Did you read the quarter-million-line license for your Slack app? (mastodon.mit.edu)

And we provide these apps with data and collaboration we rely on for our business or clubs day-to-day?

Time to rethink.

This file does not contain the terms of service of Slack. Rather, it contains the software licenses of third-party code that is embedded in Chromium, which in turn is embedded in the Slack app. Every dependency has its own license, which is why the file is so big (800× Apache-2.0, 237× MIT, 59× LGPL, and so on).

I can't really understand the point of using Slack. There's so many free alternatives.

This is simply downstream of open source working as intended. It's also not a problem, and also there's no good solution.

My first computer had a 10MB HDD. * I could program with it comfortably (e.g. Turbo Pascal). * I could play with it (Civ, Day of the Tentacle with a few tricks, ...) * I could run a office suite. * I could communicate via mail and newsgroups

In short: all problems back than could be solved at home.

And yeah, I know that barely anybody cares _how utterly_ wasteful software has become.

honestly the slack app store and it’s ridiculous policies makes publishing apps completely unworthy of the time investment. after having published numerous apps across dozens of marketplaces, I would advise everyone to avoid apps.slack.com at all costs. slack is beyond the maximum bloat threshold in virtually every aspect imaginable, TOS and licensing most especially. build elsewhere

We need to return to a world where we primarily own things, not rent them. If the software executable can be thought of as a machine, we should be able to own the version/instance of it we purchased the license for. We may not own the intellectual property, but we should have enough ownership to install it on a personal cloud computer we own and run it until such time we need to upgrade it.

An alternative to look into, https://element.io/ using Matrix, especially if encryption is preferred.