6 ms·

The Zulip Foundation

314 points by boramalper 4mo ago

nicholasjbs 4mo ago
Congrats to Tim and the rest of the team! I've been a happy Zulip user (and realm admin) for 13 years: it's one of my favorite pieces of software, and I use it daily. My understanding is these changes will be very good for Zulip's long-term stability and success. (I'm a volunteer member of the new foundation's advisory board.)
csb6 4mo ago
> Over the last few months, I’ve been reflecting deeply on the myriad ways in which AI is changing the world, and how it might change the world in the future. And I came to the conclusion that it’s vitally important that we navigate this strange adolescence of technology well, and that I should contribute to this cause more directly than I ever could as the CEO of Kandra Labs. The compensation for a senior developer at Anthropic is also certainly much better than a FOSS nonprofit - I'm sure that had nothing to do with his reasoning. Sad to see yet another longtime open source developer begin working for AI companies that disregard free software licenses for their training and enable the deluge of low quality AI pull requests that waste maintainers' time.
- nicholasjbs 4mo ago
  I've known Tim personally for over a decade. I'm certain that he's not doing this because he wants more money.
  - shimman 4mo ago
    Yeah why else would a person choose to join an AI company right before an IPO worth trillions, almost guaranteeing any employer there to capture a massive multi-generational wealth defining bag, what €ould ₿¢ th¢ ₹ea$on I wonder?
  - palata 4mo ago
    > I'm certain that he's not doing this because he wants more money. There are many reasons to change job. The pay is always one of them (if you don't work for money, it's not called a job, is it?). > join Anthropic because of its remarkable commitment to the responsible development of AI for the long-term benefit of humanity. Obviously, it's better to believe that what Anthropic is doing is good for humanity when you decide to go working for them. But it is at the very least debatable.
    - tialaramex 4mo ago
      > There are many reasons to change job. The pay is always one of them (if you don't work for money, it's not called a job, is it?). Not at the same scale as this, but I've seen friends deliberately choose to get paid less, perhaps much less money, because they wanted to do something. Video games for example, does not pay well, but it may be your passion. Banking pays very well, but it's hard to find any significant emotional involvement. You can probably argue that's what I did, but it's complicated because I'm hard work. I can't stand debt but I also don't like the feeling of not knowing how to spend all the money. I can say that it's surprisingly hard to get people who are hiring you to accept that (a) the number you put in their mandatory "previous salary" box is correct and yet (b) yes you did understand that they have fixed pay scales and can't possibly match that.
    - pulga28 4mo ago
      I was a part of the Zulip project as a contributor and have contributed > 100 commits to `zulip/zulip` and also admire Tim a ton. But, leaving you're life's work to work on "long-term benifit of humanity" at Anthropic doesn't sound right to me. I am guessing Tim isn't going to work on safety research or interpretability side of Anthropic, that's not his expertise. Hence, leaving Zulip to help build anthropic a new software is meh. There are labs who actually care about people and aren't pretentious like Anthropic. Nevertheless, wish him, alya and rest of the team all the best; they are genuinely nice people. I don't know if I'll have interest in sticking to the project anymore though (+ I am not sure about other core member's status like Anders -- that will affect my decision too).
      - 4mo ago
  - csb6 4mo ago
    If he thinks working for Anthropic is a good "cause" to devote his time to then that is also very disappointing. That would make him either very delusional as to the effects of Anthropic's work or naive in what he can achieve as their employee.
- Etheryte 4mo ago
  I worked in the FOSS space for roughly half a decade. Comments like this are easy to make and also add absolutely no value whatsoever. If you actually feel strongly about it, do the work yourself, no one is stopping you.
  - shimman 4mo ago
    They are doing work, they're advocating for what they believe in. Consumers of FOSS deserve to have a voice too.
    - Centigonal 4mo ago
      If you see complaining on forums and maintaining software as contributing the same kind of value, then oh boy do I have an enterprise-grade comment thread to sell you.
      - fragmede 4mo ago
        We'll have an LLM process the complains as proof of complaint and use that as the basis for our new cryptocurrency called CurmudgeonCoin and have an ICO. We'll make atto dollars!
    - stavros 4mo ago
      It's easy to advocate for what you believe in by posting comments on HN. It's harder to advocate for what you believe in by taking a low-paying job in a FOSS company, which they presumably didn't do.
      - shimman 4mo ago
        If you're going to blame the consumer, might as well blame the person that chose to easily be exploited too.
      - jeltz 4mo ago
        I have a low paying job at a FOSS company. Does this mean I am allowed to cast the first stone?
tiffanyh 4mo ago
