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Comment by zaargy | Hacker News Reader

So you set this up and you use it for a few hours and everyone on your team is like hey this is kinda cool.

* a month or so passes *

Now everyone is invested in the tool and since the expectations have been set by things like Slack they expect integrations to work flawlessly, search to be infinitely fast, 99% uptime, Google OpenID authentication, and a slew of other features and before you know it you have someone spending two hours out of every day keeping it running.

As a personal project for kicks? Sure it's cool. Would I let me company run it? Hell no!

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Unless you know they never used Slack, so there are no expectations.

And your company wants to run OSS, so "has a guy" that already maintains the other pocketful of apps to company is using.

And since it is OSS, you can add Google OpenID auth if required.

And the slew of other features you want to add, but can't to Slack even if you knew about Slack.

Don't crap on the idea just because Slack is Slack and this isn't. Apply your "a month or so passes and now everyone is invested in the tool" scenario to any OSS alternative and your argument just comes off as fanboying.

Well it's not just Slack that sets expectations but pretty much every SaaS webapp out there.

Of course, you can add features but do not underestimate how much work it is to do so and is it even worth the effort? It is what you should be spending your time on as a company if that's not your business?

And let's remember Slack is going to video and voice soon...

What if you can't run slack because your company doesn't allow chat services that are externally hosted?

EDIT: This seems like something that never gets brought up in any discussion of Slack. No company I have worked for would have allowed an externally hosted chat service. Have I just been unlucky, or is it just the people in my situation never speak up?

Unlucky. We used Slack at the last three companies I worked for.

You can't be a very loyal employee given that Slack has been out for less than 2 years.

I'm not. I'm a consultant.

Lots of enterprise companies demand full control over all things. Its not uncommon at all.

It's not uncommon, but it's uncommon around here.

It's certainly one of my major griefs with Slack. I don't want my entire company's internal communications to be hosted by some third party startup I can't at all trust.

I would say this traditionally case but I think things are slowly changing even in the Enterprise world, where they too are starting to realise it's not realistic to be good at everything as well as their employees demanding better services.

Also, there's nothing stopping your company from making the product better.

You shouldn't be spending 2 hours each day solving the same problems. If you make fixes, push them upstream (and others will too), then everyone gets a better product.

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.

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.

OSS isn't for just the contributors.

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.

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.

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.

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).

That also happened in transportation: Ferrari set the expectations so high that nobody rides bikes anymore.

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