[Sugar-devel] Suggestion on moving from IRC to Gitter

[Alex Perez]

As an oversight board member, for all the same reasons cited below, I am 
100% _not_ in favor of this proposal. It's a crude attempt at 
re-implementing IRC, and despite being open-source, is effectively a 
proprietary service, which there is no guarantee of continued support 
for. If you want to offer to maintain a Gitter-to-IRC bridge, that's 
great, otherwise I think this highly negative move.

I guess the real question I have, which doesn't seem to have been 
answered anywhere yet, is, why Gitter, specifically? There are other, 
much more option options, such as Matrix, which have far more mature IRC 
integration options.

James Cameron wrote on 1/20/19 4:16 PM:
> Thanks Rahul.  Please add to the plan;
>
> - critical people; identify the critical code maintainers and note
>    when they have engaged with Gitter.im on a continuous basis; in
>    particular we are yet to hear from Lionel and Ibiam.
>
> - licensing; as an open source project within the Software Freedom
>    Conservancy, we should aim to promote tools that have a compatible
>    license.  Devin said the web app is licensed MIT, but the service is
>    All Rights Reserved.
>
> - inclusiveness of prior contributors; we have several contributors
>    who know how to use IRC, but are disinclined due to their age to
>    use the modern systems; how do we continue to include them?
>
> - further division; every time we start something new, we divide again
>    the group of people talking, and the new group often forgets to keep
>    the old group informed; how will the non-Gitter.im contributors be
>    kept informed?  I'm not asking about the IRC contributors, but also
>    people using GitHub, Wiki, Trac, Jabber, Pootle, and the mailing
>    lists.
>
> - Code of Conduct; how to make this more obvious in Gitter.im?
>    Especially "If you come across a post that is in an incorrect forum,
>    please respectfully redirect the poster to the appropriate" (as has
>    happened already), and making sure to consult others.
>
> I've briefly authorised and looked at Gitter.im, using Firefox on
> Ubuntu, and have observations;
>
> 1.  a significant increase in mail contact attempts by other projects
> on GitHub; i.e. you'll get more spam, because people have coded things
> to get to you through Gitter,
>
> 2.  a daily mail message containing some of the notifications from
> Gitter, but not all,
>
> 3.  the display does not scroll with page down, page up, or arrow
> keys, unless you first click in the message area,
>
> 4.  it isn't clear how I can make a local log of the discussion,
>
> 5.  the network demand is substantially greater than IRC; this is not
> something we can expect to scale up into schools with poor networks,
>
> 6.  the power and processing demand is higher.
>

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