Dart 2.0 - Remove unethical development infrastructure

[Hayden Jones]

Slack is not open-source enough, and there are multiple alternatives. (Mattermost, Rocket.chat, Zulip, etc)

I have been keeping an eye on Dart for quite some time now, but if the Dart team continues to not show any interest in open-source development and repels developers like me by using unethical platforms to conduct important development conversations, I don't see any way that Dart can become truly successful.

I've proposed this multiple times before, offered ideas to bridge the Slack to irc, offered FOSS alternatives to Slack, etc, and I'm typically met with remarks like "Well we already use Slack" which I assume means that FOSS doesn't actually matter to the Dart team. 

In other news, Scala.js is an absolute JOY to work with, and I've found it to be quite a bit more productive than Typescript, once you get over the initial learning curve. They conduct pretty much everything in Gitter (FOSS, imagine that) and there's lots of helpful folks in the IRC that constantly answer questions. 

[Joel Trottier-Hébert]

https://gitter.im/orgs/dart-lang/rooms

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[Danny Tuppeny]

On Fri, 19 Aug 2016 at 12:35 Hayden Jones <hrj....@gmail.com> wrote:

but if the Dart team continues to not show any interest in open-source development

Dart is open source?

If OSS companies should not use closed-source services to communicate with users then presumably they shouldn't be using GitHub, twitter, or responding to questions on StackOverflow?

Also; if you want to change something, calling the people who can make the decision "unethical" (unjustly) probably isn't going to help the cause!

[Hayden Jones]

I don't particularly care if Dart changes or not. There are more effective tools available, but it seems like such a shame.

--

[kc]

A deeper is problem is with a lack of Openness generally.

The are another couple of pointless discussions on this group re named params & constructors which will go no where.

Frustrating for devs who may be interested in Flutter/Fuchsia as well as the renewed Web story with Angular 2.0 going its own way.

K.

[Günter Zöchbauer]

Why are they not listed when I search for "Rooms and People" for "dart"

I only get "dev_compiler" and "dart-lang/sdk" :-/

I haven't seen any announcement that these rooms were actually created and search quite a few times since the discussion in Slack that there are plans to create additional Gitter rooms.

[tatumizer-v0.2]

> A deeper is problem is with a lack of Openness generally.

My speculation is that due to constantly changing directions (weather-related), dart is not able to formulate even a near-term plan. There's nothing much to "open" then. 

[Bob Nystrom]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 10:13 AM, tatumizer-v0.2 <tatu...@gmail.com> wrote:

My speculation is that due to constantly changing directions (weather-related), dart is not able to formulate even a near-term plan. There's nothing much to "open" then. 

For what it's worth, I think we change direction very infrequently and pretty slowly. The VM not going into Chrome is obviously one big change, and that has a lot of ripple effects. But, otherwise, our course is pretty steady.

I think the main challenge is that we (and Google in general) have a culture of not talking about things much until after they're done. We don't want to make promises ahead of time. We'd rather under-promise and over-deliver.

In general, I think that's good, but it means when we're working on large things there can be radio silence for longer than our users would like.

Cheers!

– bob

[Danny Tuppeny]

On Fri, 19 Aug 2016 at 18:39 'Bob Nystrom' via Dart Misc <mi...@dartlang.org> wrote:

I think the main challenge is that we (and Google in general) have a culture of not talking about things much until after they're done. We don't want to make promises ahead of time. We'd rather under-promise and over-deliver.

Personally I think this idea is a bit silly. It's not entirely the same but Blizzard used to say this a lot about World of Warcraft dev ("we don't tell you what we're thinking because if we change our minds you all get angry and fill our forums with rants about how we promised it") but over time I think they realised that more people were frustrated with not knowing what was going on (and not being able to have input into it, which often resulted in things being delivered badly and fixed up later when they finally got feedback) than the few idiots that interpreted all ideas as promises. Now they're pretty open; they post what they're thinking and if they change their mind, they tend to explain why and there's little drama.

I understand that sometimes there are reasons to keep things quiet, but generally I think talking about the direction sooner rather than later is best; you'll get more feedback that'll help you make better decisions. A small number of people might get upset if you change your mind but meh, tough shit, nothing was ever promised and they're always a minority.

