Comment by nightski
10 hours ago
Gotta love the frontier labs annihilating open source projects left and right either by acquiring them directly or stealing the teams.
10 hours ago
Gotta love the frontier labs annihilating open source projects left and right either by acquiring them directly or stealing the teams.
Zulip is a critical piece of software for my business: It's the main tool my company has used to communicate for more than 13 years, and it's the primary forum used by our 3,000+ person alumni community. Our Zulip realm has over 4M messages.
I share this because I hope it makes it clear that I have a vested interest in Zulip's future. And I'm happy about this news; I'm confident Zulip will continue to improve for many years.
Also, for those who don't know: Zulip was initially a for-profit startup, which was acquired by Dropbox in 2014. Tim then went to great lengths to get Dropbox to later open source it, and allow him to found a new company (the one that was today donated to the new nonprofit foundation) to continue work on Zulip. I can't think of any other cases where a founder has gone to such great lengths to do right by their users.
I appreciate that in this case, the developers who were hired away considered it their responsibility to keep the project and company going independently of themselves, and ensuring it could continue to employ the ~dozen developers who are staying with it to maintain and develop the project.
That seems substantially better than the usual approach (of either an acquihire leading to an immediate shutdown or an acquisition leading to an inevitable "our incredible journey" shutdown later).
As we do our best to explain in the post: The Zulip project is very much not being annihilated.
There are 220 people from all over the world who have contributed 20 or more commits to Zulip, and thousands more who've contributed code, volunteer translations, ideas, thoughtful questions, and in so many other ways.
Personally, I find remarks like this to be extremely disrespectful to all of those wonderful people and their open-source work.
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.
I don't think that this is what the parent says. The parent doesn't complain about the devs moving to Anthropic (presumably to work on something they find exciting and get a good salary for it).
The parent complains about Anthropic hiring devs working on interesting projects, just because they have enough money for that.
> You can’t annihilate a project by hiring its devs away.
I also disagree with that: the codebase is still out there, but what is "a project"? Many (most?) open source projects stop evolving when their devs go away.
How dare OSS devs get paid.
It’s not really “OSS devs getting paid” if they stop being OSS developers to get paid
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.
1 reply →
Very unfortunate for Zulip as a project, and indicative of what a bubble we are in.
The founders take the money, and when the AI bubble pops we'll be left holding the ashes.