Look them up. People have written books and articles on this stuff. Here are a few:

* http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html

* Internet Explorer in the 2000's.

* Look how Microsoft got everyone by the balls with Office software for many years.

* Look up the whole Bitkeeper fiasco with the Linux kernel.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in

* Did you catch all those people freaking out because Parse is shutting down?

* Were you there when Twitter shut down a lot of people integrating with it?

* Unix is fairly open in terms of its interface, but plenty of people got stuck on proprietary ones over the years, only to see most all of them disappear in favor of Linux and the various BSDs.

I'm no RMS, and don't have problems with proprietary software, but am very wary of getting locked in to something, rather than simply buying a product that I use and can easily switch away from when there's something better that comes out. And chat protocols are very much about positive network externalities that leave you tied to something, like it or not.

The top post yesterday was literally about how Facebook was shutting down Parse and terminating support (in a year) to everyone who depends on it. You seriously don't see the relevance to this discussion?

Your argument itself aside, I think it's a bit uncharitable to fault someone for not seeing the relevance of an article they might not have read. Not everyone necessarily keeps up with every HN thread.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but maybe phrasing your comment a little less combatively would be nicer.

You've completely lost me. The argument ("Facebook killed Parse" -- see, I can even do it in three words) was given right there in the text. You certainly don't have to find it in HN archives.

The bit about the top post was just evidence to how visible to our community these kind of things are, in response to the great-grandparent's request for "name some examples", as if they were hard to come by. They're not hard to come by: you literally don't have to look farther than the most popular article of the last 24 hours on this very site.

Sorry if that seems combative, but them's the breaks. Argue from a sound position or else you'll get corrected.

The Parse situation is different because many there are companies betting their entire infrastructure on Parse. Moving from HipChat to Slack took a couple of days. Moving from Slack to whatever comes next won't take any longer.

Also, supporting your opinion with a coincidence (Facebook killing Parse) does not give you a "sound position".

Good grief things seem argumentative here.

Uh... It's not a "coincidence" that commercial products tend to die before their users want them to. It's basically the norm. Commercial software services tend to live, what, maybe a decade at best? I cited Parse as a particularly apt example, but let's try some others you might remember, trying to pick examples from a broader time range, all of which were very popular in their prime and had many teeth-gnashing users at their death:

  * Geocities
  * Google Reader
  * ICQ
  * Napster
  * Twitter's API Access
  * Deja News / Google Groups

That's just off the top of my head. You really want to continue this argument?

Open source projects die too, and it's not always because there are no users. Sometimes there is no one willing to maintain the project. My point is that "closed source software dies" isn't a valid argument for not using a product.

Indeed. My email client of choice (Thunderbird) "died" this way last year. Except of course I'm still using it, and it's still being maintained by community effort for high priority bugs. So I don't see your point, actually.

Commercial software tends to at least give a warning before dying.

Someone can certainly be forgiven for having not noticed a bit of news that may not be relevant to them, but they should definitely be cognizant of how this industry functions, both now and in the past.

"Technology changes, economic laws do not." -- Hal Varian, who is now the chief economist at Google.

Loss of message history for one.

Open Source projects can not afford to pay for archiving Slack messages. A lot of important discussions will vanish.

If writing a bot is a reasonable solution for IRCs shortcomings, then writing a Slack bot to do long term archiving of messages is also reasonable .

Slack's ToS specifically prevents doing that. Which, is reasonable, as if that's what they're selling, how would they make any money?

I'm no fan of Slack, but it has IRC and XMPP gateways. You can trivially set up an IRC bot that logs your channels & conversations, I connect to Slack via irssi & use its standard logging facility.

So you're no more likely to lose your logs via Slack than via IRC or XMPP if you set things up correctly.

So what you're saying is, Slack works great as long as you're willing to perform some 'uber geekery'? ;)

How do you think open source projects have preserved message history on the existing open source alternatives discussed in this thread (IRC & Jabber)? You set up & maintain your own logging bots.

I don't know if I'd consider that 'uber geekery'... it's just setting up an IRC client - they provide instructions on the slack website.

Either the user controls the program or the program controls the user. Those of us who don't want proprietary lock-in generally do it for one, some, or all of the four basic freedoms as defined by RMS:

1. Freedom the run the program, for any purpose. 2. Freedom to study and change the program (source code required) 3. Freedom to redistribute copies. 4. Free to redistribute your modifications. (source code required)

For the kind of people who frequent hacker news, I would expect you to be familiar with these very basic principles of software ideology. If you disagree with them, that's fine, but let's not pretend that proprietary is anywhere close to FOSS in the realm of freedom. Sometimes you must sacrifice functionality and usability to use FOSS, and that's a choice that only you can make, but what I don't want is you making that choice for me because you don't understand the basic ideas of software freedom.

On the subject of Slack, I can give you a quick example of this. Let's say you want a good chat app but it needs to be secure, and you don't want to trust another company (slack). So obviously you want to self-host internally right? Oh, sorry, no source code, no self hosted version, too bad, fuck off and wait until slack releases a self-hosted version. Oh, and if they do, and you want to implement your own internal feature X, too bad, fuck off, you get what you are given.

Very disappointed in the level of understanding of these things on hn lately.

You should also be aware, that not everybody buys into RMS's ideology, nor does it make sense for everyone. Also, the guy dos not have a monopoly on FOSS.

  > Very disappointed in the level of understanding of these
  > things on hn lately.

Well, maybe the understanding is lacking on your side…

I don't buy into it either, and spend my days working on proprietary stuff. But I use a ton of open source projects, and pretty much everything I do interacts with open source protocols, like HTTP.

" Let's say you want a good chat app but it needs to be secure, and you don't want to trust another company (slack)."

Counter-example: What if I don't care about that?

I don't understand questions like this at all. Is it not completely obvious that if you dont care about the that then go right ahead and do whatever you want? What are you even asking for? Seriously, what kind of reaponse do you imagine can even be given?

Qnd thats not even a counter example... Its just... Lazy.

If, tomorrow, Slack decided to close and there is no other app to read your conversation history; then you are locked out of this history.

That's just one point.