That said; in terms of Dart it doesn't seem to me there's much that goes on behind closed doors (it's kinda hard when you're OSS!). Working on Dart Code recently has really good; both VS Code and Dart are open and on GH and reading through code to understand how things work and being able to raise issues directly with devs is refreshing :-)

But... I did used to really enjoy reading everyones thoughts in the docs about your meetings, what happened to them? ;(

[Bob Nystrom]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 10:59 AM, Danny Tuppeny <da...@tuppeny.com> wrote:

But... I did used to really enjoy reading everyones thoughts in the docs about your meetings, what happened to them? ;(

They are on ice for now:

https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!searchin/misc/dep$20ice/misc/slFRFcBKxE0/gtICan1iBwAJ

We're playing with changes to our language development process to try to make things simpler, faster, and more strategic. The DEP meetings seemed to move really slowly and were at the mercy of whatever proposals made it our way, which isn't a good way for us to be able to guide the overall direction of the language.

We're still trying to figure out the best format and the best way to share information. It's hard. Writing those meeting notes takes a lot of effort and that's when the meetings were short and focused on very small issues. When we have several hour discussions about stuff like the type system, it's really really hard to crystallize that into something sharable.

Once stuff settles down more and we're back to changes that are more evolutionary I expect will get back to a mode that's a little more formal and written down.

Cheers!

– bob

[Steve Lympany]

Yes, I too liked to nose around in those internal meetings docs
S

[Danny Tuppeny]

On Fri, 19 Aug 2016 at 20:19 'Bob Nystrom' via Dart Misc <mi...@dartlang.org> wrote:

But... I did used to really enjoy reading everyones thoughts in the docs about your meetings, what happened to them? ;(

They are on ice for now:

https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!searchin/misc/dep$20ice/misc/slFRFcBKxE0/gtICan1iBwAJ

We're playing with changes to our language development process to try to make things simpler, faster, and more strategic. The DEP meetings seemed to move really slowly and were at the mercy of whatever proposals made it our way, which isn't a good way for us to be able to guide the overall direction of the language.

We're still trying to figure out the best format and the best way to share information. It's hard. Writing those meeting notes takes a lot of effort and that's when the meetings were short and focused on very small issues. When we have several hour discussions about stuff like the type system, it's really really hard to crystallize that into something sharable. 

That all sounds valid :) but... I don't think all of the value was necessarily from DEPs or even the detailed docs; I think just having an idea of what's being talked about is really handy (if nothing else, it gives us an idea of where to poke around on GitHub to better see what's going on!). I think just periodic posts to this list with brief summaries of what you've done/are doing would be really interesting for us (I guess monthly standup where you're the pig and we're all chickens! ;))

[tatumizer-v0.2]

> When we have several hour discussions about stuff like the type system, it's really really hard to crystallize that into something sharable.

Hmm... If you don't crystallize, then 2 weeks later, people will not remember what the other guy said. I normally don't remember what I said myself on the meeting and why. Meeting induces altered state of consciousness in participants, which is impossible to reconstruct later. 

 

[Jan Mostert]

Whatever is best for the language!
Keep up the good work!

On Fri, 19 Aug 2016, 21:55 tatumizer-v0.2 <tatu...@gmail.com> wrote:

> When we have several hour discussions about stuff like the type system, it's really really hard to crystallize that into something sharable.

Hmm... If you don't crystallize, then 2 weeks later, people will not remember what the other guy said. I normally don't remember what I said myself on the meeting and why. Meeting induces altered state of consciousness in participants, which is impossible to reconstruct later. 

 

--

[Hayden Jones]

The first step is as simple as starting a bridge between Slack and IRC, which has been advocated for multiple times for at least the past year, and even that has still not been done.

Multiple times it's been made very clear that the Dart team has absolutely no sense of urgency when it comes to making the Dart project more open. Lots of people are unable to use Slack for ethical reasons, since it's not open source. There are even open-source alternatives, which I've mentioned, there are bridges that could be set up between Slack and IRC or Jabber, or whatever new thing is out there, and the response is always "Yeah well, we use Slack, so go fuck yourself"

It speaks volumes, and I think it's going to have a huge effect on people when Google gets their shit together and starts asking people to come build apps in a language that they worked very hard to keep out of. 

