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Comment by nemild | Hacker News Reader

This last came up for OSS and Slack (e.g., "Please don't use Slack for FOSS")[1][2].

I took some time to reflect on why OSS wasn't the default for these messaging tools, rather than proprietary alternatives — and what it would take to make more users use OSS alternatives:

> As Slack has continued to grow, open source developers have had lengthy debates about using it rather than IRC. For some, the fact that Slack is closed source and a walled garden makes it unsuitable when building projects that are open.

> I’ll take a different approach: in the age of software, why is open software not more competitive for many products used by non-engineers and what can be done?

What Open Source Can Learn From Slack

https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html

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

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013136

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There are other choices besides Slack and IRC.

Setting up Mattermost on a VPS isn't hard.

https://mattermost.org/licensing/

Or just Matrix.

Still harder than Slack, right?

How is slack any better than discord? Both roll out stupid (and forced) updates, and slack doesn't even let me browse kinda old history if the owner doesn't pay for it. [*4] Not to mention the search is relatively terrible anyway.

The main thing that worries me about is discord is their revenue model... I just don't see how they're making money, and they keep on raising money.

There are a few good alternatives like zulip [0], matrix [1], discourse [2], Rocket Chat [3], or just plain old irc.

Although discourse isn't really a chat application but more of a open source forum software.

[0]: https://github.com/zulip

[1]: https://www.matrix.org/

[2]: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

[3]: https://rocket.chat/

[4]: You can get around this by messaging relevant information to yourself. Or just saving things locally, like a weirdo.

And RocketChat no?

Ah, right. I should amend the parent as there are a few other open source alternatives. That said, matrix (from what I can tell) is much more widely used.

Check out https://www.airsend.io. We are getting started and it works well in our private testing with couple of thousand users. Currently we have apps for ios and android.

If you check the parent I was replying to, it was about Mattermost being harder to set up than Slack.

I never said anything about Slack or Discord being better/worse than each other.

Also not free, has banking ramifications, etc.

TFA mentions that Mattermost's source is AGPL and the binaries are MIT. It's absolutely free software.

It's also $0 software, in that it being free software and open source, you can simply and legally patch out their license checks and recompile, if you so wish.

I was referring to the VPS hosting, not the software.

Ease of hosting is one of the very biggest advantages to something like Slack or Discord.

I'm surprised people don't bring up GitHub in these conversations more - the most critical piece of modern OSS infrastructure is itself closed-source.

Of course git itself is an open tool, so the repos are totally interoperable, but the OSS community's dependence on GitHub for issue tracking, PRs, etc. has always made me uncomfortable.

Most of the arguments against Discord also apply to Microsoft GitHub. It's unethical to ask people to use Microsoft GitHub. I'm contributing to a few projects on Microsoft GitHub, but I always feel slightly sick doing it, knowing that how using gives Microsoft and unfair advantage in data about developers and ultimate control over their projects.

All the ideology and social problems aside slack is still an awful chat tool. Even if there wasn’t a philosophical problem with it I don’t know why you would use it.

It’s popularity is due to marketing and abusing some social phenomena, not merit.

"Ideology and social problems"?

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