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So you set this up and you use it for a few hours and everyone on your team is like hey this is kinda cool. * a month or so passes * Now everyone is invested
by zaargy 11y ago
So you set this up and you use it for a few hours and everyone on your team is like hey this is kinda cool.
* a month or so passes *
Now everyone is invested in the tool and since the expectations have been set by things like Slack they expect integrations to work flawlessly, search to be infinitely fast, 99% uptime, Google OpenID authentication, and a slew of other features and before you know it you have someone spending two hours out of every day keeping it running.
As a personal project for kicks? Sure it's cool. Would I let me company run it? Hell no!
- thebouv 11y agoUnless you know they never used Slack, so there are no expectations. And your company wants to run OSS, so "has a guy" that already maintains the other pocketful of apps to company is using. And since it is OSS, you can add Google OpenID auth if required. And the slew of other features you want to add, but can't to Slack even if you knew about Slack. Don't crap on the idea just because Slack is Slack and this isn't. Apply your "a month or so passes and now everyone is invested in the tool" scenario to any OSS alternative and your argument just comes off as fanboying.
- zaargy 11y agoWell it's not just Slack that sets expectations but pretty much every SaaS webapp out there. Of course, you can add features but do not underestimate how much work it is to do so and is it even worth the effort? It is what you should be spending your time on as a company if that's not your business? And let's remember Slack is going to video and voice soon...
- hardwaresofton 11y agoAlso, there's nothing stopping your company from making the product better. You shouldn't be spending 2 hours each day solving the same problems. If you make fixes, push them upstream (and others will too), then everyone gets a better product.
- chralieboy 11y agoWhen you are running a business, you use tools to make your life easier. The reason I pay for Slack is precisely so I _don't_ have to push fixes upstream. Tools are a means to solving a problem. Something being open source is not by itself a plus. I don't want to be developing a chat client so I can use it, I want to build my own fucking company.
- syedatif 11y agoSo...don't use it. Honestly, there are other people here that will see this link and go "hey I want to add this feature in this" and the tool becomes better. Once it does I am sure you're gonna come back and leech on it.
- acutelyobtuse 11y agoOSS isn't for just the contributors.
- chralieboy 11y agoObviously I have the option not to use it, but we can still have a discussion about the pros and cons. What I'm saying is that "pull requests welcome" is a really lazy way of telling someone to support themselves. That's fine if you have a unique set of needs, in that case you should be building things out specific to you. For something like chat, most people have a very similar set of requirements, paying Slack a couple of dollars per month to handle it is awesome. Would it be cool if Slack were opensource? Maybe, but that isn't why people would use it even if it were. It works really well, there is a team behind it that is paid full time to develop new features, and we can focus on building our own company instead of using bandwidth building tools for basic functionality. That doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement, but the places for improvement in Slack aren't that it isn't open source.
- spacelizard 11y agoAnother company offering SaaS products is not a plus by itself either. The idea of "pay us so you don't have to push upstream fixes" is just another spin on the usual marketing agenda for cloud-based companies. Either way when running a business you need to consider what kind of infrastructure you're investing in.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- cuddlybacon 11y agoWhat if you can't run slack because your company doesn't allow chat services that are externally hosted? EDIT: This seems like something that never gets brought up in any discussion of Slack. No company I have worked for would have allowed an externally hosted chat service. Have I just been unlucky, or is it just the people in my situation never speak up?
- icelancer 11y agoUnlucky. We used Slack at the last three companies I worked for.
- danielsamuels 11y agoYou can't be a very loyal employee given that Slack has been out for less than 2 years.
- icelancer 11y agoI'm not. I'm a consultant.
- spotman 11y agoLots of enterprise companies demand full control over all things. Its not uncommon at all.
- steveklabnik 11y agoIt's not uncommon, but it's uncommon around here.
- emergentcypher 11y agoIt's certainly one of my major griefs with Slack. I don't want my entire company's internal communications to be hosted by some third party startup I can't at all trust.
- zaargy 11y agoI would say this traditionally case but I think things are slowly changing even in the Enterprise world, where they too are starting to realise it's not realistic to be good at everything as well as their employees demanding better services.
- tacone 11y agoThat also happened in transportation: Ferrari set the expectations so high that nobody rides bikes anymore.