“these communities are not something we have the capacity to support given the growth in our existing business.”
Though I do think they realize that getting these communities on there spreads the word about Slack and that is a good thing.
As a reverse on your first point, and something I didn't know, it looks like those folks who don't want to get rid of their IRC clients can connect to Slack:
Having used irc for many years (haven't in a long time), my first impression of Slack was it was an updated irc client.
What kind? A well organized, approachable irc client with an updated feature set to help share the things we do today. Slack has made channel based chat relevant again to a new, much wider audience. But it's not all new.
There was a time, however, where IRC made chat available to a much wider audience when it was much harder to connect.
Slack has done a nice job of positioning themselves near creating beginners and deserve the success from doing so.
I'm not sure how much more overhead open source communities would be over the free plans that already exist. Interesting to see that you can use an irc client to connect to slack.. just not sure why I couldn't use slack to do even more of my communicating in one place to be an irc client.
“these communities are not something we have the capacity to support given the growth in our existing business.”
Though I do think they realize that getting these communities on there spreads the word about Slack and that is a good thing.
As a reverse on your first point, and something I didn't know, it looks like those folks who don't want to get rid of their IRC clients can connect to Slack:
https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connectin...