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Comment by Can_Not | Hacker News Reader

> The author isn't sticking his head in the sand

I think he was talking about HN users who argue that IRC does everything slack does.

> One of the sad things that has come out of Slack's meteoric rise to success, has been how many free and open source projects have jumped over to using it (after previously using IRC or XMPP).

He's definitely honing in on a group of people who should support federated solutions and instead evangelized the opposite. Ironically there's a similar frustration with using the proprietary GitHub service rather than open source git sites like GitLab

Apples to oranges, GitHub provides Git as a service and Git is open source, so you can take your repo any time and host it yourself in number of different ways. It just happens that GitHub is most popular (for now) Git As A Service, probably due to the fact that GitLab had few horrible outages regularly every few months for past 2-3 years and hosting it yourself is/was also a bit of nightmare. Anyway, it's not like that. ;)

The problem with GitHub silo is not the repo hosting per se but the ancillary services. Issues are not easily exported. The milestones and related metadata are not easily exported. Even the identities are not easily exported since you can use noreply email addresses in git actions if you turn off public email

Neither of these are Git features. Vote with your legs if you think what you want should be available in a service like this.

My company has gone through three different milestones and issue apps. Sure its mot manually exportable but thats why we pay for data entry staff.

There are many different reasons to choose a service provider. Being FOSS should factor in, but it should hardly be the major factor. Currently, Slack and Github are better choices (Slack is far easier to get started using than IRC, and Github currently has more of a network effect than anything out there). While yes, it would be nice for open source projects to use open source solutions, they should be choosing the best tools for the job. If those aren't open source solutions, so be it.

Yeah anytime Slack is mentioned at work someone brings up IRC. So I get what he’s saying.

Nobody argues that. But they may very well argue that IRC doesn't everything they want it to do.

My argument is that IRC is better because it doesn't do a lot of things. I really don't feel my day would be enhanced by people pasting images or animated emojis into my IRC channels.

Ugh I messed up my post, "doesn't" was supposed to be "does".

See the replies to my comment 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16495893

Most of the replies are criticising the ghastly inefficient app. What is wrong with that?

I know people who literally argue that. Needless to say, I don't agree with them. :P

Thanks for clarifying this for me while I was afk. :) I wouldn't constrain it to HN only, but yes, that's my point.

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