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Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

zulip.org

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Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#261

Post by inopinatus »

voltagex_ wrote: post #220
inopinatus wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't resolve the multifarious issues with identity, reliability, scalability, federation, standardisation &c &c that further rule IRC out from being the universal panacea.

It doesn't have to be. Go help with IRCv3 - http://ircv3.net/ . Almost everything that's in Slack and Zulip would just be a capability extension.

I stopped reading when the charter said "we are not working on the server protocol". The server protocol is the limiting factor in IRC's architecture.

My interest is in federated, reliable, ad-hoc messaging and IRC's acyclic forwarding graph and lack of any inherent identity model make that impossible.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#262

Post by dave_sullivan »

new299 wrote: post #254
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…

I'm sure it's a great communications tool, however since Rice joined Dropbox's board ( http://www.drop-dropbox.com/ ) I'd have severe concerns using anything released by Dropbox. Even if it's open source. And while I apologize for a tangential comment, people should be aware of the politics promoted by their software vendors. Hopefully if it's a truly valuable tool it will be forked and audited.

I agree in principal that the politics behind a business matter. But why focus on Dropbox? Rice teaches at Stanford too, why not boycott Stanford and anything coming out of it?

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#263

Post by CydeWeys »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #262
new299 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it's a great communications tool, however since Rice joined Dropbox's board ( http://www.drop-dropbox.com/ ) I'd have severe concerns using anything released by Dropbox. Even if it's open source. And while I apologize for a tangential comment, people should be aware of the politics promoted by their software vendors. Hopefully if it's a truly valuable tool it will be forked and audited.

I agree in principal that the politics behind a business matter. But why focus on Dropbox? Rice teaches at Stanford too, why not boycott Stanford and anything coming out of it?

There's a big difference in scope and impact between merely teaching somewhere and being on the Board of Directors and running it. It's not equivalent.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#264

Post by CydeWeys »

sgk284 wrote: post #246
hobarrera wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everyone at my work (a big company) has Linux desktops. Granted we wouldn't use Zulip, or anything else hosted externally for that matter, but this does create a large demand for other types of software running on a Linux desktop from us, e.g. IDEs.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#265

Post by CydeWeys »

shanemhansen wrote: post #95
JoshM33k wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

IRC's lack of scrollback alone kills it for these considerations, unfortunately. If there's an incident or discussion in progress and you only join the room partway through you have no way of catching up to speed.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#266

Post by CydeWeys »

TillE wrote: post #77
tbingmann wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best ask them first via email.

I don't even know my girlfriend's email address. I'm 30, and she's only a few years younger. The world is strange now. I miss Google Wave. Not the messy implementation, but the promise of a big influential company throwing its weight behind a modern, open communication protocol.

Weird. I'm 30 too and I know all of my acquaintances' email addresses. How do you not know your girlfriend's email address? You can't even do something as simple as forwarding her your travel tickets so she knows your itinerary, or a receipt for concert tickets so she knows when it is, or send out a group email with details of the time and location of your party, etc.

Email was drifting off for me a handful of years back, but ever since smartphones ascended email has experienced a huge resurgence. I'm likely to use it in preference to SMS for (a) longer messages and (b) messages with multiple recipients (e.g. your standard activity planning emails).

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#267

Post by CydeWeys »

jedrek wrote: post #39
peruvian wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What annoys me about stuff like Slack is that it's misused. It's made for small teams but I've been 10k people open source projects use it instead of IRC. Of course, it was laggy and they eventually couldn't afford it.

Obfuscating usernames with real names and no ignore are also massive downsides.

That was the biggest annoyance I experienced at companies that based their communications around IM clients like AIM or Gtalk. My previous company switched to HipChat at some point and everyone showing up as their real name instead of some stupid username was a surprisingly huge improvement.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#268

Post by iyn »

chetanahuja wrote: post #209
sytse wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! If I read https://www.recurse.com/blog/90-zulip-supporting-oss-at-the-... correctly Dropbox has helped to open source it but will not dedicate engineers to it. In that case it is interesting that you'll have to sign a Dropbox CLA to contribute https://github.com/zulip/zulip#contributing-to-zulip . But even with that, the code is under Apache 2, it is great that Dropbox took the time to properly document every…

Sytse, we use gitlab enterprise edition at packetzoom (Our VP eng is a major gitlab contributor). We'd love nothing more than have a proper chat system with good native clients. Slack has excellent UX and mostly decent native clients but the pricing and/or holding our chat logs hostage has always bugged me. Please consider integrating zulip. Though even without gitlab integration, we'll still try it out anyway.

I'd also like to see integration between Zupip and GitLab.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#269

Post by CydeWeys »

krig wrote: post #131

"You can install a Zulip server on a system with 2G of RAM, but for production use we recommend a system with 4GB of RAM or more." Something has gone horribly wrong when a chat server can barely run on 2G. edit: As a frame of reference, here's what Inspire IRCd needs: > A network with 3000-4000 locally connected clients and 10000 open channels experiences a constant 1-4% CPU use with 70MB of RAM use. This won't go up…

Who cares though? A 4 GiB stick of ECC server RAM is $35-50, which is only about $10 more expensive than a 2 GiB stick.

If you spent even twenty minutes of developer time trying to reduce memory usage, you've already lost money.

It may still be worth the total savings if someone solves it globally, but from the perspective of an individual company who wants to run this, it doesn't matter at all.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#270

Post by CydeWeys »

mikekchar wrote: post #207
manigandham wrote: post #140

Side note: Please STOP using tiny font weights. Text becomes ridiculously hard/painful to read. There's no reason to use a font-weight of 200 (or anything less than 500) on body text, save that for the headlines. http://i.imgur.com/r7a794n.png

There is something wrong with your rendering. What system are you using? It looks to me like the hinting and/or sub-pixel rendering is wrong. I had a lot of problems with this when I moved to Arch Linux because Debian had done some default setup that I needed to figure out in Arch. Here are my xresources for xft if you are using Linux (probably formatted badly, but you can get an idea): Xft.autohint: 0 Xft.lcdfilter:…

Enough other people (who can read other websites perfectly fine) are complaining about breakage that it's pretty clear this site is doing something wrong. "You had one job ..." applies here. Body text on a webpage should be readable on all platforms.
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