I realize this sounds caustic, but to say "Well, you're wrong" without giving adequate reasoning beyond "I've been around a while, so I know better" contributes nothing to the discussion.
Open Source projects can not afford to pay for archiving Slack messages. A lot of important discussions will vanish.
So you're no more likely to lose your logs via Slack than via IRC or XMPP if you set things up correctly.
1. Freedom the run the program, for any purpose. 2. Freedom to study and change the program (source code required) 3. Freedom to redistribute copies. 4. Free to redistribute your modifications. (source code required)
For the kind of people who frequent hacker news, I would expect you to be familiar with these very basic principles of software ideology. If you disagree with them, that's fine, but let's not pretend that proprietary is anywhere close to FOSS in the realm of freedom. Sometimes you must sacrifice functionality and usability to use FOSS, and that's a choice that only you can make, but what I don't want is you making that choice for me because you don't understand the basic ideas of software freedom.
On the subject of Slack, I can give you a quick example of this. Let's say you want a good chat app but it needs to be secure, and you don't want to trust another company (slack). So obviously you want to self-host internally right? Oh, sorry, no source code, no self hosted version, too bad, fuck off and wait until slack releases a self-hosted version. Oh, and if they do, and you want to implement your own internal feature X, too bad, fuck off, you get what you are given.
Very disappointed in the level of understanding of these things on hn lately.
> Very disappointed in the level of understanding of these
> things on hn lately.
Counter-example: What if I don't care about that?
Qnd thats not even a counter example... Its just... Lazy.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but maybe phrasing your comment a little less combatively would be nicer.
The bit about the top post was just evidence to how visible to our community these kind of things are, in response to the great-grandparent's request for "name some examples", as if they were hard to come by. They're not hard to come by: you literally don't have to look farther than the most popular article of the last 24 hours on this very site.
Sorry if that seems combative, but them's the breaks. Argue from a sound position or else you'll get corrected.
"Technology changes, economic laws do not." -- Hal Varian, who is now the chief economist at Google.
* http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html
* Internet Explorer in the 2000's.
* Look how Microsoft got everyone by the balls with Office software for many years.
* Look up the whole Bitkeeper fiasco with the Linux kernel.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in
* Did you catch all those people freaking out because Parse is shutting down?
* Were you there when Twitter shut down a lot of people integrating with it?
* Unix is fairly open in terms of its interface, but plenty of people got stuck on proprietary ones over the years, only to see most all of them disappear in favor of Linux and the various BSDs.
I'm no RMS, and don't have problems with proprietary software, but am very wary of getting locked in to something, rather than simply buying a product that I use and can easily switch away from when there's something better that comes out. And chat protocols are very much about positive network externalities that leave you tied to something, like it or not.
That's just one point.