To be fair, Microsoft now pays the bills for the entire company, since electron is Githubs project as I have come to understand it

Which makes me wonder: where do the donations actually go? It looks like the total amount is less than 15k, so everything donated is very easily overshadowed by MSFT's contributions, and I don't see any hints at a payment-for-contributions program on the electron github.

The donations go by paying the salaries of most of the top electron devs since they work for github which is owned by Microsoft.

The donations do not come remotely close to paying even a single person's salary.

Beer money?

Several Slack employees contribute core source code to Electron. I believe they may even have several dedicated employees working on Electron full time. Same goes for MS.

The top donor on that page is Facebook, which has given $9,000 total. Next highest is $745. Just a few commits' worth of development time costs a lot more than that, and both Microsoft and Slack have been major contributors to Electron.

I would say VS Code is pretty good contribution. Since it's open source it can also be seen as a large code example.

Hi, Felix from Slack's Electron team here.

Slack co-maintains Electron together with GitHub, employing multiple core maintainers full-time, contracting those who can't join us full-time. We've also just hosted (and paid for) the first Electron conference. We're also maintaining a fairly large number of electron-userland modules.

tl;dr: That page might be misleading, we're investing heavily in Electron.

Any plans on dealing with Slack's/Electron's memory footprint?

Yes, we’re actively working on that.

I’d rather Slack just stop using electron and write a real native app; they can certainly afford it. Meanwhile, Slack remains an incredible resource hog.

It also behaves very erratically on a slower channels. On 3G speeds and lower it becomes basically unusable - messages are not sent or sent in the wrong order.

Why it needs so much resources just to send a few bytes of text?..

> Why it needs so much resources just to send a few bytes of text?..

Waste. It doesn't cost them much[0], and they don't seem to care on an ethical level about it either, and wastefulness allows them to achieve their business goals faster. Until there's a business pressure for it, things won't improve, and I have no idea what such pressure could be.

--

[0] - How many of their users are captive anyway? I didn't choose to use Slack, some non-tech folks at the company I'm working with chose it. Elsewhere, someone in the community of a technology I use also chose Slack. So now I'm forced to use them in both cases.

Slack takes 5-7 seconds to start up and connect on an ultra low latency 300 Mbit connection. I really wish there were a native app on Mac.

The Slack integration is a bit rough still, but: https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

There is:

https://www.sblack.online

AFAICT that is not native:

> Sblack works exactly like a browser with small tweaks. We inject the dark mode style at the end of the Slack’s html, and that’s it

I bet it's just embedding a WebView, and the app is small because it uses the system's WebKit2

That’s not a native app, it’s a app wrapping a web view.

Donations are a voluntary contribution based on "feeling good", and companies especially big publicly funded companies can rarely donate to "feel good". Its hard to justify to financiers why you should pay for open-source updates, if you can get them for free anyway.

It just highlights why donation is a terrible business model for open-source.

Come up with a better support model and people will pay.

are you kidding, GitHub belongs to Microsoft, they would be giving themselves money