[Danny Tuppeny]

On Sat, 20 Aug 2016 at 18:39 Hayden Jones <hrj....@gmail.com> wrote:

Lots of people are unable to use Slack for ethical reasons, since it's not open source.

If the Dart Team are unethical for using Slack, would that also mean that people using Gmail (which is closed source proprietary software) or Google Groups (also, I presume, closed source proprietary software) are also unethical?

There are many reasons to use other services over Slack; but to say you object to using closed-source software seems somewhat inconsistent and to call anyone that does unethical seems rather ridiculous.

[Jan Mostert]

Dear Hayden Jones,  we've already discussed this for almost half a day on Slack and now you're spamming the mailing list as well with this silly demands of yours.

It's simple, Google is building Dart for their own internal use, they're open sourcing it since that is how they roll. Google has no obligation supporting anything anywhere, it's purely community driven. If you don't like Slack or Gitter, feel free to support Dart on wherever you want. If you want to see Dart discussion via IRC, be the one that runs it there. I personally don't use IRC and will continue using Slack.

If you want to bridge Slack to IRC, get in contact with the Slack Channel owner and setup an IRC/XMPP bridge and no, you won't get sued for that. If it can't be done for whatever reason, then that's it, IRC and Gitter and Slack will run separately, deal with it.

Stop making drama please!

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[Hayden Jones]

Gmail isn't an open source programming language.

I guess more specifically I am against closed source, proprietary software when used to develop open source software.

--

[Hayden Jones]

Seems like it was made real clear that we need a Slack->IRC bridge, and yet there still is not one. I am absolutely not going to do it, because whomever runs the slack is probably a lawsuit-happy maniac. I care about Dart, but I don't care about it "get sued and go to jail" much. My love is just not that strong.

[Günter Zöchbauer]

On Saturday, August 20, 2016 at 7:39:02 PM UTC+2, Hayden Jones wrote:

The first step is as simple as starting a bridge between Slack and IRC, which has been advocated for multiple times for at least the past year, and even that has still not been done.

Multiple times it's been made very clear that the Dart team has absolutely no sense of urgency when it comes to making the Dart project more open. Lots of people are unable to use Slack for ethical reasons, since it's not open source. There are even open-source alternatives, which I've mentioned, there are bridges that could be set up between Slack and IRC or Jabber, or whatever new thing is out there, and the response is always "Yeah well, we use Slack, so go fuck yourself"

It speaks volumes, and I think it's going to have a huge effect on people when Google gets their shit together and starts asking people to come build apps in a language that they worked very hard to keep out of. 

Your request is just about that **you** have a wish and now you come up with all kinds of pretty weird reasons to make it look like the community wants or needs this.

[Günter Zöchbauer]

On Sunday, August 21, 2016 at 12:43:38 AM UTC+2, Hayden Jones wrote:

Seems like it was made real clear that we need a Slack->IRC bridge, and yet there still is not one. I am absolutely not going to do it, because whomever runs the slack is probably a lawsuit-happy maniac. I care about Dart, but I don't care about it "get sued and go to jail" much. My love is just not that strong.

You have made it clear that you want it. That is quite a difference to "we need it"

[Hayden Jones]

That's exactly what I was talking about. Dart team doesn't care about any other developers other than themselves. If I want to hold myself to a higher ethical standard than you do, you've no right to do anything about it.

There is a massive group of JavaScript developers that will not even think of touching dart unless more effort is made to make it as open and inclusive as possible. You can spin my words as much as you want, I think scala.js is a much better offer anyways, but it seems a shame given all the work that's been done and some the people involved. I've long been a fan of gilad's work and I can't accurately portray the sheer disappointment I have about how darts development has gone so far.

[kc]

Apple/Swift and MS/C# have created open processes.

Swift and C# are both imo benevolent dictatorships - a clear sense of leadership and direction with good user interaction. Chris Lattner and Mads Torgersen have a great attitude. As does the leader of the wrenlang project.

This is different from the anarcho-shambles of TC39 and the festung-bunker of TC52.

