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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).