IRC and mailing lists and forums is pretty much were open source communities live and work together for several decades.
Competitors want to reach out to such communities and vendor lock-in them. Nothing new, had been tried before with MSN Messenger, AIM, Skype videochat, etc. though IRC will hopefully stay about such waves and fades - it's a rather simple protocol, has a good file transfer mechanism and thousands of native, it cannot be censored (words filtered) and web clients for every platform and needs (incl bots).
Competitors want to reach out to such communities and vendor lock-in them. Nothing new, had been tried before with MSN Messenger, AIM, Skype videochat, etc. though IRC will hopefully stay about such waves and fades - it's a rather simple protocol, has a good file transfer mechanism and thousands of native, it cannot be censored (words filtered) and web clients for every platform and needs (incl bots).