasons. That's it.

Everything else is politics and philosophy. Some people really get into the
very specific politics and the very specific philosophies of the FSF. What
they don't seem to get is that the FSF merely has one out of infinitely many
perspectives on why open source is important and what people should do about
it.

It's fine if someone wants to run an ideologically pure (per FSF criteria)
FOSS project, or not contribute to projects that don't meet their criteria for
ideological purity. Where it gets counterproductive is asserting that one
group's philosophy has some sort of primacy over the entirety of the FOSS
world. It gets especially dicey when that group claims moral superiority over
everyone else.

Instead of complaining about this or that FOSS project not being "true FOSS",
the FSF should define a set of standards and practices that go beyond mere
software licensing that DO meet their standards for ideological purity. Then a
project that wants to comply with the FSF have an easy way to state up front
that they are politically aligned with the FSF in every respect. Those who
care about such things can use that information to set their expectations
about how the project is run outside of the software licensing aspect. Maybe
it draws them to the project, maybe it drives them away, but at least no one
gets surprised and no mailing lists devolve into pointless political
flamewars.

That way no one gets disappointed (for example) when a project wants to use
Slack for communication, assuming that that project has not stated up front
that FSF-compliant ideological purity is a goal. Alternatively, if a
contributor to a self-declared FSF-compliant ideologically pure project wants
to use Slack, the other contributors to that project have grounds for denying
that on a purely philosophical basis. They can focus on maintaining their
standards for ideological purity rather than continually arguing over whether
or not FSF-compliant ideological purity itself is valid goal.

~~~
cyphar
"Open source" is a term that was created to subvert another political and
social movement (the free software movement). So, it's inherently political in
nature. You might see it as "only a license" but I would argue that is a
shallow way of looking at the problem. Only in the recent past has it become
possible to run a computer with only free software. Before then, users _HAD_
to use proprietary software. To claim that free software is nothing more than
a license is to ignore the fact that 30 years ago you couldn't use a personal
computer in freedom, that all users were slaves to IBM and the other
companies. This is a social and political issue, just like all of your other
freedoms are social and political issues.

But maybe you don't care about freedom. I'm not sure why, but you probably
have some shallow justification why "it doesn't matter for you".

------
jkot
Also free service has limit, so older messages will be eventually lost.

~~~
st3v3r
IRC out of the box has an even lower limit (0).

------
Bahamut
In my experience, I like IRC (been using it for ~10 years), but sometimes
there is a lot of noise. For example, the Angular.js IRC channel devolved into
a flood of bad questions with not enough information to help, and some
entitled users. Many in the Angular community ran away to Slack in response.
Code snippets aren't as nice either in IRC vs. Slack.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but IRC is lacking (and sometimes blocked
at workplaces) & Slack seems to solve most of the issues, but it not wanting
to support large open source communities is an issue as well. There is a hole
in tools available.

------
solicode
The fact that Slack has made it clear they don't intend to support large open
source projects is the biggest thing in my opinion. Reactiflux was basically
forced off Slack for getting too big. Other large communities like the
Clojurians Slack community will likely be forced off soon in the near future
too (some members of the community have begun discussing this and evaluating
alternatives). The Elixir Slack community is also similar in size, and I see
the same thing happening there eventually.

------
bovermyer
I'm not real keen on the Church of FOSS.

Don't get me wrong, I love a great many FOSS projects; but my entire life does
not need to be constructed of such. Posts like this smack of dogma and
fanaticism to me, and engender mistrust of whatever projects the person in
question is a part of. After all, if they're that dogmatic about one thing,
then what's to say they aren't dogmatic about other things?

~~~
habitue
The reason the dogma of Free Software exists is because often in day to day
decisions it's easy not to think about the long-term effects. Right now, you
have a neat chat tool. Maybe in 10 years, you have a problem where Slack has a
monopoly on all project chats, and abuses that power.

Today, you can look and see "Hey, Slack is a cool company. They get it. This
isn't Microsoft of the 90's. They aren't going to abuse this power, they just
want to make an amazing chat tool that improves all of our lives." (This is
probably true) So it seems like it's ok to use Slack. The idea is that maybe
this power corrupts eventually. Or maybe Slack as an entity may not always be
run by people who get it. Maybe it's broken up into parts, or becomes a hollow
shell as a holding company ( _cough_ Yahoo). Without an open platform and free
source code, users are unable to move away.

The dogma is a rule that brings the potential long-term consequences to you
when you're deciding what to do now. It gives you a twinge "Hmm, that feels
dirty because it's proprietary. I'll keep looking". That way you don't have to
imagine how Slack gets from Cool Company to Abusive Monopoly, you can just
make an easy choice based on how you feel.

