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Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

zulip.org

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Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#61

Post by ossreality »

JoshM33k wrote: post #56
tbingmann wrote: post #8

Slack, Zulip, this feels like we are back in 1999, when the internet was divided by ICQ, AOL Instant Messanger, Windows Live Messanger, and Yahoo Messanger. (Instant/Live was a plus back then). And the only innovation over IRC was a backlog and buddy list. I wonder when the Trillian of Slack+Zulip will come out. I hope Trillian (which still exists) is already working on it.

Those types of fragmentation issues never went away, they just changed focus. Whether it is Slack vs. Hipchat vs. Zulip, or WhatsApp vs. iMessage vs. text vs. Hangouts... more options means more (and easier!) ways to contact friends, family, and coworkers, but also means that you have to memorize a "best way to reach me" chart for each individual person.

>more options means more (and easier!) ways to contact friends, family, and coworkers

utter nonsense.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#62

Post by chc »

scrollaway wrote: post #58
coldtea wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only Slack and Zulip are for specific teams/companies, not for the public at large. So there's no "fragmentation" issue, any more that there's one when a company uses Bugzilla and the other uses JIRA.

This is a very short sighted view. There is a real need for an alternative to IRC - and closed source products do not cut it when we are talking about communication. What parent is talking about is a real problem. There's micro-ecosystems out there around specific closed source products, all of them centralized, none of them compatible... and in the mean time, the only real decentralized, open source group chat solut…

As noted in the OP, Zulip is not a closed-source product anymore. But I'm not sure that really helps so much with the immediate problem, since it's more the proliferation of protocols rather than the scarcity of source that causes issues.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#63

Post by tbingmann »

JoshM33k wrote: post #56
tbingmann wrote: post #8

Slack, Zulip, this feels like we are back in 1999, when the internet was divided by ICQ, AOL Instant Messanger, Windows Live Messanger, and Yahoo Messanger. (Instant/Live was a plus back then). And the only innovation over IRC was a backlog and buddy list. I wonder when the Trillian of Slack+Zulip will come out. I hope Trillian (which still exists) is already working on it.

Those types of fragmentation issues never went away, they just changed focus. Whether it is Slack vs. Hipchat vs. Zulip, or WhatsApp vs. iMessage vs. text vs. Hangouts... more options means more (and easier!) ways to contact friends, family, and coworkers, but also means that you have to memorize a "best way to reach me" chart for each individual person.

Best ask them first via email.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#64

Post by rdtsc »

JoshM33k wrote: post #56
tbingmann wrote: post #8

Slack, Zulip, this feels like we are back in 1999, when the internet was divided by ICQ, AOL Instant Messanger, Windows Live Messanger, and Yahoo Messanger. (Instant/Live was a plus back then). And the only innovation over IRC was a backlog and buddy list. I wonder when the Trillian of Slack+Zulip will come out. I hope Trillian (which still exists) is already working on it.

Those types of fragmentation issues never went away, they just changed focus. Whether it is Slack vs. Hipchat vs. Zulip, or WhatsApp vs. iMessage vs. text vs. Hangouts... more options means more (and easier!) ways to contact friends, family, and coworkers, but also means that you have to memorize a "best way to reach me" chart for each individual person.

They were on their way out as some services were federating via XMPP. Then some stopped supporting it.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#66

Post by rdtsc »

scrollaway wrote: post #58
coldtea wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only Slack and Zulip are for specific teams/companies, not for the public at large. So there's no "fragmentation" issue, any more that there's one when a company uses Bugzilla and the other uses JIRA.

This is a very short sighted view. There is a real need for an alternative to IRC - and closed source products do not cut it when we are talking about communication. What parent is talking about is a real problem. There's micro-ecosystems out there around specific closed source products, all of them centralized, none of them compatible... and in the mean time, the only real decentralized, open source group chat solut…

The problem is not just the open vs closed source. Even if Google, Yahoo, Slack all open source their products. You'd still not be able to send messages from one to another unless they also federate at the protocol level.

So you can be connected with a universal "messaging" client to any of the available servers then send messages to someone on Google, or Slack etc.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#67

Post by egypturnash »

BradRuderman wrote: post #55
obrajesse wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They got the team behind it, who now work on other parts of Dropobox

Right by why maintain the chat app? Why not just buy slack.

Buying Slack requires Slack to be interested in selling themselves.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#68

Post by zeveb »

dingdingdang wrote: post #11

Would be really interesting if one could program a secure way for the individually hosted servers to hook up with each other and verify the correctness of one another while at the same time keeping the messages secure (I guess bitcoins come to mind here..). Up until something like this happens I guess centralized social networks are going to rule the roost since the value of networks is almost always in their reach/s…

> Would be really interesting if one could program a secure way for the individually hosted servers to hook up with each other and verify the correctness of one another while at the same time keeping the messages secure (I guess bitcoins come to mind here..).

You don't need a blockchain for that! Looking at the docs, it looks like Zulip messages are visible to servers anyway; that means that there's no need to encrypt the messages to hide them from the servers.

Now, supporting end-to-end encryption for chat would be pretty cool, but it's not going to happen in a browser client (since browser clients are currently completely at the mercy of servers, and will be so for the foreseeable future).

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#69

Post by SwellJoe »

proksoup wrote: post #22
SwellJoe wrote: post #10

I was just about to try out Mattermost for our company communications. It integrates with a few things including gitlab, but Zulip seems to have a larger number of integration options, which is awesome. Anybody tried both and have thoughts on them? I still prefer to host my own infrastructure, and I want to be able to archive and categorize a discussion (after it's happened) for searchability, but a couple of our peo…

I think HipChat might be the only one backing the XMPP horse still. A timeline [1]. [1] https://cdn.sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf

HipChat, while providing the XMPP backend, and a self-hosted option, isn't cheap, and doesn't seem to provide the extensibility that an open source option would. But, it's certainly closer to the right thing than Slack (at least, from a surface level examination).

I guess it doesn't even need to be XMPP, specifically. But, some open standard and some level of interoperability would be nice. In googling I came upon matrix.org, which also seems promising, but has the same problem XMPP has of not having great clients (though I also found Kaiwa, which looks like a pretty good XMPP client with Slack-like features). Maybe one of these open source projects will formalize their protocol, and we can all move forward on interop with that.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#70

Post by cjbprime »

BradRuderman wrote: post #55
obrajesse wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They got the team behind it, who now work on other parts of Dropobox

Right by why maintain the chat app? Why not just buy slack.

You're assuming:

* that Slack was for sale too

* that Dropbox wanted the app, rather than the people who made the app

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