Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
We are, temporarily, in a kind of dark ages of end-user open source software. The reason is that we shifted from software-as-a-product to software-as-a-service.<p>With the old upload-and-forget model of software distribution, you could put a tarball on a free FTP site for a few pennies, and then a million people could use it, or one person could, and you wouldn't have to lift a finger. A million people could fork your application, or one person could, and you wouldn't have to do a thing. Variable costs for an OSS developer were $0. Fixed costs were just the cost of your computer and an internet connection.<p>But if you deploy an open source service to the cloud, it's going to cost you more than a few pennies, and if a million people try to use your service you have two headaches: financial and operational.<p>In theory something like Ethereum solves this problem, but it's not really ready for the scale yet, and it's hard to use.<p>In theory something like a Heroku Button[1] on Github solves the problem, but Heroku artificially introduces a 30 second delay for accessing free applications, and put lots of their infrastructure behind a paywall that the deploy-er has to manage and pay for.<p>This has been a difficult problem to solve, because unlike the x86 machine of the OSS explosion in the 90s, the "cloud computer" is still actively being invented. Ethereum didn't even exist a few years ago, and Heroku is a moving target. Linux Containers are also brand new, and then there's Docker and other VM standards, not to mention Google, Azure, etc... we are still grasping in the dark to try to answer the question, "What does a standard cloud machine look like?"<p>Until we answer that question, closed source services are going to have an immense advantage over open source ones. After we answer the question the power dynamic there will reverse and there will be a cambrian explosion of user-facing open source services.<p>[1] <a href="https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-button" rel="nofollow">https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-button</a>