Comment by tabbott

Nothing is certain in this world, but I don't think that means one should give up and just use megacorp software.

And Zulip is specifically designed by some very capable people to be resilient. While we can mess up future versions, but you can always run (forks of) the older version. And as discussed on our values page, we've worked very hard to make the code readable and maintainable. (Various professors use Zulip as a teaching codebase).

We've made a lot of investments in the goal of having keeping-the-lights-on work for Zulip to be doable with a couple excellent people working part-time. It's good for our ability to spend our limited time on improving the product. But it also means that it doesn't require a lot of people to care in order for Zulip to remain functional and maintained. And I certainly care quite a bit.

So while I'd certainly expect other maintainers to introduce a lot more regressions, especially if doing significant changes... If you like the product today, probably the option will exist to continue using roughly that for a long time.