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.