[lima]

I'm sad to see Zulip excluded from the list. It solves the #1 issue with large group chats - proper threading.

Nothing worse than waking up to a 1000 message backlog you have to sort through to filter out the information relevant to you. Except for Slack, all of their other choices have very poor threading.

They said they had trouble to get it working behind IAM, but Zulip is just a Django application. Surely there's a Django authenticator for Mozilla IAM? I would be very happy to help set it up.

[tabbott]

I lead the Zulip project, and am also super sad about this. There's a very active Zulip in the Rust community (https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com), and we love the great feedback we've gotten from them.

The "IAM problem" is apparently that Mozilla's IAM is based on SAML, which Zulip doesn't have native support for today. There are two possible technical solutions:

* One could use https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/authentica... with https://github.com/Uninett/mod_auth_mellon to integrate SAML authentication for Zulip without any code changes.

* One could add native support for it, using our `python-social-auth` integration. Generally adding an authentication provider supported by `python-social-auth` takes about 50 lines of mostly boilerplate code plus some tests -- not a big effort.

As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I sent OP an email yesterday offering for the Zulip core team to do any work required for Mozilla to evaluate Zulip over the next week so they can evaluate Zulip. He replied that it's too late to revisit their decision :(.

For other folks involved in open source projects, you should absolutely consider Zulip! We provide our paid plan completely free to open source projects, can import history from Slack and other tools, and are actively prioritizing features specifically for open source communities (like the ability to search the complete history of all public streams even as a user who just joined).

Open source projects that have switched consistently tell us that Zulip's topic-based threading is a way better model for a distributed community with a lot of volunteers than Slack/IRC/Gitter/etc., making it easier for maintainers to manage the community and helping more new contributors stick around. A few links:

* https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source/

* https://www.recurse.com/blog/112-how-rc-uses-zulip

[olah_1]

It's $7 per user per month unless you are a favored open source project that they want to bless.

Unless I'm reading the pricing info[1] incorrectly, it seems like the free plan wouldn't be even close to being usable for a project of more than 2 people...

[1]: https://zulipchat.com/plans/

[tabbott]

Our plans page reads:

"Zulip Cloud Standard is free for open source projects and affiliated institutions."

which I thought was unambiguous that our paid plan is free for open source projects.

The intent of our pricing model is to charge businesses $80/employee/year for use by full-time staff. If you're a business that can afford to hire people, you can definitely afford $80/employee/year (under <0.1% of that employee's all-in cost to the company) for a productivity tool. Our pricing is free for open source projects and highly discounted or free for situations where the users aren't full-time staff (e.g. education).

If there's something we could do to be more clear in our pricing page, I'd love to hear it.

[olah_1]

Yeah, it's not clear to me. Do the limitations of the Free tier still apply to open-source projects?

It may help to just add a third box up top for Open Source or something. I didn't think that there would be a totally different tier listed below in the FAQs.

[buboard]

> but Zulip is just a Django application.

Yet again:

> The installer expects Zulip to be the only thing running on the system; it will install system packages with apt (like nginx, postgresql, and redis) and configure them for its own use. We strongly recommend using either a fresh machine instance in a cloud provider, a fresh VM, or a dedicated machine. If you decide to disregard our advice and use a server that hosts other services, we can’t support you, but we do have some notes on issues you’ll encounter.

[fluffything]

So why is that a problem ? I expect Mozilla IAM to handle VMs just fine.

[tabbott]

Right, our recommendation is to run Zulip on a dedicated VM or container, which I'm sure is how Mozilla will install any self-hosted chat software.

For context, the background for that advice is that most folks who want Zulip to share with other systems are running a cheap "shared hosting" server with 5 different apps on it and without root access. Before we added that advice, more than 50% of requests for help installing Zulip were problems specific to that type of environment where the user wasn't going to succeed in any case (e.g. because they had an insufficient RAM quota from their hosting provider anyway).

There are reasonable use cases that would benefit from our investing in making this possible, but container technology is convenient enough in 2019 that it doesn't feel worth it over other high-value investments in making Zulip accessible to a wider audience.

[dsr_]

Mozilla is large enough that they could go over to the Zulip developers and ask nicely for what they need, and stand a good chance of getting it.

[tabbott]

I lead the Zulip project, and we would definitely have been excited to do the work to make Zulip available. Unfortunately, they didn't contact us.

After seeing this blog post, I emailed the OP yesterday offering to add whatever they need to evaluate Zulip (which sounds like is just SAML authentication work that's was already on our near-term roadmap). He replied that they're too late in their evaluation process to consider Zulip :(. I really wish they'd thought to get in touch with us about this concern.

[fluffything]

Zulip is open source, and the community is both large and very active. So at least they can open a github issue explaining the problem. And if they want to use the tool, they can just submit PRs like everybody else.

[perlgeek]

Even if it's just for a PoC with a 1/5th chance of being actually selected in the end?

[mkr-hn]

What does PoC mean in this context?

[packetlost]

I'm going to guess 'Proof of Concept'

[joepie91_]

Proof of Concept.