Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

zulip.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 323 posts

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#121

Post by zyxley »

coldtea wrote: post #117
scrollaway wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This is a very short sighted view. There is a real need for an alternative to IRC There might be one -- but this is absolutely not what this and Slack are aiming to do. > and closed source products do not cut it when we are talking about communication. Not sure about that. As it seems, for 99% of the world who only uses "closed source products" for chat, they do cut it. (Interoperability is orthogonal of course).

> There might be one -- but this is absolutely not what this and Slack are aiming to do.

That's kind of a weird statement to me, because every time I've sold a techie-type person on Slack it's been by describing it as "private IRC with persistent history and a bunch of other neat things".

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#122

Post by scrollaway »

coldtea wrote: post #117
scrollaway wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This is a very short sighted view. There is a real need for an alternative to IRC There might be one -- but this is absolutely not what this and Slack are aiming to do. > and closed source products do not cut it when we are talking about communication. Not sure about that. As it seems, for 99% of the world who only uses "closed source products" for chat, they do cut it. (Interoperability is orthogonal of course).

Slack and IRC are room-based, semi-synchronous, topic-centered communication protocols with support for direct messaging.

Slack literally took the concept of IRC and put a bunch of cool bells and whistles on it. They updated it, centralized it and sold the idea as an enterprise solution. It works great, and the tech could be a kickass replacement to IRC, done correctly.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#123

Post by on_ »

eric-hu wrote: post #45
on_ wrote: post #38

Smart play. If they can lock people in to their free chat client they can get a stronger foothold into enterprise and servicing smaller start-up/SMB companies. This is what Paul Graham talks about building an e-mail client, just call it a todo list. This is a storage application front-end. Slack and hipchat charge the money for secure storage, file transfer and data. That is Dropbox's competitive advantage and a grea…

For others who didn't get the PG reference: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

Yep. I like his talk at Pycon in 08, where he talks about building a better email client[0] but it is also noted in your link. Thanks, I switched back from mobile and meant to post it.

Incidentally, if anyone has seen his Pycon talk, one of his ideas is "Bring Back the Old More's Law", and if you are curious it is ~2-3 minutes here[1]. I have always been wondering what he means when he says a "sufficiently smart compiler is a byword for impossible" is this an AI reference or a deeper computer science theory that I am missing. Always been really curious.

[0]https://youtu.be/R9ITLdmfdLI?t=7m40s [1]https://youtu.be/R9ITLdmfdLI?t=21m38s

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#124

Post by zyxley »

nailer wrote: post #87
burger_moon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

?->building facebook clones->building twitter clones->building slack clones->? This does look like a good product though. Personally I like the style of this more than slack at first glance. Running your own server and being open source are awesome. I can't wait to see what people build on it.

Isn't Slack an IRC client with some project management features?

No, Slack is an IRC alternative (you can connect to it with an IRC client, but you lose many of the features) with assorted bells and whistles (emoji, adding reactions to posts, easy management of private rooms, etc), a bunch of integrations with other services, and persistent and fully searchable history.

That last one is really the key feature to me.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#125

Post by lwf »

scrollaway wrote: post #93
lwf wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have both already :) https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/master/bots/jabber_mirro... https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/master/bots/irc-mirror.p... In addition to Zephyr mirroring, which we've had since 2012.

Hurray \o/ Congrats on the release!

Thanks :)

To dive a bit deeper, while XMPP/IRC exists, and it wouldn't be hard to make the Zulip server natively speak XMPP to clients, that in-and-of-itself wouldn't be quite useful. A message sent to stream "ops" with topic "prod deploy" might look like this†:

  
    prod deploy
    Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd.
But there aren't any existing clients that have the UI to:

1. Show per-message subjects/topics in a meaningful way

2. Allow users to easily reply to a message preserving the subject

So we'd need client changes to make it truly useful.

†: Adapted from syntax specified in XEP-0045

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#128

Post by nailer »

zyxley wrote: post #124
nailer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Slack an IRC client with some project management features?

No, Slack is an IRC alternative (you can connect to it with an IRC client, but you lose many of the features) with assorted bells and whistles (emoji, adding reactions to posts, easy management of private rooms, etc), a bunch of integrations with other services, and persistent and fully searchable history. That last one is really the key feature to me.

Sorry, I don't mean IRC client as in uses the same protocol, but rather that it primarily does what an IRC client would. I think it's great they've found success though.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#129

Post by spike021 »

joonoro wrote: post #90
lwf wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide a screenshot and what browser/OS you're running? I'll look into it.

Looks pretty bad on my end too, Firefox on Windows 7 64bit. https://i.imgur.com/AlcbVbR.png

Same even with OSX, which to me is usually quite a bit easier to read.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#130

Post by sinak »

My one big question is: does Zulip support push notifications to the next version of the mobile app if you self-host the server?

I'm not exactly sure how that'd be possible, but I wonder if they've managed to figure it out somehow. It's the one big problem with self-hosted chat apps like Rocket.chat and others - APNS and GCM are both centralized, and it's hard to federate them to provide push services for self-hosted instances of open source projects.

Post reply on HN