> I’m stepping back from full-time Zulip leadership to join Anthropic, alongside three senior team members, and we’re donating the company to a newly created, independent, nonprofit Zulip Foundation Not trying to be cynical … but announcing on a Friday afternoon is typically the operating mode for when you need to announce something that you do not want to get noticed. I can only speculate this weeks Bun/Rust news might have played into how this Zulip news is being handled. To be clear, excited for Tim & team.
- JoshTriplett 4mo ago
  Speaking as someone on the new board of directors: the intention here was more like "Friday is a good deadline for when we'll have the paperwork done and the announcements ready", nothing more. ;)
- tabbott 4mo ago
  Historically, Zulip blog posts have actually gotten more engagement when they landed on the Hacker News homepage during off-peak times for regular news (After business hours and weekends) than when we've published them on weekdays mornings. Fun fact: The original blog post announcing the Zulip Open Source project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279961) was published on a Friday and I think got more attention because of that choice of date than it would have otherwise.
- Argorak 4mo ago
  I mean, all customers got a mid-long email, this does not sound like anyone buries anything.
nightski 4mo ago
Gotta love the frontier labs annihilating open source projects left and right either by acquiring them directly or stealing the teams.
- Kuinox 4mo ago
  How dare OSS devs get paid.
  - kennywinker 4mo ago
    It’s not really “OSS devs getting paid” if they stop being OSS developers to get paid
    - fragmede 4mo ago
      Given that we don't know what Tim will be working on at Anthropic, given his history of commitment to open source, it seems a bit early to say he's stopped being an OSS developer just because he's changed jobs. Anthropic has done a lot for open source, specifically giving Mozilla access to Mythos to patch Firefox before they release it to the world.
      - kennywinker 4mo ago
        > Anthropic has done a lot for open source, specifically giving Mozilla access to Mythos to patch Firefox before they release it to the world. So generous, helping fix the problem they created. The fire department who went around setting fires. To be clear, i’m not coming for Tim, or anyone else who moved from OSS to closed when it was the right choice for them. Get paid! I have written code for pay and for free - getting paid is nicer. But anthropic isn’t exactly a bastion of open source community, and my default assumption is anybody who joins a massive frontier llm company will be working on closed source projects.
- sneak 4mo ago
  You can’t annihilate a project by hiring its devs away. The project is still out there and the code is still open source. This idea that devs owe their continued free service to an open source project they released in the past is a crazy one.
conorbergin 4mo ago
I've only used Zulip when checking out the Lean Zulip a few years ago, and I thought it was an infinitely better interface than Discord for serious discussion, and also much easier for lurkers to find information. I wish more projects adopted it.
- ktpsns 4mo ago
  I just gave Zulip a try with a team of 3. I loved the UI because I spent years in pain finding things in big Slack and Mattermost installations (big = 30 users, nowhere near enterprise-level). For my two junior colleagues, instead, Zulip was too complicated. We evventually switched over to Discord. I highly recommend Zulip to anybody who faces the problem that the concept of threads and channels is not a good fit to their mental model of tasks and groups in teams.
  - goosejuice 4mo ago
    How is any chat app complicated with 3 people?
    - jinushaun 4mo ago
      Have you used Zulip? The UX is basically chat for vim and tmux users. It doesn’t “feel” like chatting. Not exactly user friendly.
      - goosejuice 4mo ago
        Well yes, I've used most of the main players. What exactly isn't user friendly about it? You can't find the conversation?
- Davidzheng 4mo ago
  My only gripe is that on my phone sometimes it takes like 30 seconds to load, which doesn't seem to happen for almost anything else
  - 4mo ago
tabbott 4mo ago
For those looking for more context on Zulip, we did a major release a couple weeks ago: https://blog.zulip.com/2026/04/27/zulip-12-0-released/ https://blog.zulip.com/2026/04/27/zulip-12-0-released/.
- tclancy 4mo ago
  Thanks for all you do.
- bachmeier 4mo ago
  Thanks for your work on Zulip and for everything you did to increase its availability to the masses. Your work was important. Congratulations on your new position at Anthropic. I wish you well in this new chapter of your life.
gm678 4mo ago
Not sure what to term this as it's an acqui-hire without the acquire, but why did Anthropic want to poach most of Zulip/Kandra's team?
- tedd4u 4mo ago
  Multi-user/team-chat with Claude/Code. Today it's all 1:1.
  - severine 4mo ago
    Seems logical.
- wmf 4mo ago
  Anthropic only poached 1/4th of the team. (Presumably the top 1/4th.) They're doing the same to SaaS companies but it's less visible.
xiaoyu2006 4mo ago
> I’m stepping back from Zulip to join Anthropic because of its remarkable commitment to the responsible development of AI for the long-term benefit of humanity. I cannot quite agree to this. But nonetheless I wish good luck to the Zulip project.
iloveoof 4mo ago
This article would have been fine and a good send-off if the maintainers just said they were moving on to greener pastures. The discussion of the Anthropic job offer and the cult-like praise of them seems out of place, especially the unnecessary defensiveness in the tone. It’s okay to make money and change up your career! But this communication is bizarre.
