gistfile1.txt

I think that IRC remains popular because of its momentum. There are so many people in the project already using it that it's 
hard to get them to go to another technolgy.  but the converse of that, it used to be mailing list and irc centric. But in 
the past few years, they've started to use online web forums, which have become more popular thatn people originally thought 
it would be. There was some resistance from diehards, saying, "No, I'm not going to use this".  The answer to that is "Well, 
it's not for you, it's for the people that will use it". And all it takes is for someone to get involved with the project and 
say "Hey, listen, I'm going to start up this slack channel" and it becomes part of the project.  I can give you an example. I 
started a website called FreshPorts, and when I originally suggested it, someone said "Hey no, I can do that with a mailng 
list and procmail".  My answer to that was, "well, it's not for you, it's for the people that want the service which will 
come with this new feature", so I went ahead and created it and it's now a vital part of the community.  And that's what 
anyone can do if they want.  If you think that slack will be of great benefit to the community, all you do is you start it up.  That's the great beauty of open source: if you want to do it, you do it.