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Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

zulip.org

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Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#241

Post by hobarrera »

ex3ndr wrote: post #119
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.

We ( https://actor.im ) are actually working on this, but not trying to connect slack, but building telegram, skype, whatsapp, social networks to one, slack like interface that will help you easily manage communications from many networks. This is not our main feature, just something like side project.

I also really dislike the idea of having to register with a phone number. I reminds me of ICQ, where I had to dig up some obscure number to log in. Except, I also lose my account permanently the moment I lose my phone.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#242

Post by sitkack »

on_ wrote: post #123
eric-hu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

"Sufficiently Smart Compiler" refers to something which has been hand waved away as a "Simple Matter of Engineering" or an "Exercise for the Reader" as to be impossibly difficult. Compilers are already very smart, usually the sufficient part of the SSC is a tongue in cheek Spock like sufficient. See the failure of Itanium betting that it could produce the SSC to create fast code. It was never built, the performance never matched expectations and it failed.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#243

Post by hobarrera »

fallat wrote: post #210
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.

IRC+ZNC = backlog support, and WAY more. I don't know why you'd want anything else.

> I don't know why you'd want anything else.

Voice+video just to begin with. The ability to work on poor networks (mobile?), read notifications, delivery notifications.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#244

Post by hobarrera »

ara4n wrote: post #229
SwellJoe wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

[Matrix lead here] The open source clients for both Matrix and XMPP are improving a lot currently. On the Matrix side there's vector.im; on XMPP there's Kaiwa and Conversations.im. If you want to help break the fragmentation and have an open standards based approach please run the clients and help us make them better - it is open source, after all!

Something really missing about matrix (at least last time I looked) is a hosted option with my own domain.

I don't want to use the domain you provide, because I'm tied to a provider forever. I don't want to set up my server right now, because it's just too much work to try something that I may end up dumping (because nobody else I know uses it yet).

The overhead to get it is too high, when you're just betting it'll prosper.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#246

Post by sgk284 »

hobarrera wrote: post #234
kevinr wrote: post #149

We've been using Zulip internally for a couple of years now. We've used IRC and Jabber, looked at Slack and Hipchat and Skype and Lync, and somehow keep coming back to Zulip. It lets us have real, ongoing, and substantive conversations, with a large number of participants, without being overwhelmed. I sometimes feel like Twitter is actually a better comparison for Zulip than Slack---in Zulip like on Twitter, it's eas…

There's something that quite surprised me: being a software company: how is it that you've never gotten around to a Linux client? Do most of you use the web-version, or is dropbox mostly windows-centric (sorry, I'm quite ignorant about dropbox team's culture. :D )

Most tech companies (doubly so in the Bay Area) develop on Macs and deploy (servers) on Linux. There'd be little pressure to develop a Linux client since most devs are spending their day on a Mac.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#247

Post by jwheare2 »

rikkus wrote: post #137
shanemhansen wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every week I have to use a Cisco jabber client, Hipchat, Slack, and Hangouts within the same company. I know it's got less of a "cool" factor because it wasn't invented last week, but I soooo wish everyone would just use IRC. Use irccloud if you want some nice apps and picture embedding.

Is it possible to get what Slack provides using IRC? I mean the whole package, not just the text chat. Consider enterprise-friendliness, excellent mobile clients, zero-setup required (no separate keep-you-online relays), really easy integrations, etc.? We are adopting Slack because it's great and I'd have loved to make a case for IRC but I wouldn't know what server to recommend (we don't really want to install it, bu…

Any reason you rejected IRCCloud? (disclosure: my company). We host private servers for teams and do the majority of what you're asking for.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#249

Post by jallmann »

e12e wrote: post #216
jallmann wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Has anyone got experience with both XMPP and SIP/H.323? I've worked with all three. The H.323 vs SIP battle was fought a long time ago... for better or worse, SIP won. Any H.323 systems still in the wild can probably be considered "legacy." That being said, while H.323 has more "batteries included," its call flow is accordingly more complex. SIP is not too bad, there is some subtlety to it, but the main issue is th…

Sigh, sorry to hear that. I was hoping h.323 might work well for a personal call system with the option of ditching regular cell service. And just try and brute force most communication through h.323 :-/ It seems obvious multimedia calls is part of our future, and I refuse to let that be dictated by corporate lock-in -- be that Skype/Lync, Hangouts or whatever Facebook will launch when they enable videochat. And any…

> I was hoping h.323 might work well for a personal call system with the option of ditching regular cell service. And just try and brute force most communication through h.323

I guess you could try to run H.323 through a $protocol bridge, but I don't know why you would want to. Retrofitting modern features onto H.323 does not seem like fun. Because if SIP suffers from being too general, H.323 suffers from being way too specific in its architecture and technology requirements -- read through some of the associated specs, eg H.245, and it's not hard to see why SIP won. For the longest time, there was not even the notion of URI addressing...

> SIP for phone ... maybe SIP for videochat (but I'm sceptical

In SIP (and most well-designed protocols), there is no fundamental difference between an audio and a video call. It's just capability negotiation and RTP. Actual interoperability is the problem... and that is one of the reasons vendors like to create closed networks, so they can guarantee the experience end-to-end.

Regarding gating and lock-in: Part of it may be a desire for a proprietary walled garden [1], but a big reason is logistical as well -- one of the reasons Google disabled XMPP federation was because of abuse. This is the same reason you can't dial directly into the PSTN without going through a trusted trunk, and why unlicensed use of cellular frequencies (or any RF, really) is illegal.

[1] Actually, the reason the PSTN is federated is probably more an accident of history than anything else. If not for the AT&T monopoly (and subsequent breakup), people would have been complaining about siloed telephone services 50 years ago! See Tim Wu's The Master Switch for a nice treatment of this.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#250

Post by XorNot »

voltagex_ wrote: post #222
scrollaway wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closest you can get is a foss slack alternative such as Mattermost, and push for an IRC bridge (Mattermost is working on it it seems: https://github.com/mattermost/platform/issues/650 ). But it's not possible to get what you're asking without breaking the IRC protocol - it's not easily extended and the formatting rules are icky mIRC crap.

Go help with IRCv3 - you're talking about capabilities, which are part of the v3 protocol. http://ircv3.net/specs/core/capability-negotiation-3.2.html

The trick with capabilities is you need them to be reasonably standard. Which means the go to IRCv3 server should ship with them turned on, and the reference client should be capable of using them.
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