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>Unless you run a private IRC server IRC has a long, tortured history of design-based security difficulties. So run a private IRC server? This is a weird cavea
by astazangasta 11y ago
>Unless you run a private IRC server IRC has a long, tortured history of design-based security difficulties.
So run a private IRC server? This is a weird caveat, like complaining that angelfire is an insufficient web platform and you have to run your own http server to do well. There are a billion IRC clients, libraries, and bots out there. There are IRC servers in most distros. There are JS servers in NPM. Why not use them?
- res0nat0r 11y agoCompanies are using Slack because they explicitly don't want to have to deal with this and would rather someone else take care of their chat infrastructure, and with more features.
- paulddraper 11y agoAbsolutely. My company uses it (among other things) for handling production issues. We'd rather not manage that ourselves. It's just one more thing we can screw up. This is different than the FOSS subject of the article, but it true that convenience is compelling.
- vacri 11y agoIf it's just infra management you want, then use Hipchat. It does the same things Slack does, at $2/user/mo instead of $8. Slack is ridiculously expensive.
- jsmeaton 11y agoIt's only expensive compared to HipChat which is a subsidised gateway service that leads to Jira. Our company used HipChat for about a year before moving to Slack. Honestly, the differences are not many and any reasonable team could choose either. I think we migrated to Slack for connectivity reasons, fonts and general user interface, and the bigger list of integrations. Are these worth $6 per user per month? If you've got the money then maybe. But it's by no means a given.
- paulddraper 11y agoAnd that's what I meant by "among other things". Originally, we were using Campfire. As needs grew beyond just putting out fires, we looked at Hipchat, Flowdock, and Slack. We probably would have gone with Hipchat (because of the price), if they had SSO, or better JIRA integration. Slack had both.
- astazangasta 11y agoI highly doubt that slack has more features than IRC, which has thirty years of history in dozens of code bases. I agree that taking a canned solution is easier, and easier is often best. But I think this is the main reason slack is popular; its less to think about. There are many dimensions in which it will be worse.
- ris 11y agoSo use grove.io
- donatj 11y agoMy company runs our own private IRC server on an EC2 instance and once it was set up I don't believe we've needed to touch it since.
- KirinDave 11y agoHow very lucky of you. I hope you have a repeatable provision, AMI, static IP linked to a tcp loadbalancer and autoscaling group in the event AWS rotates out your instance. And of course, the same goes for your logging and search and file sharing infrastructure. And of course, similar caveats exist for the database said features use.
- dijit 11y agohow very sarcastic of you. This is the realm of systems administrators, if you can't read a 20 line config file then sure, run slack.. but for a biggish company that values security and publishes NDA's like mine, an IRC server is a better solution. however, Project Managers fucking -love- emoji and sending word documents across the planet.
- KirinDave 11y agoHow very decisive of you. And you'd take on the burden of constellation of comparable services as opposed to a white label hipchat because....?
- vacri 11y agoIf your file sharing infrastructure is limited to what Slack provides, then your file sharing infrastructure sucks. Slack is good for quick "check this outs", but it's not a file sharing system.
- kbenson 11y agoWell, you add the google docs integration, or the dropbox integration, or the box integration, or use the Zapier integration to tie things together. Slack isn't a file sharing platform, it's a communication platform. As such, they try to make communicating about, discovery and grouping of files in dedicated file sharing platforms easier.