Fluttter has expressed interested in ergonomic 'value objects' - but there is no 'concrete resolution' or progress. How many times has this been raised on this group and over on the aborted core-dev? 

What's different about Google. No need to re-invent the wheel. Use a C# approach for Dart 2.0 and maybe a more formal Swift approach for Dart 3.0 onwards.

K.

[Günter Zöchbauer]

On Sunday, August 21, 2016 at 3:50:18 PM UTC+2, Hayden Jones wrote:

That's exactly what I was talking about. Dart team doesn't care about any other developers other than themselves.

Because it would be way too inefficient for Google to address wishes for single users, doesn't mean they don't care.

> higher ethical standard than you do

This sounds quite arrogant. To me you are just inflexible.

 

If I want to hold myself to a higher ethical standard than you do, you've no right to do anything about it.

There is a massive group of JavaScript developers that will not even think of touching dart unless more effort is made to make it as open and inclusive as possible. You can spin my words as much as you want, I think scala.js is a much better offer anyways, but it seems a shame given all the work that's been done and some the people involved. I've long been a fan of gilad's work and I can't accurately portray the sheer disappointment I have about how darts development has gone so far.

Considering how much noise you make for a feature that seems only to be interesting to you personally, I assume

There is a massive group of JavaScript developers 

means about 2 JS developers :D 

[Lex Berezhny]

I suspect Hayden Jones is just trolling. Let's not feed the troll, "scala.js is a much better offer anyways" or whatever, he can use that and not have to put up with us unethical monsters, baby eaters and impure proprietary software users/worshippers... may we rot in hell. Anyways, just trying to match the tone of the discussion, maybe I over did it a bit... maybe not... those free software evangelicals can get pretty hard core.

I have nothing against idealism but sometimes people put it into the most absurd things and get carried away.

[Steve Lympany]

Hello Hayden,

First - my position: retired, old, creaky mech engineer, not a proper software engineer like the geniuses on these pages.  Fortran 4, C....we paid for those compilers in ye old days. So forgive me if I'm missing something. 

2014 - I had really no idea what a web app was, but wanted a play. Discovered Dart, polymer etc etc, slack, S-O, these pages. All free!! I would have cried in wonderment 20 years ago. My employers would have too. Free support. Magic. Open source. We can download the Dart SDK and compile it if we wish. How open is that? Totally appreciated by (nearly) all that use it.

I assume you'll be offering your software likewise? It's the morally-correct thing to do.

Anyway, why blow a gasket, you don't have to use dart.

Cheers

Steve

[Hayden Jones]

I'm not blowing a gasket. There is some fascination with my (alleged) emotionality about this. I 100% do not care if Dart succeeds or not. Most of my back end is Scala, my front end will eventually be all Scala.js, Dart doesn't offer anything to me, for my project. So we can go ahead and move on from that, because I really don't care about it in a personal way.

What I do care about is about Dart in a PLT sense. Optional types done well, the Mirror API, that sort of thing is fascinating to me and one of the big early victories I think Dart had was pursuing standardization through ECMA. It's a very smart move, and ultimately if Dart proves it's worth I'm sure a more capable team will form and re-implement, since there's a standard.

When my software is completed, it will be absolutely free to anybody who wants to use it, and the entirety of my project utilizes NO unethical software. I mainly use Gedit and Emacs, both great open source tools, and I develop on Debian, a fantastic open-source distro. My stack is ethical. Dart's isn't. I understand that Dartisans are upset that I'm bringing this up, but I'm not wrong, and I'm not emotional about it, I'm just bringing it to the attention of the wider Dart audience who might not realize they're taking part in something that is objectively unethical.

[Hayden Jones]

Yeah how dare people want other people to benefit from their work. Those savages.

On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 1:00 PM, Lex Berezhny <l...@damoti.com> wrote:

I suspect Hayden Jones is just trolling. Let's not feed the troll, "scala.js is a much better offer anyways" or whatever, he can use that and not have to put up with us unethical monsters, baby eaters and impure proprietary software users/worshippers... may we rot in hell. Anyways, just trying to match the tone of the discussion, maybe I over did it a bit... maybe not... those free software evangelicals can get pretty hard core.

