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Drew DeVault on the biggest threats for FOSS, and proposed solutions (fosstodon.org)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Glad he brought up Discord's quality.

I'm a bit tired of people saying e-mail/IRC work just fine. Yes, they do, but that's not the point. Discord works better for way over a hundred millions users, many of whom rarely ever send mail and aren't interested in learning how IRC or whatever alternative you use works.

It's like instead of collaborating to solve this issue half of the open source community decided they want to die in IRC, while the other half just straight up gave up. Metaphorically. I get why, but it saddens me a little.

Will have to check out Zulip later.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Don't waste your time with Zulip, it is just another corporate messenger.

The IRC "problem" is a lot more complex than "giving up". It is actually a problem of attempted corporate capture on two main occasions.

The first one is Element (matrix) that tried to EEE IRC with their extremely poor bridges and in general Matrix has been binding developer resources on an ultimately failed and over-engineered protocol where the parent company is now pivoting to provide government services.

The second one was the largely failed attempt at a hostile takeover of Freenode, which somehow left the people that were trying to innovate IRC in a really bad spot as those that are mostly standing on the brakes "won" and formed libera.chat. A very phyrric victory, as it pretty much cemented the continued decline of IRC.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If you're willing, I'd appreciate more information on this claim:

Don’t waste your time with Zulip, it is just another corporate messenger.

I tried looking it up myself, but I didn't see anything that bad. Open source, self-hostable, Apache 2 licensed, didn't see any CLA. About the Element thing, that sounds a bit far-fetched, but I'll refrain from saying anything else since I haven't had time to look into it. The Freenode story sounds interesting though, I'll try looking it up later.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The issue is the intended use case and not specific licensing and so on. Zulip targets internal chat in a corporate environment, like MS Teams and the like, which makes it ill suited as a Discord replacement.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Fair point, thanks for sharing. Does that mean you consider fine the use of Zulip by open source development teams? Seeing as their main objective is providing organized chat between core contributors (with some level of outsider participation), that is, generally focused on facilitating the work of the project instead of building a community.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

If that team currently has a strong email culture, yes. Zulip is basically a "what if chat was more like threaded email" UI experiment.

Teams that are more used to Slack or Discord will probably hate it though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Fair warning there is a lot of drama surrounding him. I'll only link one example here but you can google for more if you want:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37780551

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Thanks, I'm going through some of it right now, since I do prefer to be aware of this stuff. Far as I can see, though, he just seems like another opinionated person—not really noteworthy for a developer—who happens to write strongly, and write a lot. While this led to a larger virtual profile, most of his opinions that I've seen were shared, at least in part, with stray lobsters/reddit/hackernews comments.

He has ideas I agree with, ones I don't, some that I think make him look silly... so he's just another person on the internet, kinda like you and me. Could, maybe, use a better tone sometimes. As long as his controversial status is limited to the level of tech nerds ranting at each other, there's not much to be warned about. I think we need to be more open towards earnestly discussing certain topics—sometimes it's not drama, it's just a serious conversation you haven't needed to have until now.

Well, those are my two cents. Thanks, regardless.

P.S. huh, subscribers of opensource did not appreciate this post much. Maybe this is what happens when you cross-post "old" news.