~~~
bovermyer
I generally make my choices based on a balance of time/monetary cost, feature
set, user experience, service integrity (e.g., SLAs for proprietary software,
or difficulty of maintenance for self-hosted/OSS), and ease of migration in
the event of abandonment.

The choice I ultimately make is not always, or even often, open source. There
is no blanket "always choose this" guiding rule for me.

------
vortico
Projects can use [https://hack.chat](https://hack.chat), for which I am the
main developer. I am also working on an overhauled version (temporarily named
Libre Chat) supporting file transfers, mobile apps, channel subscriptions, and
chat history. Both are GPL, can be installed on your own server, and have
"official" hosted versions.

------
kaiizen
Weechat in tmux/screen with a bouncer is fantastic. Weechat has a ton of
scripts like highlight monitoring, filtering of join/part/quit that you can
customize for timeouts. Has a great support channel on freenode too.

If you're doing FOSS projects, you can probably get your way around a command
line enough to install and run both of these in a $3 VPS or even an AWS
instance.

------
e12e
On a related note, Debian annonced [1] a new unified communications in
November:

[https://wiki.debian.org/UnifiedCommunications/DebianDevelope...](https://wiki.debian.org/UnifiedCommunications/DebianDevelopers/UserGuide)

I'm not a DD, so can't comment on how well it works - but I've had it on my
todo-list s while to look at their real-world setup as inspiration.

[1] [https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-
announce/2015/11/msg00...](https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-
announce/2015/11/msg00000.html)

Previously submitted to hn, but didn't gain any traction:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10531061](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10531061)

------
fideloper
Those bullet point against slack are really common around here, but I've yet
to hear an explanation as to why they're a con.

Example: It's closed source.

Apparently that in itself is intrinsically "bad", and obviously so, because
I've yet to see any explanation attached to that argument.

~~~
jeena
You can't know what happens with the content you put in there.

~~~
zepto
What does that even mean? Surely the same is true for IRC, since anyone can be
running their own code for relays, bots, and clients.

~~~
yoo1I
The difference is that if freenet started to use my messages to #IluvCarrots
and sell them to the carrot industry, I could tell them to shov it and migrate
over to OFTC with little friction.

If Slack starts doing that, and I want to continue to use my client software
I'm pretty much screwed.

------
ChuckMcM
I appreciate the sentiment but the message is a bit weak. There are many
things that are "closed source" that we have to use to collaborate on FOSS, I
ride in closed source airplanes to get to conferences but I realize I could
use a Prarie Schooner that I built out of freely obtainable materials to get
there instead.

Ok perhaps that is a bit too harsh, but it is the essence of the argument. Its
easy to get an open source tool that replaces IRC and works like Slack, you
take $5M and you hire a half dozen engineers and a couple of designers and you
build a set of tools and then you give it away for free and never see your $5M
ever again. Welcome to the prisoner's dilemma, FOSS edition.

------
isaiahg
I have only one complaint of Slack. It should be much easier to find and join
open slack communities and switch between them.

I've used it for a small team before but we quickly finished what we were
doing and now it's dissolved. So I've been hearing awesome things about it and
how people are using it and I haven't really had a chance to try it out. I've
applied to join a few communities but I've never received a reply.

That process should be so much easier.

For open source projects or communities I think Discord fits the bill much
better. It allows you to take part in multiple communities in one interface
and you can use it without an official account.

------
jakejake
I've tried and failed many times to keep IRC in my workflow. I always wind up
opening it for a few days/weeks then eventually just kinda fizzle out.

My company installed slack and it was just like wildfire - the whole team was
on it instantly and never have looked back.

If there was a client + bot setup that would offer the same functionality out
of the box over IRC I'm sure we would have picked it up just as quickly. And I
would have liked to be on the irc channel for a few of my favorite OS projects
as well. But as far as I know, without there is no such setup?

------
superuser2
Jabber rooms seem like a pretty good idea. Lots of open source servers to
choose from. Is there a reason not to use them, other than relative obscurity?

------
rasengan
IRC is fine if you package it right. IRC is just a protocol anyway. Slack is
way more convenient versus IRC + etc. However, we can change that.

------
jscheel
A lot of the popular FOSS irc channels have devolved into rooms with thousands
of people there with nobody talking. Seriously, over the past few years, it
seems like people are still on IRC, but they just don't engage on it. I wonder
if that has to do with a lot of people becoming more used to other platforms
doing a better job of assisting in communication.

------
theaccordance
This comes off as a snobbish article IMO. I don't want to discredit the work
the author has done, but it's all over a communication tool, one that many of
us have adopted in other environments. Having open source projects on the same
platform as our other groups is simply a matter of convenience for the project
organizer.

