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Comment by nightski | Hacker News Reader

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

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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).

I think at least some skepticism about independency is warranted when the board of directors is 3/4 Anthropic employees. Zulip is an awesome tool, and I want to assume good faith here, but it’s really hard to interpret this as anything other than acquihiring, especially given how industry is prone to using intermediary non-profits for things they actually control.

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.

I don't disagree with you in general terms, but what % of total commits or code change came from you and the three others leaving? A long lived long tail is great, but it still often dies out when you cut the head

If you’re not that familiar with the project then what’s it to you?

Personally, I think this is great and I’m going to send this to my boss who might have to make a similar decision someday. It seems to me like they could have just sold the product to them but went to lengths to keep it independent; that’s the type of thing we should encourage.

No offense intended but sometimes this type of comment sounds like the other side of the AI psychosis coin, like an anti AI psychosis.

Poaching four full time core developers is bound to hurt any open source project, even ones much larger than Zulip.

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.

> 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.

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.

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