Zulip Is Now Open Source
Dropbox has released Zulip, its group chat application designed for software development teams, as open source software. The release was completed during this year’s Dropbox Hack Week, when the original Zulip team was reconvened to take on the project with an ambitious timeline. Zulip was acquired by Dropbox in 2014.
The decision to open source Zulip stems from the passion of its user base, who have been eager to make their own improvements to the product. The Recurse Center has already announced plans to work on the Zulip open source project.
Dropbox considers contributing back to the open source community a key priority, having previously released projects such as the zxcvbn password strength estimator, the Djinni cross-language bridging library, the Hackpad codebase, and the Pyston JIT for Python.
What’s Included in the Release
Zulip is being released under the Apache license, and the release includes the full scope of the product:
- The Zulip server
- Android and iOS mobile apps
- Desktop apps for Mac, Linux, and Windows
- The complete Puppet configuration needed to run the Zulip server in production
An Alternative to Aging Chat Protocols
The open source chat landscape has long been dominated by IRC and XMPP, both of which are aging protocols that haven’t seen significant advancement in over a decade. Zulip enters this space with a substantial set of features and integrations that software development teams expect, built on a well-engineered, maintainable codebase. The open source community can now build on top of that foundation to add whatever capabilities are still missing.