- neuronexmachina 4mo ago
  Which part was defensive?
aidenn0 4mo ago
I've long thought that we need a name for what Zulip is other than "team chat." IMO it's different qualitatively than slack/mattermost/discord/teams &c.
- tabbott 4mo ago
  Yeah I've often had the same thought! Ideas are very much appreciated. I do like our current "organized team chat" quite a bit better than the original "group chat", which would often result in confusion with WhatsApp and its equivalents.
  - cyberax 4mo ago
    Naming is hard! Thank you for working on Zulip, it's truly impressive!
- nicoburns 4mo ago
  > IMO it's different qualitatively than slack/mattermost/discord/teams I always think of it as being halfway between those and more traditional forums (PHPBB, discourse, etc).
  - crabmusket 4mo ago
    I thought of it that way too when I was onboarding into it. When introducing new people to it, I like the topics to email threads, as they also have a subject line and replies. It also gels with the "inbox" part of Zulip's UI.
phoenixy1 4mo ago
The front page of Hacker News was not exactly the place where I was expecting to discover that you were changing jobs, but congrats, Tim!
sergiotapia 4mo ago
bro just say: "Anthropic is going to pay me a beefy salary and it's exciting!" what's this salad come on: "I’m stepping back from Zulip to join Anthropic because of its remarkable commitment to the responsible development of AI for the long-term benefit of humanity." it's pretty funny
- arunc 4mo ago
  Come on. He ran Zulip for 10 years!
  - sergiotapia 4mo ago
    Totally and Zulip is wonderful. But the double speak come on dude
    - goosejuice 4mo ago
      Inflated, but not doublespeak.
dijit 4mo ago
Long-time Zulip advocate; I've (successfully) pushed for it at two organisations, so genuinely, thanks for building something worth that effort. One thing I'd like to understand better: how does the Foundation intend to keep its mandate narrow? The Mozilla comparison in the post is one I find cuts both ways... technically excellent product, foundation that drifted considerably from "make the browser good." The advisory board has some names I associate with community governance work beyond the purely technical. That's not necessarily a problem, but I'd love to hear how the Foundation thinks about scope creep, and whether there's anything structural that keeps the focus on shipping great software.
- tabbott 4mo ago
  Mozilla has had the unusual situation of having an enormous revenue stream from Google. It is reasonable in that situation to build some adjacent things that support the mission. MDN is amazing, for example! Rust was too! I do feel Mozilla has lost its way, and I think it would be crazy to spend resources available to the Zulip Foundation on projects that don't directly advance Zulip or its community. I think the question presupposes that we solve the hardest problem for a new non-profit: Funding. We would be very lucky if Zulip with 1% of Mozilla's funding; we could do so so much with that scale of resources. The biggest risk to Zulip's ability to succeed over the next few years is not risk of spending time on side projects. It's risk of not having the financial resources even to hire remarkable people who want to take a big pay cut to work on Zulip.
  - dijit 4mo ago
    [flagged]
  - yencabulator 4mo ago
    > Mozilla has had the unusual situation of having an enormous revenue stream from Google. It is reasonable in that situation to build some adjacent things that support the mission. Ah yes, this is why they fired the Servo team. Mozilla has the unusual situation of having been fully taken over by a management layer that doesn't give a shit about the thing that caused that pile of money to flow their way. And the ongoing flow might even depend on Firefox remaining just underfunded enough to never compete against Chrome for real. Nevermind the fact that Mozilla is sitting on a $1B fund that would be enough to do miracles in the browser space.
stefan_ 4mo ago
Wait, don't they know that the best way for your newly corporate orphaned quasi-source project to flourish is to donate it to the Apache Software Foundation?
crabmusket 4mo ago
> It’s hard these days to feel confident that a company whose product you love won’t yield to commercial pressure and start selling your data, putting in ads, or otherwise violating your trust. It’s been a challenge to convincingly make the case that this won’t happen to Zulip, especially to folks who might not have time to investigate deeply. The Zulip Foundation, which has the goal of serving the public good, makes this so much easier to communicate clearly. As a huge fan of Zulip the app and the team behind it, I have intensely mixed feelings about the AI-ness of it all. But this does seem to be the most responsible way forward. Zulip needed to be able to outlast its founders to be a truly sustainable project. The way they've focused on building up their contribution pipeline, the effort they spend on mentoring new developers, it has all built towards that being possible. https://blog.zulip.com/2021/12/17/why-zulip-will-stand-the-test-of-time/ https://blog.zulip.com/2021/12/17/why-zulip-will-stand-the-t... It seems like just yesterday that the core team started experimenting with using Claude to work on Zulip, which maybe adds to the surprise of this announcement. But I don't begrudge those individuals their choices. Ten+ years is a long time to work on any project. https://blog.zulip.com/2025/11/24/zulip-ten-years/ https://blog.zulip.com/2025/11/24/zulip-ten-years/ Here's to the Zulip project continuing to maintain its engineering excellence and its community principles for the next ten years.