I have nothing against idealism but sometimes people put it into the most absurd things and get carried away.

--

[Filipe Morgado]

On Sunday, 21 August 2016 22:23:35 UTC+1, Hayden Jones wrote:

... and one of the big early victories I think Dart had was pursuing standardization through ECMA. It's a very smart move, and ultimately if Dart proves it's worth I'm sure a more capable team will form and re-implement, since there's a standard.

...

Regarding Dart being an ECMA standard ... That was a smart move if, and only if, Dart was to be integrated into Chrome.

So other web players could participate as well.

A lot of things have changed since then and now ECMA only slows things down.

If the Dart team made the choice to abandon ECMA, it would maybe be seen, from the outside, as a step backwards.

Personally, I would see it as two steps forward and would eliminate a lot of bureaucracy from the evolution process.

I don't see any other relevant programming language (besides JS of course) being dependent on an external committee.

I won't bother commenting on other topics discussed here as it seems pretty futile.

[Filipe Morgado]

I'm out to other forums to bash the hell out of languages I don't use.

[Günter Zöchbauer]

On Sunday, August 21, 2016 at 11:23:35 PM UTC+2, Hayden Jones wrote:

My stack is ethical. Dart's isn't. I understand that Dartisans are upset that I'm bringing this up

I'm not upset about this at all. Opinions don't upset me. What upsets me is that you make accusations just because you want to get your way.

What upsets me is that you demand from the Dart team to spend time on work that doesn't provide much value to the community.

The number of people you claim would benefit from this work is quite exaggerated. 

In my opinion what you do here is quite unethical and therefore your emphasis of what you find ethical isn't to credible to me.

[Hayden Jones]

Multiple times over the past year I've advocated for a Slack->IRC bridge to be implemented, I've been advised not to do it myself for legal reasons so I've expected that the Dart team would do it, since it's literally one plugin to install in Slack, and that the Dart project already has an official IRC channel. That's like 90% of the work right there, and yet it still hasn't been done.

Dart is objectively unethical, it's not my OPINION, it's a measurable fact. Developing open source software with closed source software is unethical.

[Nigel Magnay]

Where may I download the sourcecode to github ?

[Hayden Jones]

Most of github's infratstructure is closed-source. They have a couple interesting repos on https://github.com/github but I recommend GitLab for a more ethical experience. 

[Kasper Peulen]

This is all about slack? For what it is worth, I believe slack is here mainly because of the community wanted it. It was created for the dart summit, and I think Seth Ladd was actually thinking about closing it afterwards if not the community asked for it to stay open because they like it so much better than IRC. Before that, the only chat was on IRC, and it was very unactive. IRC is not from this time, you want a chat that automatically saves history and has markdown support out of the box.

Gitter may be a better option, I heard that this is being considered?

Anyway, slack is I believe only there because of request from the community, nothing serious about the direction of the dart team is discussed there. I dont see the problems you are describing. If you like scala, use scala.

Kasper

[Günter Zöchbauer]

On Monday, August 22, 2016 at 1:31:07 PM UTC+2, Hayden Jones wrote:

Dart is objectively unethical, it's not my OPINION, it's a measurable fact. Developing open source software with closed source software is unethical.

Ethical and measureable - I assume that is supposed to be a joke :D

[Joel Trottier-Hébert]

lol I thought the same.

[Greg Lusk]

Same here. This thread has shown up in my Spam box several times. I agree that we shouldn't feed trolls and move on.

[Matthew Butler]

Well, I certainly can't imagine how you are getting any programming done with Scala/Scala.js when you're trying to save the world from "unethical" Open Source projects. You show no interest in using Dart, contributing to Dart or otherwise interact. Why are you not making the same claims on the GoLang Gopher slack? Or saving Rust and Kotlin from their proprietary github ways? And of course TypeScript.

You say you've been advised, for legal reasons, not to create the IRC bridge yourself. Yet you expect Google and/or the Dart team to shoulder that burden on your behalf? As has been pointed out time and time again, IRC is a dying medium [1], you're solo quest to save it by any means necessary is not endearing you to the Dart community.

