Kurokujo

As a healthcare worker, the nurses are absolutely not washing their hands intentionally. You'd be surprised how many healthcare workers don't believe in science based medicine.

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.

That's a fair assessment and I agree with your prediction at the end. I think the problem is that, in the meantime, there massive real-world harm being done to people by these practices that have potentially generation spanning consequences (much like redlining).

In my area of the country (mid-south), home prices were pretty low until the last couple of years. I bought a 3000 ft² house in 2020 for <100k in a city. Now, a similar sized house is going for >500k. A lot of homes were bought by individuals and property management companies who did some cosmetic renovations then raised rents sometimes by >200%.

Other properties are bought and left vacant on purpose to make sure the renters don't have other places to go.

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