- crabmusket 4mo ago
  PS. With the sincerity out of the way - can't wait for the upcoming Rust rewrite!
  - lukaslalinsky 4mo ago
    If they can also vibe-code some modern Android app for Zulip using the unlimited tokens, I'd be happy.
  - steve_adams_86 4mo ago
    The likelihood of the Rust rewrite being announced is grossly overstated, and the PR that just landed almost certainly won't get merged before I finish this comment
  - 4mo ago
dr_kretyn 4mo ago
Reads like Anthropic has recognized that in order to better get into enterprise it needs to be better than Slack - meet users where they are most of the time. Having someone experienced with a good reputation and a say on how to steer a product sounds quite beneficial.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
pig208 4mo ago
Zulip means a lot to me, as it has been my introduction to open source through Google Summer of Code, and my first time actually working on a real codebase of a project that so many people love. I'm excited about the Zulip Foundation as a new start; at the same time, I'm also a bit sad about the departure of the core team members. While I'm obviously biased, I can totally see the optics for people coming from Bun's acquisition—this is not that. Knowing Tim for 5 years, I'm confident that an incredible amount of thought has been put into this, and that this is in Zulip's best interest for its sustainability and integrity. I hope Zulip and team all the best for the next 10 years and more to come.
KolmogorovComp 4mo ago
Concretely, how are you going to manage PR reviews? Even with today’s staff they are very slow (weeks for a round of NITS at a time), so with more developers leaving they’re going to explode and further discourage external contributors.
- tabbott 4mo ago
  Like we always have. See https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/review-process.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/review-p... for the basics; but it's all written down in ReadTheDocs. Like most large projects, we triage every new PR, and make decisions about which ones to invest what level of maintainer time into. We try pretty hard to efficiently review visibly high-quality PRs and those from highly engaged contributors who are visibly learning from the feedback we give. Review latencies vary for myriad reasons. For example, when preparing to publish a major release like Zulip 12.0, there's about a month wherein we mostly only review PRs that might go into that release. Historically, the great majority of PRs in zulip/zulip have been reviewed by two maintainers before being merged. First a "maintainer review", and then a second "integration review" by me. My reviewing everything is a quite unusual practice for a project of this scale, and I would not recommend anyone else try it. But it has worked for us, and everyone appreciated my having the complete context that comes with this practice. All of our maintainers are very good at reviewing Zulip work. Thus, the great majority of those integration reviews involve my suggesting readability/documentation improvements, or merging the PR with just a comment thanking everyone who helped. So we're making the obvious adjustment wherein the other longtime maintainers also do integration reviews. We've been writing a great deal of nice process documentation to support this plan (For example: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/39290 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/39290 details how I think about integration review, and https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/39229 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/39229 greatly improves our database migration documentation). I plan to hold regular office hours for more active project maintainers to use my time as they wish. It is likely that some of that time will be used doing reviews. I hope this context helps!
WhereIsTheTruth 4mo ago
RIP Zulip, it was bound to happen When politics gets involved, you loose all the talents ;) They don't mind, they have their LLM code monkeys to handle rewrites automagically After all, what's a society, if not just a bunch of soulless servants
usr1106 4mo ago
We used zulip at work 7 years until I had to leave when the startup had to cut down development. We didn't pay a cent (which is not good for the project...) It was truly enjoyable software. Nowadays I am forced to use Microsoft Teams, which is largely non-functional bullshit. We pay real money to the disgusting company. Where do I find a list of employers using zulip?
andybak 4mo ago
Is the content visible to search engines yet? That was the deal-breaker when I looked into it for handling an open source community. No discoverability
- em-bee 4mo ago
  which communication tool is offering that? except web forums, discourse? most others you need to go an extra step to make the messages public, like mailing list archives. there is this: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive i haven't used it, just saying that solutions exist. and with the constant hammering of sites by AI bots you probably don't want them hitting a dynamic message interface but prefer a static copy.

