The team at Dropbox announced that Zulip is now an open-source software.

Zulip is a group-chat app acquired by the company in 2014. From that day onwards, Dropbox has been working on open sourcing Zulip with a timeline that seemed to be bound with an ambitious target. It's no wonder why the team was hugely excited with the latest announcement as they are also releasing everything that is needed to fully run the Zulip server. These include mobile apps for Android and iOS, desktop apps for Windows, Linux and Mac, and the complete Puppet configuration.

"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," wrote Tim Abbott, Zulip co-founder, in a blog post.

Currently, two of the most popular choices for team-based, business-oriented chatroom-style services are Hipchat and Slack. However, Zulip, while being a new type of service, already boasts a number of useful features and integrations.

Some of its notable features include threaded group conversations; one-on-one and group private conversations, @-notifications, desktop notifications, audible notifications, full-history search, stream-wide announcements, emails for important missed messages, invite-only streams, and more.

The integrations feature allows users to receive alerts and updates from a number of popular services such as Asana, Basecamp, GitHub, Perforce, RSS, Stash, Trello and Zendesk, among others. There are at least 30 integrations available, and users can also suggest a type of integration that they would like to see if they don't see it yet on Zulip's site.

"With Zulip integrations, your team can stay up-to-date on code changes, issue tickets, build system results, and much more," stated Zulip.

Apart from Zulip, Dropbox also released other open-source projects which include the Pyston JIT for Python, the Hackpad codebase, the Djinni cross-language bridging library and the zxcvbn password strength estimator.

"The world of open source chat has for a long been dominated by IRC and XMPP. Zulip starts with many useful features and integrations expected by software development teams today," said Dropbox. "We're very excited to see what people build on top of Zulip."