Etymologically, a product is a thing which is produced. But it's unpleasant to think about how the sausage gets made, so nobody wants to consider the goods in their lives as products. They want their Nikes to simply pop into existence before them.
Tools like grep and vim dangle by a thread based on volunteer work, and open-source maintainers are famously prone to burnout. Some tools survive by being very small—nobody's out there updating `ls` every month—but the only sustainable way to maintain a large piece of software is with a salaried workforce.
You may not want to interact with the systems that produce Zulip for you, but you should be suspicious of goods that hide their status as products. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Tools like grep and vim dangle by a thread based on volunteer work, and open-source maintainers are famously prone to burnout. Some tools survive by being very small—nobody's out there updating `ls` every month—but the only sustainable way to maintain a large piece of software is with a salaried workforce.
You may not want to interact with the systems that produce Zulip for you, but you should be suspicious of goods that hide their status as products. There's no such thing as a free lunch.