314 points by boramalper 4mo ago

Congrats to Tim and the rest of the team! I've been a happy Zulip user (and realm admin) for 13 years: it's one of my favorite pieces of software, and I use it daily. My understanding is these changes will be very good for Zulip's long-term stability and success. (I'm a volunteer member of the new foundation's advisory board.)

csb6 4mo ago

> Over the last few months, I’ve been reflecting deeply on the myriad ways in which AI is changing the world, and how it might change the world in the future. And I came to the conclusion that it’s vitally important that we navigate this strange adolescence of technology well, and that I should contribute to this cause more directly than I ever could as the CEO of Kandra Labs. The compensation for a senior developer at Anthropic is also certainly much better than a FOSS nonprofit - I'm sure that had nothing to do with his reasoning. Sad to see yet another longtime open source developer begin working for AI companies that disregard free software licenses for their training and enable the deluge of low quality AI pull requests that waste maintainers' time.

nicholasjbs 4mo ago
I've known Tim personally for over a decade. I'm certain that he's not doing this because he wants more money.
- shimman 4mo ago
  Yeah why else would a person choose to join an AI company right before an IPO worth trillions, almost guaranteeing any employer there to capture a massive multi-generational wealth defining bag, what €ould ₿¢ th¢ ₹ea$on I wonder?
- palata 4mo ago
  > I'm certain that he's not doing this because he wants more money. There are many reasons to change job. The pay is always one of them (if you don't work for money, it's not called a job, is it?). > join Anthropic because of its remarkable commitment to the responsible development of AI for the long-term benefit of humanity. Obviously, it's better to believe that what Anthropic is doing is good for humanity when you decide to go working for them. But it is at the very least debatable.
  - tialaramex 4mo ago
    > There are many reasons to change job. The pay is always one of them (if you don't work for money, it's not called a job, is it?). Not at the same scale as this, but I've seen friends deliberately choose to get paid less, perhaps much less money, because they wanted to do something. Video games for example, does not pay well, but it may be your passion. Banking pays very well, but it's hard to find any significant emotional involvement. You can probably argue that's what I did, but it's complicated because I'm hard work. I can't stand debt but I also don't like the feeling of not knowing how to spend all the money. I can say that it's surprisingly hard to get people who are hiring you to accept that (a) the number you put in their mandatory "previous salary" box is correct and yet (b) yes you did understand that they have fixed pay scales and can't possibly match that.
  - pulga28 4mo ago
    I was a part of the Zulip project as a contributor and have contributed > 100 commits to `zulip/zulip` and also admire Tim a ton. But, leaving you're life's work to work on "long-term benifit of humanity" at Anthropic doesn't sound right to me. I am guessing Tim isn't going to work on safety research or interpretability side of Anthropic, that's not his expertise. Hence, leaving Zulip to help build anthropic a new software is meh. There are labs who actually care about people and aren't pretentious like Anthropic. Nevertheless, wish him, alya and rest of the team all the best; they are genuinely nice people. I don't know if I'll have interest in sticking to the project anymore though (+ I am not sure about other core member's status like Anders -- that will affect my decision too).
    - 4mo ago
- csb6 4mo ago
  If he thinks working for Anthropic is a good "cause" to devote his time to then that is also very disappointing. That would make him either very delusional as to the effects of Anthropic's work or naive in what he can achieve as their employee.
Etheryte 4mo ago
I worked in the FOSS space for roughly half a decade. Comments like this are easy to make and also add absolutely no value whatsoever. If you actually feel strongly about it, do the work yourself, no one is stopping you.
- shimman 4mo ago
  They are doing work, they're advocating for what they believe in. Consumers of FOSS deserve to have a voice too.
  - Centigonal 4mo ago
    If you see complaining on forums and maintaining software as contributing the same kind of value, then oh boy do I have an enterprise-grade comment thread to sell you.
    - fragmede 4mo ago
      We'll have an LLM process the complains as proof of complaint and use that as the basis for our new cryptocurrency called CurmudgeonCoin and have an ICO. We'll make atto dollars!
  - stavros 4mo ago
    It's easy to advocate for what you believe in by posting comments on HN. It's harder to advocate for what you believe in by taking a low-paying job in a FOSS company, which they presumably didn't do.
    - shimman 4mo ago
      If you're going to blame the consumer, might as well blame the person that chose to easily be exploited too.
    - jeltz 4mo ago
      I have a low paying job at a FOSS company. Does this mean I am allowed to cast the first stone?

tiffanyh 4mo ago

> I’m stepping back from full-time Zulip leadership to join Anthropic, alongside three senior team members, and we’re donating the company to a newly created, independent, nonprofit Zulip Foundation Not trying to be cynical … but announcing on a Friday afternoon is typically the operating mode for when you need to announce something that you do not want to get noticed. I can only speculate this weeks Bun/Rust news might have played into how this Zulip news is being handled. To be clear, excited for Tim & team.

