[chralieboy]

When you are running a business, you use tools to make your life easier.

The reason I pay for Slack is precisely so I _don't_ have to push fixes upstream.

Tools are a means to solving a problem. Something being open source is not by itself a plus. I don't want to be developing a chat client so I can use it, I want to build my own fucking company.

[syedatif]

So...don't use it. Honestly, there are other people here that will see this link and go "hey I want to add this feature in this" and the tool becomes better. Once it does I am sure you're gonna come back and leech on it.

[chralieboy]

Obviously I have the option not to use it, but we can still have a discussion about the pros and cons.

What I'm saying is that "pull requests welcome" is a really lazy way of telling someone to support themselves. That's fine if you have a unique set of needs, in that case you should be building things out specific to you.

For something like chat, most people have a very similar set of requirements, paying Slack a couple of dollars per month to handle it is awesome. Would it be cool if Slack were opensource? Maybe, but that isn't why people would use it even if it were. It works really well, there is a team behind it that is paid full time to develop new features, and we can focus on building our own company instead of using bandwidth building tools for basic functionality.

That doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement, but the places for improvement in Slack aren't that it isn't open source.

[acutelyobtuse]

OSS isn't for just the contributors.

[spacelizard]

Another company offering SaaS products is not a plus by itself either. The idea of "pay us so you don't have to push upstream fixes" is just another spin on the usual marketing agenda for cloud-based companies. Either way when running a business you need to consider what kind of infrastructure you're investing in.

[hardwaresofton]

This. Was about to respond with a comment like this, but I think it's just better not to devolve into that argument (which has definitely been done before, countless times).

When Slack doesn't have some feature you need, what do you do? switch? pay some other company? develop it yourself? both positions have tradeoffs.

But by all means, if you don't have time to contribute to open source, then... don't, and buy the pre-packaged service -- I'm glad people think this way because it makes it easy for SaaS startups to profit -- which moves the industry forward anyway.

[hardwaresofton]

Right, so then... pay for Slack. Leaving negative comments about such a general "problem" with open source software isn't really productive or warranted, I think.

It's not the open source project's job to make themselves appealing to you, you're just looking to use and use and not give back.

Also, the benefits (intrinsic or otherwise) of open source is a completely different discussion (that people have by and large already had).