> 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.
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.
Here's to the Zulip project continuing to maintain its engineering excellence and its community principles for the next ten years.
crabmusket 3 hours ago [-]
PS. With the sincerity out of the way - can't wait for the upcoming Rust rewrite!
pig208 4 hours 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.
tiffanyh 8 hours 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 8 hours 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 7 hours 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) was published on a Friday and I think got more attention because of that choice of date than it would have otherwise.
Argorak 5 hours ago [-]
I mean, all customers got a mid-long email, this does not sound like anyone buries anything.
conorbergin 8 hours 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 5 hours 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 30 minutes ago [-]
How is any chat app complicated with 3 people?
Davidzheng 2 hours 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
tabbott 1 hours ago [-]
There's new long-lived connection support in Zulip 12.0 that will enable the mobile app to do a lot better for startup in organizations with multiple 10ks of users.
I think it's expected to be enabled in the mobile apps in the next couple weeks.
nicholasjbs 9 hours 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.)
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 7 hours 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 6 hours ago [-]
Naming is hard! Thank you for working on Zulip, it's truly impressive!
nicoburns 3 hours 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 2 hours 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.
nightski 8 hours ago [-]
Gotta love the frontier labs annihilating open source projects left and right either by acquiring them directly or stealing the teams.
nicholasjbs 6 hours ago [-]
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.
JoshTriplett 7 hours ago [-]
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).
tabbott 7 hours ago [-]
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.
sneak 7 hours 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.
palata 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Kuinox 7 hours ago [-]
How dare OSS devs get paid.
kennywinker 6 hours ago [-]
It’s not really “OSS devs getting paid” if they stop being OSS developers to get paid
fragmede 5 hours 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 1 hours 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.
wegwerper 6 hours ago [-]
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.
dr_kretyn 5 hours 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.
4 hours ago [-]
gm678 8 hours 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?
wmf 6 hours 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.
tedd4u 7 hours ago [-]
Multi-user/team-chat with Claude/Code. Today it's all 1:1.
severine 5 hours ago [-]
Seems logical.
KolmogorovComp 4 hours 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.
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.
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!
iloveoof 7 hours 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.
phoenixy1 7 hours 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!
xiaoyu2006 8 hours 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.
csb6 8 hours 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.
Etheryte 8 hours 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 8 hours ago [-]
They are doing work, they're advocating for what they believe in. Consumers of FOSS deserve to have a voice too.
Centigonal 8 hours 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 5 hours 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 8 hours 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 8 hours ago [-]
If you're going to blame the consumer, might as well blame the person that chose to easily be exploited too.
cptskippy 8 hours ago [-]
I think the op was suggesting the contribute to FOSS rather than shaming people who have contributed greatly for not contributing more.
csb6 7 hours ago [-]
I have no qualms with him deciding to step away from developing Zulip or setting up a foundation. My qualms are with his choice to work for an AI company when someone of his experience could easily have found a job working somewhere else. Public figures should be subject to criticism of their ethical choices when they make bad ones.
nicholasjbs 8 hours ago [-]
I've known Tim personally for over a decade. I'm certain that he's not doing this because he wants more money.
palata 8 hours 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.
pulga28 7 hours 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).
tialaramex 7 hours 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.
shimman 8 hours 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?
csb6 8 hours 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.
stefan_ 5 hours 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?
sergiotapia 7 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
Come on. He ran Zulip for 10 years!
sergiotapia 1 hours ago [-]
Totally and Zulip is wonderful. But the double speak come on dude
goosejuice 2 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
dijit 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 04:27:32 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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-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/
Here's to the Zulip project continuing to maintain its engineering excellence and its community principles for the next ten years.
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.
Fun fact: The original blog post announcing the Zulip Open Source project (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.
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.
I think it's expected to be enabled in the mobile apps in the next couple weeks.
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.)
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.
I always think of it as being halfway between those and more traditional forums (PHPBB, discourse, etc).
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.
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.
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).
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.
This idea that devs owe their continued free service to an open source project they released in the past is a crazy one.
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.
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.
The founders take the money, and when the AI bubble pops we'll be left holding the ashes.
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 details how I think about integration review, and 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!
It’s okay to make money and change up your career! But this communication is bizarre.
I cannot quite agree to this. But nonetheless I wish good luck to the Zulip project.
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.
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.
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.
it's pretty funny