JoshTriplett 4mo ago
Speaking as someone on the new board of directors: the intention here was more like "Friday is a good deadline for when we'll have the paperwork done and the announcements ready", nothing more. ;)
tabbott 4mo ago
Historically, Zulip blog posts have actually gotten more engagement when they landed on the Hacker News homepage during off-peak times for regular news (After business hours and weekends) than when we've published them on weekdays mornings. Fun fact: The original blog post announcing the Zulip Open Source project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279961) was published on a Friday and I think got more attention because of that choice of date than it would have otherwise.
Argorak 4mo ago
I mean, all customers got a mid-long email, this does not sound like anyone buries anything.

nightski 4mo ago

Gotta love the frontier labs annihilating open source projects left and right either by acquiring them directly or stealing the teams.

Kuinox 4mo ago
How dare OSS devs get paid.
- kennywinker 4mo ago
  It’s not really “OSS devs getting paid” if they stop being OSS developers to get paid
  - fragmede 4mo ago
    Given that we don't know what Tim will be working on at Anthropic, given his history of commitment to open source, it seems a bit early to say he's stopped being an OSS developer just because he's changed jobs. Anthropic has done a lot for open source, specifically giving Mozilla access to Mythos to patch Firefox before they release it to the world.
    - kennywinker 4mo ago
      > Anthropic has done a lot for open source, specifically giving Mozilla access to Mythos to patch Firefox before they release it to the world. So generous, helping fix the problem they created. The fire department who went around setting fires. To be clear, i’m not coming for Tim, or anyone else who moved from OSS to closed when it was the right choice for them. Get paid! I have written code for pay and for free - getting paid is nicer. But anthropic isn’t exactly a bastion of open source community, and my default assumption is anybody who joins a massive frontier llm company will be working on closed source projects.
sneak 4mo ago
You can’t annihilate a project by hiring its devs away. The project is still out there and the code is still open source. This idea that devs owe their continued free service to an open source project they released in the past is a crazy one.

conorbergin 4mo ago

I've only used Zulip when checking out the Lean Zulip a few years ago, and I thought it was an infinitely better interface than Discord for serious discussion, and also much easier for lurkers to find information. I wish more projects adopted it.

ktpsns 4mo ago
I just gave Zulip a try with a team of 3. I loved the UI because I spent years in pain finding things in big Slack and Mattermost installations (big = 30 users, nowhere near enterprise-level). For my two junior colleagues, instead, Zulip was too complicated. We evventually switched over to Discord. I highly recommend Zulip to anybody who faces the problem that the concept of threads and channels is not a good fit to their mental model of tasks and groups in teams.
- goosejuice 4mo ago
  How is any chat app complicated with 3 people?
  - jinushaun 4mo ago
    Have you used Zulip? The UX is basically chat for vim and tmux users. It doesn’t “feel” like chatting. Not exactly user friendly.
    - goosejuice 4mo ago
      Well yes, I've used most of the main players. What exactly isn't user friendly about it? You can't find the conversation?
Davidzheng 4mo ago
My only gripe is that on my phone sometimes it takes like 30 seconds to load, which doesn't seem to happen for almost anything else
- 4mo ago

tabbott 4mo ago

For those looking for more context on Zulip, we did a major release a couple weeks ago: https://blog.zulip.com/2026/04/27/zulip-12-0-released/ https://blog.zulip.com/2026/04/27/zulip-12-0-released/.

tclancy 4mo ago
Thanks for all you do.
bachmeier 4mo ago
Thanks for your work on Zulip and for everything you did to increase its availability to the masses. Your work was important. Congratulations on your new position at Anthropic. I wish you well in this new chapter of your life.

gm678 4mo ago

Not sure what to term this as it's an acqui-hire without the acquire, but why did Anthropic want to poach most of Zulip/Kandra's team?

tedd4u 4mo ago
Multi-user/team-chat with Claude/Code. Today it's all 1:1.
- severine 4mo ago
  Seems logical.
wmf 4mo ago
Anthropic only poached 1/4th of the team. (Presumably the top 1/4th.) They're doing the same to SaaS companies but it's less visible.

