[ntaylor]

It seems to me that Slack could position itself to provide free and open access to certain types of communities like open source projects, charities, etc. Enable the "pro" features so long as the community follows the rules.

The value of synchronous communication is very real and it should not be precluded, but the points are totally valid. Slack is a closed-garden and it does not contribute to the global conversation if the access and historical record is controlled from within.

[caseysoftware]

But if your entire infrastructure is centrally managed and can disappear at a company's whim, you're setting your community up for problems.

[scrollaway]

This applies to Freenode as much as it applies to Slack. If freenode disappears, people using its channels for foss will have similar issues and inconvenience as if Slack/Discord disappear and in both cases, it's recoverable.

[hueving]

If freenode disappears, it's less than a day to pick a new network and connect.

Nobody changes clients, tooling, etc. That's the difference between a closed walled garden like slack and an open protocol.

[scrollaway]

Nobody changes clients if Slack disappears and is replaced by another webapp. It's all in browser.

The UI might change, but the UI also changes when you go from a Mac IRC client to a Windows one, which doesn't happen with web apps.

I say this as someone who's used IRC a crapton and is a strong advocate for open protocols (and for more than just ideological reasons): Realistically, if Freenode disappears, IRC will most likely die as a protocol as all major projects switch to non-IRC solutions, which is happening today anyway. A protocol needs users.

The only thing IRC has got going for it is federation and openness. It's not easily extensible, it's not secure, it can't benefit from most of the advances we've made in comms and protocols since the 90s, and there isn't even a common format for your messaging history - most clients just use text logs!

If you want to advance the state of comms and ensure humans are using open protocols to communicate rather than walled gardens, you first have to acknowledge these flaws and needs. Propping up IRC as something it's not doesn't do anyone any favours.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> Nobody changes clients if Slack disappears and is replaced by another webapp. It's all in browser.

You aren't serious, are you? Because the new client runs on the same virtual machine, you are not changing clients? That does not really make sense to you, does it?

> The UI might change, but the UI also changes when you go from a Mac IRC client to a Windows one, which doesn't happen with web apps.

(1) I haven't ever heard of a computer changing its operating system from MacOS to Windows because anyone but the owner of that computer decided to make that switch. How would that happen?

(2) Erm, no, not necessarily?

[uiri]

If Freenode disappears, people will join Debian over on OFTC. I'm not sure if Mozilla and GNU/FSF use Freenode or run their own infrastructure but if the former, then they may set up their own network(s).

Other IRC networks than Freenode and OFTC exist too.

As far as security goes, SSL is an option for client<->server connections. I hope that at this point it is default for server<->server connections. What else are you expecting for security?

[scrollaway]

SSL is not required and it's certainly not default in most clients.

IRC won't survive the loss of Freenode. With Quakenet dying off (its userbase went from ~65k in 2013 to 23k today), Freenode is the last central bastion that keeps the protocol in people's minds.

FOSS projects today are migrating off IRC, onto Slack and Discord instead. This is why you have an article here talking about it and it's not the first one. If Freenode disappeared, this would accelerate massively. The projects won't bother going to another network because the topic of "Where do we go now?" is going to be asked and in most cases is going to be answered with "Well, we wanted to move to Slack/Discord anyway...".

There will be a few projects left on OFTC, certainly. But they'll give up and go elsewhere eventually as well when they'll see their userbase shrinking 5-10x due to other projects migrating elsewhere and taking their users with them. They'll probably end up on Matrix.

[steveklabnik]

Mozilla has its own server, irc.mozilla.org, distinct from freenode.

[hueving]

>The UI might change

If the UI changes, the client has effectively changed for the user. Otherwise you might as well argue that clients are all equivalent if they are running on the same OS.

>but the UI also changes when you go from a Mac IRC client to a Windows one

Only if you use clients that don't look the same.

> if Freenode disappears, IRC will most likely die as a protocol as all major projects switch to non-IRC solutions

No supporting evidence that they would drop IRC if this happened. You must have missed the part about a network switch being literally a config change. Compare that to dropping irc which is all of your tooling.

>most clients just use text logs!

There is nothing wrong with a text log. Also, which common format is your browser storing your slack messages in?

Most of your complaints apply just as equally to chat inside of a web browser (other than the security issues).

>Propping up IRC as something it's not doesn't do anyone any favours

Tell me how my comment is incorrect. You literally change a config to change networks, that's it.

[ue_]

That's why you use Matrix instead.

[joelberger]

This is the point that I can't get anyone to see. So what if they provide history? They can take it away at any point too. So what have you accomplished?!

[zimbatm]

This is certainly true for github as well.

[caseysoftware]

Git is decentralized so being dependent on a central repo is the users' fault not the organization.

But that said, I don't put anything on Github if I can avoid it. Disgusting organization with awful management.

[flukus]

There is a lot of vendor lock in for git these days, everything from CI integration to git clients hard coded for github. We spent most of the 90's and 00's breaking vendor lock in and then forgot it was a thing.

[rckrd]

I believe the Cloud Native Computing Foundation qualified for discounted pricing for the Kubernetes slack channel under this program https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204368833

[caniszczyk]

This is true: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/03/01/slack-gives-back-k8s-cnc...

Slack extended their not profit pricing to 501(c)(6) not profit organizations which covers CNCF projects like Kubernetes.