That’s kind of what I was getting at. Medium to large organizations usually require a certain level of reliability that closed software companies usually guarantee with dedicated support staff and SLAs. An open source project developed by the community with no dedicated support is risky from that perspective.

If someone with the technical know-how and ability to maintain those systems offered support (red hat for example) for a lower price, many small and medium sized companies would get on board. That could also just look like a company hiring a small team to implement and maintain their own systems while contributing back to the community project.

It’s just a much harder sell to non-technical leaders. They just want uptime guarantees and fixed costs.

Yeah, channel management is super important. It’s useful to have a full featured chat client that can integrate into other systems, but it’s important to know what the limitations are. We use Slack for internal chat only (no customers) and it works pretty well for our use case but with all the integrations available it could easily get out of hand if we let more people manage it.

That’s not a terrible idea as long as it’s significantly cheaper than the closed alternatives. I think the biggest issue would be that orgs that pay would expect a certain level of service that a community project might not be able to deliver on.

Same. I also have one of the older models in that family of cases. I love the thing but need to put in a water cooling loop.

I understand the sentiment, but email is a necessary part of modern life and not everyone has the luxury of paying for it.