xiaoyu2006 4mo ago

> I’m stepping back from Zulip to join Anthropic because of its remarkable commitment to the responsible development of AI for the long-term benefit of humanity. I cannot quite agree to this. But nonetheless I wish good luck to the Zulip project.

iloveoof 4mo ago

This article would have been fine and a good send-off if the maintainers just said they were moving on to greener pastures. The discussion of the Anthropic job offer and the cult-like praise of them seems out of place, especially the unnecessary defensiveness in the tone. It’s okay to make money and change up your career! But this communication is bizarre.

neuronexmachina 4mo ago
Which part was defensive?

aidenn0 4mo ago

I've long thought that we need a name for what Zulip is other than "team chat." IMO it's different qualitatively than slack/mattermost/discord/teams &c.

tabbott 4mo ago
Yeah I've often had the same thought! Ideas are very much appreciated. I do like our current "organized team chat" quite a bit better than the original "group chat", which would often result in confusion with WhatsApp and its equivalents.
- cyberax 4mo ago
  Naming is hard! Thank you for working on Zulip, it's truly impressive!
nicoburns 4mo ago
> IMO it's different qualitatively than slack/mattermost/discord/teams I always think of it as being halfway between those and more traditional forums (PHPBB, discourse, etc).
- crabmusket 4mo ago
  I thought of it that way too when I was onboarding into it. When introducing new people to it, I like the topics to email threads, as they also have a subject line and replies. It also gels with the "inbox" part of Zulip's UI.

phoenixy1 4mo ago

The front page of Hacker News was not exactly the place where I was expecting to discover that you were changing jobs, but congrats, Tim!

sergiotapia 4mo ago

bro just say: "Anthropic is going to pay me a beefy salary and it's exciting!" what's this salad come on: "I’m stepping back from Zulip to join Anthropic because of its remarkable commitment to the responsible development of AI for the long-term benefit of humanity." it's pretty funny

arunc 4mo ago
Come on. He ran Zulip for 10 years!
- sergiotapia 4mo ago
  Totally and Zulip is wonderful. But the double speak come on dude
  - goosejuice 4mo ago
    Inflated, but not doublespeak.

dijit 4mo ago

Long-time Zulip advocate; I've (successfully) pushed for it at two organisations, so genuinely, thanks for building something worth that effort. One thing I'd like to understand better: how does the Foundation intend to keep its mandate narrow? The Mozilla comparison in the post is one I find cuts both ways... technically excellent product, foundation that drifted considerably from "make the browser good." The advisory board has some names I associate with community governance work beyond the purely technical. That's not necessarily a problem, but I'd love to hear how the Foundation thinks about scope creep, and whether there's anything structural that keeps the focus on shipping great software.

tabbott 4mo ago
Mozilla has had the unusual situation of having an enormous revenue stream from Google. It is reasonable in that situation to build some adjacent things that support the mission. MDN is amazing, for example! Rust was too! I do feel Mozilla has lost its way, and I think it would be crazy to spend resources available to the Zulip Foundation on projects that don't directly advance Zulip or its community. I think the question presupposes that we solve the hardest problem for a new non-profit: Funding. We would be very lucky if Zulip with 1% of Mozilla's funding; we could do so so much with that scale of resources. The biggest risk to Zulip's ability to succeed over the next few years is not risk of spending time on side projects. It's risk of not having the financial resources even to hire remarkable people who want to take a big pay cut to work on Zulip.
- dijit 4mo ago
  [flagged]
- yencabulator 4mo ago
  > Mozilla has had the unusual situation of having an enormous revenue stream from Google. It is reasonable in that situation to build some adjacent things that support the mission. Ah yes, this is why they fired the Servo team. Mozilla has the unusual situation of having been fully taken over by a management layer that doesn't give a shit about the thing that caused that pile of money to flow their way. And the ongoing flow might even depend on Firefox remaining just underfunded enough to never compete against Chrome for real. Nevermind the fact that Mozilla is sitting on a $1B fund that would be enough to do miracles in the browser space.

stefan_ 4mo ago

Wait, don't they know that the best way for your newly corporate orphaned quasi-source project to flourish is to donate it to the Apache Software Foundation?

