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<title>Zulip history</title>
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<div class="portico-landing why-page no-slide">
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            <h1 class="center">Zulip History</h1>
        </div>
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    <div class="main">
        <div class="padded-content">
            <div class="photo-description">
                Zulip at the PyCon Sprints in Portland, Oregon.
                Over seventy-five people sprinted during the four day event.
            </div>
            <div class="inner-content history markdown">
                <h1>Early history</h1>

                <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
                    <a href="https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a-dropbox-hack-week-project/">release Zulip as open source software</a>
                    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>

                <h1>Success as an open source project</h1>

                <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, tens 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 October 2018, the Zulip server project had
                        merged <a href="https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pulls">
                        6500 pull requests</a> written by over
                        <a href="https://github.com/zulip/zulip/graphs/contributors">400 developers</a>.
                    </li>
                </ul>

                <h1>Commercial (re-)launch</h1>

                <p>
                    In 2016, Tim Abbott started a company, Kandra Labs, to
                    steward and financially sustain Zulip’s development.  Kandra
                    Labs was soon awarded
                    a <a href="https://seedfund.nsf.gov/">large grant</a> from
                    the US National Science Foundation, and also acquired
                    additional sources of funding.
                </p>
                <p>
                    In mid-2017, Kandra Labs launched two products: a
                    hosted Zulip service
                    at <a href="https://zulip.com">zulip.com</a>, and
                    an enterprise support product for on-premise
                    deployments.
                </p>
                <p>
                    As of October 2018 the hosted service was seeing 4× year
                    over year growth in daily active users, and the
                    on-premise product was seeing rapid adoption (fueled
                    partly by the sunsetting of HipChat server).
                </p>

                <h1>Support</h1>

                <p>
                    Kandra Labs is supported by nearly $1M
                    in <a href="https://seedfund.nsf.gov/">SBIR
                    grants</a> from the US National Science
                    Foundation, and Zulip has benefited enormously
                    from the 30+ developers that started working on
                    Zulip
                    via <a href="https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/">Google
                    Summer of Code</a> and
                    <a href="https://codein.withgoogle.com/">Google
                    Code-In</a>.
                </p>
                <div class="sponsors">
                    <div class="sponsor-picture">
                        <a href="https://seedfund.nsf.gov/">
                            <img src="/static/images/history/nsf-logo.png" alt="" />
                        </a>
                    </div>
                    <div class="sponsor-picture">
                        <a href="https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/">
                            <img src="/static/images/history/gsoc-logo.png" alt="" />
                        </a>
                    </div>
                </div>
            </div>
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