What parent is talking about is a real problem. There's micro-ecosystems out there around specific closed source products, all of them centralized, none of them compatible... and in the mean time, the only real decentralized, open source group chat solution (IRC) has a lot of issues [1] which shouldn't exist in 2015.
[1] https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JeromeLeclanche/posts/icC6gDToB...
There might be one -- but this is absolutely not what this and Slack are aiming to do.
>and closed source products do not cut it when we are talking about communication.
Not sure about that. As it seems, for 99% of the world who only uses "closed source products" for chat, they do cut it. (Interoperability is orthogonal of course).
Slack literally took the concept of IRC and put a bunch of cool bells and whistles on it. They updated it, centralized it and sold the idea as an enterprise solution. It works great, and the tech could be a kickass replacement to IRC, done correctly.
Persistent history is easy. Email notification is easy. Storage of various assets like text snippets and pictures is easy. I've never used any, but I'm assuming that at least one of the web interfaces for IRC works well...
I think the main thing that Slack has done is package it up so that you don't need to cobble together 100 different things -- which is, of course, very valuable. Or at least more valuable than the monthly cost that they charge ;-)
To be honest, I would really rather be using free software. I would be quite happy to pay for a service that made it easy for me (as Slack does), but software freedom is valuable to me.
That's kind of a weird statement to me, because every time I've sold a techie-type person on Slack it's been by describing it as "private IRC with persistent history and a bunch of other neat things".
It's not meant to be an IRC replacement. That it has point to point communication, channels etc, doesn't make it IRC.
Slack is all about the default stuff it bundles with it, and the features it includes as native for work teams.
So you can be connected with a universal "messaging" client to any of the available servers then send messages to someone on Google, or Slack etc.
I'm super excited Zulip is going open source. And it's both the proliferation of protocols and the closed-sourceness(?) of the products that is problematic.
Open source has two coupled benefits:
1. If the product becomes popular, it's easy to integrate with it, extend it, modify it, etc rather than just write an alternative from the ground up. This prevents the proliferation of new protocols just for the sake of an alternative. Right now, it makes no sense for me to go and build a FOSS alternative to Zulip. It would've made sense a few weeks ago. FOSS web services encourage/promote self-hosting. This also counts for something.
2. When extending a foss product, writing a gateway is a lot easier. Gateways don't slow down proliferation as much, but they do keep protocols somewhat close to one another and make it easier for users to migrate from one another. For example: It's been several years now and there is still no reliable open source XMPP-to-Hangouts gateway. But a Zulip/IRC gateway? If one doesn't exist already, I bet you there'll be one within weeks.
https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/master/bots/jabber_mirro... https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/master/bots/irc-mirror.p...
In addition to Zephyr mirroring, which we've had since 2012.
