Yes, that's the title of the thread, you can assume I read that far at least ;) I'll give you I wasn't very clear.

I'm super excited Zulip is going open source. And it's both the proliferation of protocols and the closed-sourceness(?) of the products that is problematic.

Open source has two coupled benefits:

1. If the product becomes popular, it's easy to integrate with it, extend it, modify it, etc rather than just write an alternative from the ground up. This prevents the proliferation of new protocols just for the sake of an alternative. Right now, it makes no sense for me to go and build a FOSS alternative to Zulip. It would've made sense a few weeks ago. FOSS web services encourage/promote self-hosting. This also counts for something.

2. When extending a foss product, writing a gateway is a lot easier. Gateways don't slow down proliferation as much, but they do keep protocols somewhat close to one another and make it easier for users to migrate from one another. For example: It's been several years now and there is still no reliable open source XMPP-to-Hangouts gateway. But a Zulip/IRC gateway? If one doesn't exist already, I bet you there'll be one within weeks.

We have both already :)

https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/master/bots/jabber_mirro... https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/master/bots/irc-mirror.p...

In addition to Zephyr mirroring, which we've had since 2012.

Hurray \o/ Congrats on the release!

Thanks :)

To dive a bit deeper, while XMPP/IRC exists, and it wouldn't be hard to make the Zulip server natively speak XMPP to clients, that in-and-of-itself wouldn't be quite useful. A message sent to stream "ops" with topic "prod deploy" might look like this†:

  <message
      from='[email protected]/ops'
      id='162BEBB1-F6DB-4D9A-9BD8-CFDCC801A0B2'
      to='[email protected]/broom'
      type='groupchat'>
    <subject>prod deploy</subject>
    <body>Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd.</body>
    <delay xmlns='urn:xmpp:delay'
       from='[email protected]'
       stamp='2002-10-13T23:58:37Z'/>
    <addresses xmlns='http://jabber.org/protocol/address'>
      <address type='ofrom' jid='[email protected]/desktop'/>
    </addresses>
  </message>

But there aren't any existing clients that have the UI to:

1. Show per-message subjects/topics in a meaningful way

2. Allow users to easily reply to a message preserving the subject

So we'd need client changes to make it truly useful.

†: Adapted from syntax specified in XEP-0045

But one more protocol on the stack with mac/windows/iphone/android clients is, IMHO, an entirely different ball of wax than a libre project with only a single platform under its belt. In my situation, the existence of mobile clients is clinch for actually pitching it to any org I participate in.