> Which chat systems were similar to IRC, but not to Slack, outside of IRC clients? Slack is very similar to IRC at its core, so I'm not sure I see what you're

> Which chat systems were similar to IRC, but not to Slack, outside of IRC clients? Slack is very similar to IRC at its core, so I'm not sure I see what you're asking here. I meant that IRC isn't foreign or alien to anyone who's familiar with chat clients - the basic concept of servers and channels and nicknames is pretty universal. > And just because someone doesn't want to spend the time fiddling with IRC bouncers, IRC bots, getting clients to display things nicely doesn't mean that they are a bad developer. I feel like I covered this point already: > And ok, if that's not fun for you, there are plenty of really "click and install" tools for you (e.g. ZNC is super easy to setup). > And especially if you don't do it all the time, getting people set up to work with Slack is way easier than IRC. What are you referring to here by "getting people setup"? Like a corporate environment? It's fairly easy to setup bouncers and the like in a corporate environment using tools like chef, etc. I really don't feel like this is a strong argument for a corporate setting. If you mean on a personal level for individual contributors to get up and running on contributing to FOSS, sure it's not 100% frictionless - but pretty much. Again, there are lots of bouncers that can be setup with <5 commands. If the argument is that it takes an extra ten minutes to install ZNC vs. Slack, then I dunno - I guess I don't see that as very much friction when the tradeoff is using non-free software. > I really find these discussions half amusing and half depressing I feel the same way, but for different reasons. It's a little depressing to me how averse people are to spending 10 extra minutes to use FOSS, usually under the guise of "I have different priorities." I thought developers in the wild would at least be slightly more willing to invest the time, especially post-Snowden, to use FOSS. I guess that was just a college pipe-dream of mine.