~~~
elliotec
Yeah this guy needs to move on. He is welcome to hold on to IRC forever, as is
anyone, but Slack is obviously an extremely useful, popular, and effective
communication tool for open source projects as well as just about any team
function.

------
johnchristopher
It hasn't been mentioned yet but glowing bear ([http://glowing-
bear.org/](http://glowing-bear.org/)) is a nice web client that plus into any
instances of a weechat process (that you let run in a multiplex terminal on a
raspberry you plug in the kitchen, on the fridge).

------
unexpand
Finally someone said it. I have a tough time with one of the project I am
working on during my personal time. By the time I go home and get time to work
on it or ask a few questions, I don't see anyone in that slack room. When I am
work, slack is blocked, so I have to wait till weekends to get someone answer
my question.

------
pnathan
The basic problem with Slack is that it's not libre. It's a fine product in
many other ways. I won't defend the ethics of libre: I'll leave that up to
rms, who has done a more-than-adequate job. But _libre_ is a more ethical
choice than _proprietary_.

------
kaiizen
I'm starting to see slack repeaters in IRC channels all around IRC and I am
leaving those channel as it ruins my IRC settings and makes things confusing.
My colored nicknames no longer work. It splits communities and makes people
leave the channel.

Please don't repeat slack to IRC.

------
shmerl
Why IRC and not XMPP?

~~~
drdaeman
This.

Well, I must admit, XMPP isn't the nicest protocol out there, and it has some
issues (esp. with older software that implements it). One can't talk it with
telnet client, and this is a downside. We've discussed it the other day:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10900859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10900859)

But it has advantages over IRC. To name a few:

\- Universal federation. Private systems (that don't have S2S enabled) aside,
any public XMPP server can talk to any public XMPP server. You don't need to
have a separate account here, there and everywhere. Not that IRC really needs
accounts (one can surely use it without signing up with NickServ etc), but
sometimes it does.

\- History access. Well, it requires server to have MAM (XEP-0313) support,
but if it does, then everything is there.

\- File transfers. Unlike Slack, it may not work for absolutely everyone but I
think Jingle had gone through a lot of work and is quite capable of piercing
quite draconian NATs. I'm not sure IRC's DCC is anywhere near. Well, and
there's also in-band file transfers (XEP-0047) that's awful and sucks but
still works for tiny content (short code snippets). And XEP-0363, although not
many servers support it. XMPP's messiness has both down- and upsides.

\- Integrations. I think there are as many XMPP bots as there are IRC ones.
Either way, there are ton of libraries for most languages so one can hack
their own simple XMPP bot literally in just a few of hours.

\- Extensibility. XMPP can attach virtually arbitrary metadata to messages, or
send extra information like typing notifications or delivery receipts. Well,
it all depends on client support, but you don't need a committee to think of
your own standard and make a ejabberd/Pidgin/Gajim/etc plugin or patch. And,
possibly, think of compatibility approach for non-supporting clients. That's
it. I don't think IRC has anything like this.

\- OMEMO (of Axolotl/TextSecure/Signal fame). It's not mature, but one can
already have multi-point end-to-end encryption for personal conversations.
Sadly, not for chatrooms yet (MUC doesn't support PubSub, MUC2 aka MIX isn't
yet here), but I'm sure it will work in the future.

------
shriphani
I don't mind FOSS projects adopting slack - whatever it takes to make
devs/users happy. But slack's tab-completion is woefully pathetic when there's
more than a few hundred members in a chat room.

This is a solved problem - get it together slack!

------
kasbah
I recently decided on gitter.im plus a channel on IRC and a bot [1] that syncs
