zulip/templates/zerver/history.html

202 lines
9.7 KiB
HTML

{% extends "zerver/portico.html" %}
{% block title %}
<title>Zulip: the best group chat for open source projects</title>
{% endblock %}
{% block customhead %}
{{ super() }}
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
{% stylesheet 'portico' %}
{% stylesheet 'landing-page' %}
{{ 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="http://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="http://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 %}