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Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

zulip.org

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Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#311

Post by fleetfox »

plonh wrote: post #306
CydeWeys wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google Drive doesn't even work on Linux. Linux Desktop will never be more than a VM host or Web Browser host.

I've been using linux on workstation for last 6 years. I have to run VM with Windows, only when i have to interact with some Microsoft product directly. It may not be ideal solution for every use case, but it works.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#312

Post by paulej »

e12e wrote: post #198
scrollaway wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ One of the best things that could happen today I think is Google open sourcing the Hangouts protocol. It's a reasonable alternative to XMPP and has a massive userbase. The clients are pretty horrible but that might be completely unrelated to how good the protocol is (Note: I have no idea how good it is. Because it's closed source.). I was hopeful for a while but I don't really see it happening anymore :( Oh…

Has anyone got experience with both XMPP and SIP/H.323? From what I've been able to figure out, H.323 looks like it's one of the better candidates of protocols that exist today and is "reasonably" simple... while SIP... well, SIP smells a lot like it came from big TelCos. And not in a good way. See eg: https://www.packetizer.com/ipmc/h323_vs_sip/

I was the editor of the H.323 spec years ago. Funny you would say that SIP looks like it comes from the telcos, when the whole aim with SIP was to create just the opposite. H.323 has often been accused of being created by telcos, too. Truth is, folks from the traditional enterprise voice equipment makers shaped both.

SIP was adopted by 3GPP in 1999 to be used in the mobile networks. Of course, that trickled throughout the telcos, so it now is widely used in the telco space. H.323 was widely used for PSTN backhauling to reduce tolls. However, SIP is more prevalent there, I'd guess.

Enterprise networks still use both H.323 and SIP, with more desk phones using SIP and videoconferencing equipment split, but moving to SIP.

That said, any move to SIP these days is only because there is nothing better. WebRTC is the next big thing. It borrows SDP from SIP, but no signaling protocol is defined.

Personally, I'd like to realize the vision behind what was intended to be H.325, which was to be a JSON-based signalling protocol that is fully distributed. Each application could implement whatever protocol it wanted, and they would all be associated through H.325, giving the user the feeling that these different applications work closely together. That would be possible, even when applications run on different devices.

Alas, there seems to be no financial motivator for those that control the market to explore that concept, so we're stuck with H.323, SIP, and WebRTC (and various proprietary glue pieces). The trend these days seems to be toward proprietary solutions, providing limited interop with others through SIP. Limited, as in nothing but basic voice and video.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#313

Post by manigandham »

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:…

Nothing is broken with my rendering or system. This is a fresh Windows 10 on a normal 1900x1200 24" monitor.

The font used is a fancy font with thinner strokes and then using a font-weight of 200 makes it that much smaller, making it illegible. There's no reason to make body text so skinny and it's often better to stick with normal system fonts.

Headlines and occasional larger text can have more styling. This is just a failure of design/UX on this site.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#314

Post by e12e »

paulej wrote: post #312
e12e wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone got experience with both XMPP and SIP/H.323? From what I've been able to figure out, H.323 looks like it's one of the better candidates of protocols that exist today and is "reasonably" simple... while SIP... well, SIP smells a lot like it came from big TelCos. And not in a good way. See eg: https://www.packetizer.com/ipmc/h323_vs_sip/

I was the editor of the H.323 spec years ago. Funny you would say that SIP looks like it comes from the telcos, when the whole aim with SIP was to create just the opposite. H.323 has often been accused of being created by telcos, too. Truth is, folks from the traditional enterprise voice equipment makers shaped both. SIP was adopted by 3GPP in 1999 to be used in the mobile networks. Of course, that trickled throughou…

I recently discovered DTLS and QUIC, of which DTLS appear to be most interesting as a "general use" thing. We do of course not actually have a shortage of protocols, but it'd be nice to have something that was a little more suited for the "new" Internet. Full authentication/encryption, something lighter than TCP for multimedia -- and something that actually has a hope of crossing cheap DSL routers.

QUIC looks interesting, but a) is very concentrated on being a transport for http/2, b) is in flux, and c) Google apparently haven't donated any code that makes sense for production (excepting client-side in Chromium).

DTLS is closely connected with WebRTC, has several implementations (though, apparently no support in Erlang/Elixir yet?) and given the current push behind WebRTC appears to be here to stay.

Honestly, I don't know how interesting "hardware phones" are anymore. As long as one can get something to work over wlan with android, things "should" be real-world deployable. And I don't have 100s of SIP devices, so I don't need to care ;-).

It may turn out that wlan+android+WebRTC+DTLS never achieves the kind of latency needed for good live video/audio... I haven't experimented that much, but hopefully it's "good enough".

At any rate, appears that SIP really is the only interop that currently works. At first glance it does seem a little complex for the use-case of text messages, inconvenient in terms of addressing -- but maybe a core focused on WebRTC/IPv6 with gateways for SIP the way to go.

Either way, I guess as long as no big players want interop, it doesn't really matter. One'll just have to make a solution that works for inter-org/inter-friends communication, with the option to federate with those interesting in joining/building a new network. Doesn't look like it'll be easy to take a bite out of FB Messenger/Google Hangouts/WhatsApp etc.

https://webrtcglossary.com/dtls-srtp/

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#315

Post by mentat »

plonh wrote: post #305
dave_sullivan wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. As a professor at Stanford, she's teaching the future rulers of the world how to rule. At Dropbox, she's showing up to board meetings and taking a salary.

Her teaching at Stanford is the same sort of trophy namedropping photo op that being on the board is. You can't actually get a PhD in Hegemony from school.

> PhD in Hegemony

Probably will cost me karma, but I find this incredibly amusing, thanks!

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#317

Post by kevinr »

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 )

There is a Linux desktop client, although it isn't mentioned on the front page with the other clients.

From https://zulip.org/clients.html:

> There's a Linux client, but we don't have binaries posted yet. We hope to have a PPA setup soon.[0] In the meantime, you can clone the git repo[1] and build from source.

[0]: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-desktop/issues/1

[1]: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-desktop

It's mostly a WebKit wrapper, just like the Mac and Windows clients, but it does provide an icon and a dedicated window and potentially better integration with system notifications etc.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#318

Post by kevinr »

CydeWeys wrote: post #264
sgk284 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Zulip can be hosted internally, and there is a desktop Linux client in addition to running fine in the usual zoo of Linux web browsers.

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#319

Post by Drdrdrq »

tabbott wrote: post #98
Drdrdrq wrote: post #88

No linux client? That's a deal breaker for us right there... Pity, looks interesting otherwise.

There is a Linux client! You can build it from source right now, and prebuilt binaries will be available in a PPA soon. Prebuilt binaries aren't available quite yet because it's a lot easier to submit to a PPA once you're already open source :)

Thanks, will check it out!

Re: Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip

#320

Post by hobarrera »

ara4n wrote: post #251
hobarrera wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Yup, agreed. We're planning to provide domain vhosting (ie point the SRV for your domain to matrix.org and you'll get your own server instance) which should help a bit, although doing that for free could start to get uneconomic. We also need to work out a nice way to let users migrate between providers.

Free for "2 users per domain" might catch on for those of us who use our own domain for email/im. Not the most common thing in the world, but probably quite common amongst your potential early adopters. All while keeping away domains with hundreds of users that would cripple your servers.
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