them.

[1]: [https://github.com/finnp/gitter-irc-
bot](https://github.com/finnp/gitter-irc-bot)

------
uxcn
The nice thing with IRC is that it's scriptable. So for example if you want a
klaxon to sound every time the secret word is mentioned, it's easy to do.

------
sergiotapia
Makes total sense. Let's say I have an open source project, how do I create a
FREE irc channel for my users and what server to I choose to host it on?

------
ex3ndr
Almost all brazil FOSS community is in our completely open app:
[https://actor.im](https://actor.im)

------
halis
I've heard this argument before. The only problem is that IMO slack is awesome
and IRC is not anymore.

I'm on 3 slack teams, one with some former co-workers, one for a non-profit
that teaches coding and one for a side project.

If any of them suggested IRC I probably wouldn't have bothered.

As it is, I have the desktop client on my Mac Mini, MacBook Pro and my Windows
laptop and the app on my iPhone.

It's great. IRC is not. That's my opinion. You don't even give any good
reasons why it doesn't work for open source projects.

------
mberning
IRC sucks from a usability standpoint. Huge opportunity to make it better, but
also a huge risk due to the legacy of IRC.

------
forrestthewoods
The positives listed in "Problems with IRC that Slack solves" are
significantly stronger than the negatives listed in "Problems with Slack". By
a lot. No wonder FOSS projects are choosing Slack!

I also like how the "IRC is better for your company" section doesn't actually
give reasons as to why it's better. It instead lists multiple services you can
employ to achieve the features Slack provides out the gate.

------
akmiller
This whole article and discussion is silly. Use whatever you damn well please
for your projects communication!

------
Sami_Lehtinen
Slack client and web-app both are really heavy consuming ridiculous amounts of
memory and cpu time.

------
finnn
>irccloud: Is really cool and solves all of the problems. irccloud.com

Is IRCCloud not closed source also?

~~~
kuschku
Yes, it is. But it still uses an open protocol – so you can switch from
IRCCloud to, say, Quassel[1] easily without having to recreate channels or
permissions.

[1] Quassel is an IRC bouncer/client combination which handles things like
backlog archiving and so on properly – you can connect with multiple clients
at once, just scroll up to load more backlog, use web clients,
windows/mac/linux/Android/iOS clients, etc.

(The backlog lives in an SQL database, so tools like Quassel-Suche can easily
query it, and you can easily export it. I personally stopped using bookmarks,
and just search for links through Quassel-Suche instead)

------
unimpressive
I plan to write a blog post on this at some point, but as a tentative short
and rough draft:

IRC's biggest problem is what I would loosely term 'Grunginess'. Every single
thing I've seen associated with IRC has this kind of Unix/Linux-y grunginess
to it where nothing is easy and everybody rolls their own solution.

If you would like to experience this first hand, try setting up eir
([https://freenode.net/eir.shtml](https://freenode.net/eir.shtml)) which is
written in an unholy mixture of C++ and Perl. (The moment I see this
combination I usually know I'm in for a ride.) Or try the python IRC library
([https://pypi.python.org/pypi/irc](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/irc)) which
has almost no documentation besides docstrings and needs to be puzzled out and
examined and source-read before you can use it.

You want to be able to see messages in an IRC channel when you're not on?
Don't worry, ZNC ([http://wiki.znc.in/ZNC](http://wiki.znc.in/ZNC)) is here to
help, with powerful command line configuration action! Honestly IRC bouncers
are kind of a red herring. Even if _you_ can see what is typed in a room when
you're not on using a bouncer, the real benefit of slack's message history is
being able to see what's typed in a room before you __joined __, and being
able to assume that this is a feature which is available to every slack user.