crabmusket 4mo ago

> It’s hard these days to feel confident that a company whose product you love won’t yield to commercial pressure and start selling your data, putting in ads, or otherwise violating your trust. It’s been a challenge to convincingly make the case that this won’t happen to Zulip, especially to folks who might not have time to investigate deeply. The Zulip Foundation, which has the goal of serving the public good, makes this so much easier to communicate clearly. As a huge fan of Zulip the app and the team behind it, I have intensely mixed feelings about the AI-ness of it all. But this does seem to be the most responsible way forward. Zulip needed to be able to outlast its founders to be a truly sustainable project. The way they've focused on building up their contribution pipeline, the effort they spend on mentoring new developers, it has all built towards that being possible. https://blog.zulip.com/2021/12/17/why-zulip-will-stand-the-test-of-time/ https://blog.zulip.com/2021/12/17/why-zulip-will-stand-the-t... It seems like just yesterday that the core team started experimenting with using Claude to work on Zulip, which maybe adds to the surprise of this announcement. But I don't begrudge those individuals their choices. Ten+ years is a long time to work on any project. https://blog.zulip.com/2025/11/24/zulip-ten-years/ https://blog.zulip.com/2025/11/24/zulip-ten-years/ Here's to the Zulip project continuing to maintain its engineering excellence and its community principles for the next ten years.

crabmusket 4mo ago
PS. With the sincerity out of the way - can't wait for the upcoming Rust rewrite!
- lukaslalinsky 4mo ago
  If they can also vibe-code some modern Android app for Zulip using the unlimited tokens, I'd be happy.
- steve_adams_86 4mo ago
  The likelihood of the Rust rewrite being announced is grossly overstated, and the PR that just landed almost certainly won't get merged before I finish this comment
- 4mo ago

dr_kretyn 4mo ago

Reads like Anthropic has recognized that in order to better get into enterprise it needs to be better than Slack - meet users where they are most of the time. Having someone experienced with a good reputation and a say on how to steer a product sounds quite beneficial.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

pig208 4mo ago

Zulip means a lot to me, as it has been my introduction to open source through Google Summer of Code, and my first time actually working on a real codebase of a project that so many people love. I'm excited about the Zulip Foundation as a new start; at the same time, I'm also a bit sad about the departure of the core team members. While I'm obviously biased, I can totally see the optics for people coming from Bun's acquisition—this is not that. Knowing Tim for 5 years, I'm confident that an incredible amount of thought has been put into this, and that this is in Zulip's best interest for its sustainability and integrity. I hope Zulip and team all the best for the next 10 years and more to come.

KolmogorovComp 4mo ago

Concretely, how are you going to manage PR reviews? Even with today’s staff they are very slow (weeks for a round of NITS at a time), so with more developers leaving they’re going to explode and further discourage external contributors.

tabbott 4mo ago
Like we always have. See https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/review-process.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/review-p... for the basics; but it's all written down in ReadTheDocs. Like most large projects, we triage every new PR, and make decisions about which ones to invest what level of maintainer time into. We try pretty hard to efficiently review visibly high-quality PRs and those from highly engaged contributors who are visibly learning from the feedback we give. Review latencies vary for myriad reasons. For example, when preparing to publish a major release like Zulip 12.0, there's about a month wherein we mostly only review PRs that might go into that release. Historically, the great majority of PRs in zulip/zulip have been reviewed by two maintainers before being merged. First a "maintainer review", and then a second "integration review" by me. My reviewing everything is a quite unusual practice for a project of this scale, and I would not recommend anyone else try it. But it has worked for us, and everyone appreciated my having the complete context that comes with this practice. All of our maintainers are very good at reviewing Zulip work. Thus, the great majority of those integration reviews involve my suggesting readability/documentation improvements, or merging the PR with just a comment thanking everyone who helped. So we're making the obvious adjustment wherein the other longtime maintainers also do integration reviews. We've been writing a great deal of nice process documentation to support this plan (For example: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/39290 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/39290 details how I think about integration review, and https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/39229 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/39229 greatly improves our database migration documentation). I plan to hold regular office hours for more active project maintainers to use my time as they wish. It is likely that some of that time will be used doing reviews. I hope this context helps!

WhereIsTheTruth 4mo ago

RIP Zulip, it was bound to happen When politics gets involved, you loose all the talents ;) They don't mind, they have their LLM code monkeys to handle rewrites automagically After all, what's a society, if not just a bunch of soulless servants

usr1106 4mo ago

We used zulip at work 7 years until I had to leave when the startup had to cut down development. We didn't pay a cent (which is not good for the project...) It was truly enjoyable software. Nowadays I am forced to use Microsoft Teams, which is largely non-functional bullshit. We pay real money to the disgusting company. Where do I find a list of employers using zulip?

andybak 4mo ago

Is the content visible to search engines yet? That was the deal-breaker when I looked into it for handling an open source community. No discoverability

em-bee 4mo ago
which communication tool is offering that? except web forums, discourse? most others you need to go an extra step to make the messages public, like mailing list archives. there is this: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive i haven't used it, just saying that solutions exist. and with the constant hammering of sites by AI bots you probably don't want them hitting a dynamic message interface but prefer a static copy.