If you truly feel there are issues with Dart's implementation, feel free to file a bug at: http://dartbug.com

As for Dart's success. If developers, such as yourself, who refused to use "unethical platforms" were the majority of developers, we really wouldn't be having this conversation at all. So to believe that Dart's success or popularity hinges on your support is egotistical at best. The Dart team is doing its best to make Dart accessible to the majority of developers. They can't please everyone. That is visible right from the initial language design. They have an IRC channel, they have a Slack channel. The users decide which they would rather use.
Similar happened prior to the Google Code service shut down, it was reviewed if decided that moving to Github (over say GitLab / Atlassian / BitBucket) because that's where the developers were. Official Google+ and twitter accounts, but no Diaspora account. (Okay, Granted the Google+ one was probably due to Google products should have a Google+ account as an internal decree of some sort when it launched).

I understand your need to feel righteous in all things FOSS only and don't dare do anything proprietary. And if that works for you, then great. But as for the rest of the world, don't expect everyone to bend over backwards because of what you feel is ethical. 

[Bob Nystrom]

Hi,

I think we can all agree that this thread is not measurably improving the quality of anyone's life.

Hayden, I see that our selection of chat infrastructure is important to you, but that you also don't feel comfortable directly working to change it. Both of those are entirely reasonable viewpoints for you to have. It seems like your only recourse would be to persuade others to do that work on your behalf, but it also doesn't like you've been successful at that.

Everyone else, remember that even when we disagree, we should still treat each other with compassion and respect. In fact it is most important to do so when we disagree. We're willing to forgive many more mistakes when someone is on "our side".

In the meantime, I'll also note that this list is primarily targeted towards people interested in the Dart programming language and has several thousand members. When posting, try to consider whether most of those potential readers would find what you're writing helpful and relevant to their interests. As stuff veers away from the nuts and bolts of evolving and using the language, the chance that it's annoying noise to many readers increases.

Cheers!

– bob

--

[Hayden Jones]

Are you saying that whether or not people WANT to read this thread reflects on whether this is ethical or not? I'm not honestly sure, but I think you'd realize how ridiculous that is, if it is indeed the case.

There have been 0 propositions that refute the lack of ethicality that I've presented. I've tried to do this the best that I can, and 100% of the responses are just "Shut up, nobody cares about your stupid ETHICS, you don't even use Dart so we don't care" which is LITERALLY the antithesis of """ Everyone else, remember that even when we disagree, we should still treat each other with compassion and respect. In fact it is most important to do so when we disagree. We're willing to forgive many more mistakes when someone is on "our side". """

I didn't force anybody to read this thread. Nobody forced me write it.

[Joel Trottier-Hébert]

Can you please elaborate on this:

Dart is objectively unethical, it's not my OPINION, it's a measurable fact. Developing open source software with closed source software is unethical.

I don't get it.

Thanks.

[Michael Francis]

This is just absolutely silly.

[Matthew Butler]

On Monday, August 22, 2016 at 4:53:01 PM UTC-3, Hayden Jones wrote:

Are you saying that whether or not people WANT to read this thread reflects on whether this is ethical or not? I'm not honestly sure, but I think you'd realize how ridiculous that is, if it is indeed the case.

I don't think anyone at any point said this. What was said, is that this group is for individuals who want to discuss the Dart Programming Language. Not a debate on FOSS ethics and how they tie to various discussion platforms.

 

There have been 0 propositions that refute the lack of ethicality that I've presented.

It's very difficult to refute something that the vast majority of individuals don't see an issue with. Allow me to presumptuously state, that I am not indicating people see no problems with "lack of ethics in the Dart communications mediums". Rather, people do not see a lack of ethics in the first place. If you feel it is unethical to use Stack Overflow, Slack, GitHub, etc, that is you're personal belief. My personal belief is that there is absolutely no ethical concerns regarding the medium I use to communicate. I also have no issues with eating meat for instance. There are organizations and movements throughout the world who certainly do have issues with not only their own consumption of meat but mine as well. That I am unethical for it. But simply because they feel it is unethical does not make it so, just as Dart, Golang, Rust, Kotlin and so many other open source projects using Slack, StackOverflow and GitHub does not make them unethical because you believe it so.

