Given that it's free software, it might be worth making the install instructions a little bit more visible. At least then people can whip up a VM and try it on their own. The instructions[0] look straight forward, though I haven't tried it.
Just a quick question... How difficult is it to build, install and run from source? I guess I'm slightly concerned about the "it expects to have the whole machine" in the requirements section. Is that just for your installation scripts, or are there assumptions baked into the server? (Apologies for asking without looking myself!)
Making that build process super easy (if it isn't already) might lower some barriers for the technical crowd (personally I don't like setting up VMs... maybe it's just because I'm old :-) ). Possibly you can leverage more from your free software angle.
Building one's own release is easy. Before I get into how, you should be linking to https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/1.8.0/prod.html for installation instructions -- that's the much simplified install instructions for the latest release.
In the Zulip development environment, you can build your own release tarball with `tools/build-release-tarball`. Or you can just clone the Git repo and run `scripts/setup/install` directly (similarly, you can use `scripts/upgrade-zulip-from-git` to upgrade to any Git ref, which is great for running a pre-release version or a small fork).
The "expects to have the whole machine" story is just that we need to configure third-party services like nginx, postgres, redis, and memcached, and it's very hard to write configuration for all of those to support Zulip that doesn't carry some risk of breaking an arbitrary third-party app that might have been installed first.
Just a quick question... How difficult is it to build, install and run from source? I guess I'm slightly concerned about the "it expects to have the whole machine" in the requirements section. Is that just for your installation scripts, or are there assumptions baked into the server? (Apologies for asking without looking myself!)
Making that build process super easy (if it isn't already) might lower some barriers for the technical crowd (personally I don't like setting up VMs... maybe it's just because I'm old :-) ). Possibly you can leverage more from your free software angle.
[0] - https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/1.7.1/prod.html