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A comment on Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects. Parent comment

Re:Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects by mikeash on Monday February 01, 2016 @03:23PM (#11015104)
Don't all contributors have to at least set up an account through the web interface?

Even if you can connect to GitHub without ever touching their proprietary JS, that's clearly not the typical route. Just like you can connect to Slack using nothing but open source clients, but one is "enticed" to use the proprietary client.

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Re:Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects by e12e on Wednesday February 03, 2016 @01:42PM (#11028570)
> Don't all contributors have to at least set up an account through the web interface?

You can clone/pull anonymously from github and eg: email patches.

I'd say using github just for hosting read-only/read-mostly git is a bit like running http on IIS or email on Exchange - or indeed a propietary XMPP server that allows federation.

I'd prefer Free projects to use Free infrastructure - but building on established open protocols is good. Contrast with bitkeeper: you'd have to reverse engineer the protocol to pull/push - or with slack: there's no way to set up your own server snd federate with it.

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Re:Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects by adrusi on Monday February 01, 2016 @04:11PM (#11015479)
Oh yeah, good point, projects can't bring their own user authentication system, so all your contributors have to have github accounts.

So OK, sure, github is as bad as slack.

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Re:Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects by lfowles on Monday February 01, 2016 @05:19PM (#11016038)
Contributors won't be able to push to GitHub, but they can still push to a mirror repo or some other setup that then pushes to github.
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