Day: September 27, 2015

And, since we are talking about Zulip in our earlier post… here you go! Zulip for you!

Zulip – Open Source Texting

“This year’s Dropbox Hack Week saw some incredible projects take shape – from the talented team that visited Baltimore to research food deserts, to a project to recreate the fictional Pied Piper algorithm from HBO’s Silicon Valley. One of the most special elements of Hack Week, though, is that often times we’re able to share these exciting projects openly with our users and our community.

At Dropbox, we love and depend on numerous excellent open source projects, and we consider contributing back to the open source community to be vitally important. Popular open source projects that Dropbox has released include the zxcvbn password strength estimator, the Djinni cross-language bridging library, the Hackpad codebase, and the Pyston JIT for Python.

During this year’s Hack Week, we 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. Today, on behalf of the Zulip team, I’m very excited to announce that we have released Zulip as open source software!

We took on this project during Hack Week in order to enable Zulip’s users to enjoy and improve a product they love. Zulip’s users are passionate about the product, and are eager to make their own improvements, and we’re excited to be able to offer them that opportunity. In particular, the Recurse Center has announced plans to work on the Zulip open source project.

To make Zulip maximally useful to the world, we have released it under the Apache license, and we’ve released everything, including the server, Android and iOS mobile apps, desktop apps for Mac, Linux and Windows, and the complete Puppet configuration needed to run the Zulip server in production.

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.”

Gotta love them supporting Open Source.

Dropbox releases its chat app Zulip under an open-source license

TNW News – By: Jackie Dove – “Dropbox has released its recently acquired chat app, Zulip under an open-source Apache license.

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

Abbott had this to say about the overall genre:

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.

The threaded chat app’s client and server code is now available on GitHub, and you can download clients for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android on Zulip’s site. The Zulip site also contains various hints on how to get started with building integrations and other enhancements for the app.

Dropbox has released the zxcvbn password strength estimator, the Djinni cross-language bridging library, the Hackpad codebase, and the Pyston JIT for Python as open source, as well.”

And yet, nobody needs it like they do!

Sprint Drops Out of Spectrum Auction

PC Magazine – By: Chloe Albanesius – “Sprint has decided not to participate in the FCC’s big spectrum auction next year.

‘Sprint’s focus and overarching imperative must be on improving its network and market position in the immediate term so we can remain a powerful force in fostering competition, consumer benefits and innovation in the wireless broadband world,” Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure said in a statement. “Sprint has the spectrum it needs to deploy its network architecture of the future.”

The auction will allow broadcasters to sell their unused spectrum to mobile carriers, and get a cut of the purchase price. Already moved from 2014 to 2015, a legal challenge last fall pushed the event into 2016.

Spectrum allocation might seem like a boring topic, but with more and more people picking up bandwidth-intensive gadgets, carriers need spectrum to support them. Without it, you could see a lot of buffering and dropped connections.

One of the big concerns from smaller carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile going into this auction, though, was whether their larger rivals, Verizon and AT&T, would use their sizable war chests to snap up all the desirable spectrum. Last year, there were reports that Sprint and T-Mobile would pool their assets and jointly bid on spectrum (but only if their now-failed merger bid was still in play). The FCC put the smackdown on that, and T-Mobile independently pushed for auction limits. The agency agreed to some restrictions—it set aside 30 megahertz of spectrum per market for smaller companies—but did not give T-Mobile everything it wanted.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted yesterday that Sprint is ‘crazy to sit out this historic auction.” T-Mobile ‘is going to go hard in this low-band spectrum auction and put that spectrum to good use for our customers.”

The last major spectrum auction of this nature was in 2008, when AT&T and Verizon were the big winners. Verizon has said it does not need any more huge blocks of spectrum, though recent reports suggest the company is weighing a lease of spectrum held by Dish.”