 

I've tried to do this the best that I can,

No, as Bob mentioned, you have done all you can to insist how everyone else must do it, but you personally have done very little. I have been able to uncover 0 issues/bugs with a Pull Request or in place configuration or software to implement your desired values. Rather you've been indignant and abrasive when your views weren't met with wide accepts. 

 

and 100% of the responses are just "Shut up, nobody cares about your stupid ETHICS, you don't even use Dart so we don't care"

To be honest, I believe most of the emphasis has been on the word "your", not on "ethics" (nor the adjective "stupid" at all.)

 

which is LITERALLY the antithesis of """ Everyone else, remember that even when we disagree, we should still treat each other with compassion and respect. In fact it is most important to do so when we disagree. We're willing to forgive many more mistakes when someone is on "our side". """

This reminder came after the myriad of other responses, which is perhaps why this was made. Because Bob most likely sensed hostility in responses and wanted to remind everyone in the community (as a Google team member, he's more or less a community leader even if not in an official sense).

I didn't force anybody to read this thread. Nobody forced me write it.

In your own words "I think you'd realize how ridiculous that is". You write very opinionated message, specifically calling Dart development unethical in the subject line to a large group of individuals who receive the messages because of their interest in Dart and Dart Development. You then claim you forced no one to read it. That's akin to standing nude in the middle of town square and when you get a ticket for public indecency, stating that you didn't force anyone to look at you, that its not your fault people happened to see you naked.

As has been stated before, the IRC channel is already available and is an option for all members of the Dart community, Gitter.im is a recently added option, though at this point not widely adopted either. You are asking the Dart team to dictate what people's preference must be to suit your personal belief system. Meanwhile the community has made its choice based on what the best fit for them is. Personally, I'm a member of 6 different slack teams, for open source and closed source projects. Were it to come to the point where Slack team for Dart shut down, there's a strong likelihood that I would not install a separate application just for Dart communications, and certainly wouldn't use yet another browser tab in my already overwhelmed browsers. Is losing contributors to the community (as well as to the Dart SDK itself) worth Dart meeting your ethical standards? As you've stated, you have no interest in Dart's success whatsoever.

[Ованес]

>> It's simple, Google is building Dart for their own internal use, they're open sourcing it since that is how they roll. Google has no obligation supporting anything anywhere, it's purely community driven.

Yes, I agree, Google did not obligated anything to anyone.
And I agree that Google is building Dart for their own internal use but not for all.

[Warren]

Without piling on, I will note that Gitter now has several Dart discussions:

https://gitter.im/dart-lang/TALK-general 

As far as I know, there was never an "official" Google policy of using Slack. Folks gravitated to it 

because it has a nice UI, and everyone else is there. i.e. it was the best place to get help.

Gitter has come a long way, and I think the UI is pretty much on par with Slack.

The best way to convince people to use it is to start posting questions (and answers!) to that forum. 

On Friday, August 19, 2016 at 5:35:10 AM UTC-6, Hayden Jones wrote:

Slack is not open-source enough, and there are multiple alternatives. (Mattermost, Rocket.chat, Zulip, etc)

I have been keeping an eye on Dart for quite some time now, but if the Dart team continues to not show any interest in open-source development and repels developers like me by using unethical platforms to conduct important development conversations, I don't see any way that Dart can become truly successful.

I've proposed this multiple times before, offered ideas to bridge the Slack to irc, offered FOSS alternatives to Slack, etc, and I'm typically met with remarks like "Well we already use Slack" which I assume means that FOSS doesn't actually matter to the Dart team. 

In other news, Scala.js is an absolute JOY to work with, and I've found it to be quite a bit more productive than Typescript, once you get over the initial learning curve. They conduct pretty much everything in Gitter (FOSS, imagine that) and there's lots of helpful folks in the IRC that constantly answer questions. 

[Filipe Morgado]

If I understand the thread correctly, the arguments which make Slack "unethical" also apply to Gitter (and Github ... and Google Groups).

I never used Slack or Gitter, so I can't compare them. But both are free, functional and both are just a means to an end.

I don't think we should impose a migration on all users if there's no real benefit.