I read the edits on your original comment. I think you’re missing the point that the metric system at least scales in a reasonable and expected way, which is not the case in the imperial system of measurement.

And to your point about averaging a human arm and using that as a measurement standard, no, it’s not necessarily better. You still need an exact standard that you have to measure against for any kind of precision. Making it similar to the size of a human body part doesn’t matter unless you’re estimating, which isn’t how anything is built anymore.

There are reasons the old standards were abandoned.

Hard disagree. There is far too much variability in the body size of adult humans, especially when taking sex into account. Sure, maybe my foot closely resembles the foot-size of said monarch but my 5 ft tall wife’s doesn’t.

There’s no reason to use body paste measurements for nearly any purpose in the modern day. You can’t build a house based on the rough size of someone’s arm when you have half a dozen people minimum working on a project. You need a standard unit which would need to be measured using a standard unit measuring device. Either way you need to use a measuring tool, so why not use a standard that makes the math easier.

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.