[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] RFC: Moving toward Discord and Discourse for LLVM's discussions

[Renato Golin via llvm-dev]

On Wed, 20 Nov 2019 at 08:44, Whisperity via llvm-dev
<llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> There *are* open-source Discord clients, 3rd party tools and the like.

This is a big uphill fight that is rarelly worthy. Not to mention
privacy guarantees and terms and conditions that are not "fixed" by
OSS tooling.

> The corporation behind Discord is just not authorising you legally to use any of those tools at hand.

That doesn't sound good.

Also, many companies have "approved list" of software, which a "gaming
chat app" will rarely be.

I'd have to subvert  the private license *and* my company's security
policies. I can assure you, this won't end well.

Slack isn't much better in general, tbh, but more companies allow them
on corporate networks.

IRC has a ton of problems, too, but it's our default. We should only
move to a better tool, not a different tool. We want to bring in new
people without alienating old people, like me.

Discourse seems to be OSS GPLv2, so we could host our own and apply
our own CoC / moderating if providers are not able to meet our needs.
I have real trouble using web BBSs (text ones over dialup were fine),
so I'd really appreciate an email/subscription mechanism.

If we do select a provider (for Discourse, another or even Stack
Overflow), we need to make sure we'll always be able to download the
whole history and move to another service if the terms stop being
reasonable (or we get tired of it).

This was a big point in using Github (vs. self-hosted): it's git, we
can move out whenever we want. We should keep that constraint for
every tool we use.

--renato