On 21 Jan 2025, at 01:27, Simon Phipps via open-regulatory-compliance <open-regulatory-compliance@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi!
I appreciate the discussion and know this can be a sensitive topic so read everything below in a spirit of attempted compromise rather than of confrontation!
While I understand your disappointment, the activity we're seeing on GitHub since the move is unparallelled to what we had ever achieved on GitLab with this project, and so I think that move in particular was justified.
Or it may just be that meetings started so there was a reason to engage? Whatever the reason Github seems to work at the moment, but let's be aware of which features we become dependent on as they will be the lock-in if we ever choose to switch for a future reason.
The concentration on a single platform with a single vendor is indeed concerning. I think way too much of the Open Source community relies on a single vendor today. Was happy to see that Eclipse had a good Gitlab installation as an alternative.
We'll see if we can find a good bridge between Slack and Matrix; recommendations welcomed.
I have had to use Slack in the past and the problems it has manifest at different times:
- For those not using it for anything else, it doesn't get visited regularly, so early in deployment people get isolated resulting in an "in" and "out" crowd
- After the trial period expires, those not in corporate contexts begin to peel off as the upsell starts from the vendor and old messages vanish
- Slack doesn't like bridges and interop so any features to allow diverse platform choices tend to be unstable and at risk of future disruption.
At present this is the only project in which I am involved that uses it so I have no "optimisations of scale" to benefit from.
Getting bogged down in platform wars is never a good direction for a project so I just expressed this to you privately so far, Tobie, but it seems especially unfortunate to have migrated from an open platform that is widely used in open source (e.g. for FOSDEM) to a closed system tilted towards corporate users. I'd suggest reversing the switch while it's still feasible rather than attempting a bridge.
If we people want to chat, Matrix and Element is not a hinder. I think migration to a proprietary platform sends the wrong signals for a group that focuses on Open Source.
As discussed today, we're also looking at whether we're able to offer an alternative to Zoom for calls. Here too, recommendations welcomed.
That's wonderful. I continue to have great experiences of
meet.jit.si and professional instances of the same software. I especially like the fact it offers dial-in and the fact there is a mobile app.
The Jitsi project is usually really helpful, so if there are issues I’m pretty sure those can be resolved. It’s used successfully for the OFE meetings with a larger number of participants than what we’ve had in this group’s meetings so far. Bridging to Slack, well that’s an interesting challenge, but is it something that this project should focus on?
