[treed]

#kernel-panic on freenode for good Linux and tons of other good discussion. Been there for years. Active right now with 34 people. But pretty much every major FOSS project has an IRC channel, usually on freenode. Every programming language, framework, etc. is represented there. I get tons of good help there and help others as well. IRC is definitely very much alive. I rue the advent of modern one-on-one IM as it really ruins teamwork. A few months ago we threw up our own openfire jabber server and required everyone in the company to be present and it has really boosted awareness of what is going on and replaced the "hallway conversations" we were missing from our distributed development environment.