Slack's multithreading is beautiful. One of the biggest problems with running
an IRC channel is that IRC is fundamentally broken. And when I say that I
don't mean it in the shallow way most people do, I mean actually literally
fundamentally broken. Here's why: The average human reads somewhere between
150-300wpm. A decent typist types at 60wpm. If we take 300wpm as an optimistic
estimate of average reading speed, the moment you're having a lively
discussion the channel is swamped at seven participants or so. Slack makes
multithreading easy by associating multiple topic 'channels' together for a
single group so that you can talk about one topic in this channel and another
topic in that channel and it's not confusing or unwieldy, people who want to
hear about certain topics can subscribe to a channel and people who don't can
just not subscribe or leave. You don't have this 'stepping on each others
toes' problem where three people want to talk about this and three people want
to talk about that and they all use the same channel to do it.

Avatars, emoticons, that stuff is all a bit tacky but the core fundamentals of
the design are a sound improvement over IRC, and IRC needs to respond to that.

~~~
kuschku
IRC has responded to that.

A huge part of users uses now IRCCloud, or their own ZNC or Quassel setup.

And creating multiple channels is never an issue to separate topics.

------
josep2
People who are maintaining the FOSS projects should decide what they use, not
you.

------
j45
Ideally, Slack can consider:

\- doubling as an IRC client

\- providing open source projects pro level services similar to github.

~~~
thebouv
I doubt that's something they want to do:

“these communities are not something we have the capacity to support given the
growth in our existing business.”

Though I do think they realize that getting these communities on there spreads
the word about Slack and that is a good thing.

As a reverse on your first point, and something I didn't know, it looks like
those folks who don't want to get rid of their IRC clients can connect to
Slack:

[https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/201727913-Connectin...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/201727913-Connecting-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP)

~~~
j45
Having used irc for many years (haven't in a long time), my first impression
of Slack was it was an updated irc client.

What kind? A well organized, approachable irc client with an updated feature
set to help share the things we do today. Slack has made channel based chat
relevant again to a new, much wider audience. But it's not all new.

There was a time, however, where IRC made chat available to a much wider
audience when it was much harder to connect.

Slack has done a nice job of positioning themselves near creating beginners
and deserve the success from doing so.

I'm not sure how much more overhead open source communities would be over the
free plans that already exist. Interesting to see that you can use an irc
client to connect to slack.. just not sure why I couldn't use slack to do even
more of my communicating in one place to be an irc client.

------
diegorbaquero
My vote goes to Gitter

~~~
andrewmcwatters
Gitter is also a great example of excellent integration and general design
that keeps developers from having to do busy work like setting up a GitHub <->
IRC bot. I use it for my own projects, too.

------
aggieben
Uh, no. So much no.

So many things are better than IRC. Even Jabbr.net is better.

------
7185413413
Kauan

------
andrewmcwatters
I like the present-day Slack vs. IRC argument. It's an ongoing manifestation
of the blatant lack of appreciation of user experience and great design.

Developers need to get their heads out of their rear-ends. If IRC is so great,
why doesn't everyone use it?

This endless argument has been fought in multiple other products and fields as
well.

------
frik
All open source projects should offer an IRC channel, mailing lists and a
forum!

And almost all do. Even newer ones like Elixir that started with Slack have
now a mailing list and an IRC channel.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> mailing lists and a forum

Ideally those can be the same thing; see the current Mailman interface, or
Discourse, both of which can provide a forum-like interface to a mailing list.

~~~
frik
Discourse is a forum, with a modern UI.

Forums are more for new and normal users/fans of open source projects.
Technical discussions happen over IRC. And even more longer insightful
technical discussions (often over several days) happen on mailing lists.

------
st3v3r
He lists the stuff that Slack does better than IRC, but then ignores it. Kinda
like he's just waving it off as not being important. So what's the solution
for getting the benefits that Slack has, without using Slack?

------
smokedoutraider
You were whining about this a couple of months ago already. Slack is simply
much more user friendly and doesn't look as dated as 99% of IRC clients.

------
halis
IRC sucks.

------
dawnbreez
Is this gonna be one of those "every day until you like it" things?

