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.
> 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.
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. ;)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
> 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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
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. ;)
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.
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.
Yeah I've often had the same thought! Ideas are very much appreciated.
I do like "team chat" quite a bit better than the original "group chat", which would often result in confusion with WhatsApp and its equivalents.
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/.
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.)
Gotta love the frontier labs annihilating open source projects left and right either by acquiring them directly or stealing the teams.
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.
How dare OSS devs get paid.
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?
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.
Multi-user/team-chat with Claude/Code. Today it's all 1:1.
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!
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
They are doing work, they're advocating for what they believe in. Consumers of FOSS deserve to have a voice too.
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.
I think the op was suggesting the contribute to FOSS rather than shaming people who have contributed greatly for not contributing more.
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.
If you're going to blame the consumer, might as well blame the person that chose to easily be exploited too.
I've known Tim personally for over a decade. I'm certain that he's not doing this because he wants more money.
> 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.
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).
> 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.
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?
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.
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