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Comment by whyagaindavid | Hacker News Reader

In my uni, I strongly forbid use of any proprietary apps, as much as possible. Please forgive me, I do agree software devs needs to eat ... etc. but let me explain. We all moved to macs in the last 5 years, which means when I upgrade from mountain lion to Mavericks to sierra, we need to get a BUY Endnote. Every second major version of OSX needs and new EndNote. Even with academic license, it costs, about EUR 600 for every device. 1 Prof, 2 Staff scientists, 4 postdocs, 6 PhDs (charged a bit lower EUR 200 per year). You calculate. There are universities where Endnote is cheaper but subsidized by the bulk-contracts.

Oh yes, we do use MS-office. Atleast MS does not force us to buy new MS-Office for every OS upgrade. Also remember, that grants pay mainly for equipment and rarely any/expensive software.

As other posters indicated, mailing-lists + proper filtering is the optimal.

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I don't get why people still use proprietary software for team communication. Slack is just a glorified IRC owned by a private company that you have to pay to get something remotely useful. My teammates hate me for not even having slack installed on my computer.

Especially when you can use Mattermost, which is self hosted and open source and it can do pretty much anything Slack can.

How are the phone apps? It says the exist but haven't tried them.

The phone apps work, but they are react-application web views. At least on Android. I saw that they had an open hiring req for a React Native person recently, so I suspect that is about to change.

I was on the same boat given that I have used IRC for since the 90s. The one thing that Slack does solves is IT. It makes IRC "enterprisy" which means that IT can do account management, tie it with authentication etc..

The second thing it solves is management buyin. At my company we used Lync and I tried to introduce Hipchat, but nothing worked until the company President explicitly bought in to the idea of Slack. Not sure who or what convinced him but he made it clear that it's the tool he wants to use. Pronto, all 500 employees (baring some of us older guys), clicked their heels and marched.

IRC works great as technology and I love it. But Slack solves management issues and as a company I think that's their biggest advantage.

The killer feature is out-of-the-box server-side logging of all conversation history with full-text search.

Make an free/opensource product that will do that for me with no configuration or administration effort and I'll gladly use that instead.

we use Telegram as a free (no cost) alternative, "poor-man Slack"

+1 for Telegram.

HN loves to hate it and I know I should treat it as unencrypted as the crypto might or might not be good but both mobile and desktop clients works nicely (actually IMO brilliantly) across Android, IPhone, Linux desktop and Windows desktop. Bonus points for bot API and channels.

Slack has more features with no configuration. HR people can use slack. Most hr people have never heard of IRC.

I literally work for a company that owns an instant messaging and group chat platform and everyone uses slack instead of our own product.

>Slack is just a glorified IRC

A lot of smart people who are old enough to be familiar with IRC see it differently. See comments from old HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541

Many many not use Slack but they certainly can see the value of it over IRC.

Where do you live? Even retail pricing doesn't seem to be that high.

http://endnote.com/buy http://www.adeptscience.co.uk/products/refman/endnote

I agree. I work in a robotics lab with 30-40 members and choosing our basic support software can be really challenging. We avoid proprietary apps until we have no other choice.

We also prefer to have software we can self-host, review the code, and extend. Aside from cost and compatibility concerns, many of our projects have data protection requirements (ITAR, IRB, HIPAA) that can be difficult to maintain with proprietary systems.

Sometimes it sucks to not be able to jump to using the latest big thing, but it's often more important to have software we know will be sustainable.

thank you.

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