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Comment by ogre_codes | Hacker News Reader

Uuuuggggghhhhhh

While I've already kind of fallen out of love with Slack, I do appreciate that they are independent. I do understand why smaller companies do this, but generally it results in a crappier product. Skype is a perfect example of a good product left to rot on the corporate vine.

The software world would be so much richer if there were more difficult for bigger companies to suck them up and turn them into corporate goop. I'm not necessarily suggesting regulation here. Just wishful thinking.

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This is my quarterly Zulip[1] mention! Independent OSS chat and unlikely to be turned into corporate goop.

[1] https://zulip.com/

Let's add in Mattermost. Have you used both? I remember trying Zulip briefly one evening and it just felt horribly confusing. Mattermost feels more at home but its threading model is weird, it's not really threading (at least like Slack) since all messages are echoed to the channel.

https://mattermost.org/

> unlikely to be turned into corporate goop

What are reasons it's unlikely?

(I like Zulip btw)

Zulip's founder here. (I should write a blog post on this topic.)

The structural reason is that we're intentionally not taking VC funding, which does more or less inevitable lead to that outcome.

Less structural but just as important is that my personal priority is in creating great open source software for the world, not personal enrichment.

This thread may be useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23105031.

Thanks! I read it and the history section at your website

How is Zulip as a company different from Slack?

Zulip as a company is extremely different a massively-VC-funded-and-then-go-public company like Slack:

* 100% of the software we write is FOSS.

* We intentionally haven't taken VC funding despite plenty of opportunity to do so, to ensure we can remain an independent, values-focused company.

* Most features are built by our open source community, not fulltime employees.

* Zulip was a distributed company pre-pandemic (while we did have a SF coworking space walking distance from my home, I as the founder only went in about once every week or two, and essentially all collaboration was over Zulip or GitHub).

Isn't Zulip acquired by Dropbox?

Dropbox hasn't been involved with Zulip since 2016. Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23864140

They acquired the original Zulip startup in 2014. Then they open-sourced the code, and Zulip since 2016 is backed by a new company which is the one tabbott is describing above.

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