Announcing the Zulip Foundation

41 points by louwers 14 days ago on lobsters | 13 comments

jak2k | 14 days ago

A transition to a foundation is a good thing. But it's concerning that most board members are involved with Anthropic.

algernon | 14 days ago

...just when I set up a zulip, I get to migrate away from it. Wonderful. I kind of started to like it.

I'd offer a different framing here: several individuals who have already been long-term leaders of the project are being hired by Anthropic. They're setting up a foundation so they can replace themselves easily, not handing over control to a new group controlled by Anthropic.

RIP Zulip, was nice knowing you.

schmudde | 13 days ago

Great point. I also see Recurse Center in there. Not sure what to make of all this.

The School of Losing Time uses it - was really happy that they decided to support us. Zulip had a good offer to communities like ours. https://www.theschooloflosingtime.com/

bitshift | 14 days ago

Where does it say who's with Anthropic and who's not? I see the mention at the top that 4 people are joining Anthropic (the author and "three senior team members"), but I don't see a direct confirmation of who those people are. It doesn't say if the 4 members of the board of directors are those same 4 people or not, though I guess that would be reasonable to assume?

punchagan | 14 days ago

The post mentions:

Three additional members of Zulip’s longtime leadership team are also joining me at Anthropic: Alya Abbott, Greg Price, and Alex Vandiver.

bitshift | 14 days ago

Ah, thanks! So 3 out of 4 of the initial board of directors will be from Anthropic.

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goldstein | 14 days ago

I can’t help but interpret it as “Anthropic is acquihiring Zulip by going through the usual “technically nonprofit” scheme”. I would love to be proved wrong, but 3/4 board members being Anthropic employees does not feel me with confidence. This is sad, Zulip is a good tool and I have some skepticism that Anthropic would be good stewards for it given their previous performance.

dzervas | 14 days ago

is anthropic/openai buying the whole opensource ecosystem?

pointlessone | 14 days ago

It’s a pragmatic decision. I’m sure Anthropic came with a dump truck of cash. And it’s just a job. The project remains independent. If anything happens to Anthropic he can return to Zulip.

radio | 13 days ago

I liked Zulip when it came out, I had hopes its new approach to organizing things was going to improve something.

This hasn't proven to be the case.

teymour | 13 days ago

Why hasn’t it improved things for you?

I really like Zulip - In my experience it’s a nice point between email and a more conventional synchronous chat application (e.g. slack).