Comment by kevinr

11 years ago

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 easy to watch and participate in multiple conversations at the same time. Zulip's threading model exists somewhere between Slack's rigid "rooms" model and Twitter's everything-is-public model, so it's much lighter-weight to participate in multiple places at once than on Slack but it's also easier than on Twitter to have the right conversation with the right people without bothering others with something irrelevant to them. And Zulip's threading model makes it much easier to have multiple conversations within the same space without stepping on each others' toes or getting distracted.

Our remote folks rely on it particularly heavily. When Zulip got acquired it was our remote employees and their managers who were showing up outside my cube with pitchforks when I breathed a word of turning it off. It gives folks in other offices or working from home a watercooler and a way to virtually tap a group of coworkers lightly on the shoulder when they need help.

Basically we can't live without it, so I'm super-excited to see it finally open sourced. Thanks for making it happen. :-)

31 comments

kevinr

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sytse  11 years ago

So Zulip was acquired in March 2014 http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/17/dropbox-acquires-zulip-a-st...

You mention considering to turn it off. Is open sourcing it a way to keep the project going? Any idea how many people at Dropbox will be tasked with maintaining it?

  • tabbott  11 years ago

    Just to clarify, most users of Zulip were using the central cloud service (zulip.com). Kevin's experience is from one of the Zulip customers who had "Zulip Enterprise" (aka a Zulip server in their own data center -- which is also the basis of the "self-hosted production server" installation process you see now is based on). So "turning it off" in this case refers to their discussions about their internal deployment, not the Zulip cloud service (which is still running for existing Zulip users today).

    I think my blog post covers pretty well why we open sourced Zulip: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a....

new299  11 years ago

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.

  • noelsusman  11 years ago

    Do you boycott every company that has any questionable people on their board? This feels like cherry picking because of how high profile Rice is. Her only crimes are being in the Bush administration and doing her job, and being on the board of an oil company. That's pretty weak.

  • dave_sullivan  11 years ago

    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?

    • CydeWeys  11 years ago

      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.

      6 replies →

  • eli  11 years ago

    But your complaints have nothing to do with the codebase. How would a fork help? If I fork it and change nothing but the name does it become palatable to you?

hobarrera  11 years ago

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 )