Dropbox Open Sources Zulip Group Chat Tool

Facebook, Google and many other name brand technology companies have shown themselves to be strong contributors to the open source community, and the latest company to open source a potentially very useful tool is Dropbox. The company recently held its Dropbox Hack Week, and reassembled the original team from Zulip (a group chat application optimized for software development teams that was acquired by Dropbox in 2014) to tackle open sourcing Zulip on an ambitious timeline.

Now, Dropbox has released the Zulip chat application as open source.

According to a blog post by Zulip co-founder Tim Abbott, Dropbox has released everything, including the server, Android and iOS mobile apps, desktop apps for Mac, Linux and Windows, and the Puppet configuration needed to run the Zulip server in production.

Every group chat in Zulip has a topic, potentially making it easy to keep conversations straight. An example of a group chat use case might be coworkers discussing a software bug or content headed for a website.

The Dropbox blog post notes the following:

"The world of open source chat has for a long been dominated by IRC and XMPP, both of which are very old and haven’t advanced materially in the last decade. In comparison, Zulip starts with many useful features and integrations expected by software development teams today and has a well-engineered, maintainable codebase for those that are missing. We’re very excited to see what people build on top of Zulip."

 Indeed, the Dropbox team fully expects Zulip to branch into new incarnations and group chat concepts. You can find out much more here.