zulip/templates/zerver/history.html

{% extends "zerver/portico.html" %}

{% block title %}
<title>Zulip: the best group chat for open source projects</title>
{% endblock %}

{% block customhead %}
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
{{ render_bundle('landing-page') }}

{% endblock %}

{% block portico_content %}

{% include 'zerver/landing_nav.html' %}

<div class="portico-landing why-page no-slide">
    <div class="hero bg-pycon">
        <div class="bg-dimmer"></div>
        <div class="content">
            <h1 class="center">About the Zulip project</h1>
            <p>Learn about the history of the Zulip project and community!</p>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="main">
        <div class="padded-content">
            <div class="inner-content">
                <div class="photo-description">
                    Developers contributing to Zulip at the PyCon 2017
                    sprints in Portland, Oregon.  Over 75 people
                    sprinted on Zulip during the 4-day event!
                </div>

                <h1>About Zulip</h1>

                <p>
                    This server is an installation of version {{ zulip_version }} of
                    the <a href="https://zulipchat.com">Zulip open source group chat
                    software</a>.  Written in Python and using the Django web framework,
                    Zulip has an extensive real-time messaging featureset, including
                    both group and private messaging, conversation streams, powerful
                    search, drag-and-drop file uploads, image previews, audible
                    notifications, missed-message emails, markdown formatting, desktop
                    and mobile apps, dozens of integrations, and much, much more.
                </p>

                <p>
                    Zulip was designed from the ground up to optimize the productivity
                    of discussions and real-time decision-making.  Zulip's unique model
                    for threading topics, together with its system for tracking unread
                    messages, make it easy to have multiple simultaneous conversations
                    in the same stream.  As a result, Zulip is more efficient than any
                    other chat product for catching up on conversations you missed while
                    you were away from your devices.  You can read exactly the threads
                    that are important to you, and it feels natural to follow up on
                    conversations that happened while you were away.
                </p>

                <p>
                    Zulip's vision is to create the world's best group chat software,
                    completely open source, so that everyone has the freedom to
                    customize, improve, and run their own copy of this essential piece
                    of collaboration infrastructure.
                </p>

                <p>
                    Further information on the Zulip project and <a href="/features">its
                    features</a> can be found on
                    the <a href="https://www.zulip.org">Zulip open source project's
                    website</a> and
                    the <a href="https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/">Zulip
                    documentation</a>.
                </p>

                <h2>Zulip Community</h2>

                <p>
                    Zulip is developed by a vibrant community of developers from around
                    the world.  Every month, dozens of people contribute code to it, and
                    dozens more contribute bug reports, feedback, and translations.  The
                    Zulip community welcomes new contributors from any background.  The
                    project has an easy to install development environment, an extensive
                    test suite,
                    and <a href="https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/">over 100,000
                    words of developer documentation</a> to make it easy for new
                    contributors to contribute effectively to the project.
                </p>

                <h3 class=" normal">Contributing to Zulip</h3>

                <p>
                    If you'd like to join the Zulip community, we'd love to have you!
                    Please
                    visit <a href="https://github.com/zulip/zulip/#zulip-overview">the
                    main Zulip project on GitHub</a> for details on how to get involved!
                </p>

                <h2>Early history</h2>

                <p>
                    Zulip was originally developed by Zulip, Inc., a small startup in
                    Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Zulip, Inc. was founded by the MIT team
                    that previously created
                    <a href="https://www.ksplice.com">Ksplice</a>, software for
                    live-patching a running Linux kernel.  Zulip was inspired by
                    the <a href="https://barnowl.mit.edu/">Barnowl</a> client for
                    the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol)">Zephyr</a>
                    protocol, and the incredible community that Zephyr supported at MIT.
                </p>

                <p>
                    Zulip, Inc. was acquired by Dropbox in early 2014, while the product
                    was still in private beta.  Zulip's beta
                    users <a href="https://www.recurse.com/blog/90-zulip-supporting-oss-at-the-recurse-center">loved
                    Zulip's unique user experience</a> and continued using it, despite
                    the fact that the product was not being actively developed.  After a
                    year and a half, Dropbox generously decided to release Zulip as open
                    source software so that Zulip's users could continue enjoying the
                    software.
                </p>

                <p>
                    As a result, the first time the public had the opportunity to use
                    Zulip was when Dropbox
                    <a href="https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a-dropbox-hack-week-project/">released
                    Zulip as open source software</a> in late 2015.  The open sourcing
                    announcement was very popular, staying at the top of
                    both <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279961">Hacker
                    News</a>
                    and <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3me9qp/dropbox_has_open_sourced_zulip_group_chat_software/">the
                    programming subreddit</a> for an entire day.
                </p>

                <p>
                    Zulip was open sourced with the complete version control history
                    intact because 10 Zulip users visited Dropbox for a full week to
                    help with the technical work.  The Zulip community is incredibly
                    grateful to both Dropbox and those enthusiastic early users for
                    making the Zulip open source project possible.
                </p>

                <h2>Success as an open source project</h2>

                <p>
                    At first, the Zulip open source project was
                    maintained with just a bit of lead developer Tim
                    Abbott's nights and weekends.  However, the
                    community steadily gained new contributors, and
                    has now grown to be one of the world's largest and
                    most active open source projects.  We highlight a
                    few milestones below:
                </p>

                <ul>
                    <li>
                        By the end of 2015, the open source project
                        was already going strong with a community of
                        dozens of developers around the world.
                    </li>
                    <li>
                        At the PyCon Sprints in May 2016, dozens of
                        developers got involved in contributing to
                        Zulip; a major accomplishment from those
                        sprints
                        was <a href="https://blog.zulip.org/2016/10/13/static-types-in-python-oh-mypy/">annotating
                        Zulip with mypy static types</a>.
                    </li>
                    <li>
                        By late
                        2016, <a href="https://github.com/zulip/zulip/graphs/contributors">more
                        than 150 people from all over the world</a>
                        had contributed almost 1000 pull requests to
                        the software, and the Zulip project was moving
                        faster than when the original startup employed
                        11 full-time engineers.
                    </li>
                    <li>
                        At the PyCon Sprints in May 2017, dozens of
                        Zulip core developers gathered and led the
                        largest PyCon sprint ever, with over 75
                        developers contributing to Zulip over course
                        of the 4-day event.
                    </li>
                    <li>
                        As of August 2017, the Zulip server project had
                        merged <a href="https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pulls">over
                        4000 pull requests</a> written by
                        <a href="https://github.com/zulip/zulip/graphs/contributors">well
                        over 325 developers</a>.
                    </li>
                </ul>
            </div>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

{% endblock %}