Comment by legitster
3 days ago
It's insane how much AIs use Tailwind and yet the companies aren't contributing anything. It would be trivial for Anthropic or Cursor to pay something.
Would it work to have a new free-use license that explicitly excludes LLMs? Make them pay royalties - you'd have to use something like public license keys. But if Spotify pays a trivial license payment for every stream - Claude could contribute something when it recommends a project.
For what it's worth, Cursor does support Tailwind, see their sponsors page. But certainly agree.
https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor
> It would be trivial for Anthropic or Cursor to pay something.
You don't get rich by paying people what they deserve.
How would you possibly enforce this? I can disconnect my laptop from the internet and the local LLM will still autocomplete TW classes. Does JetBrains therefore owe TW every time it does this? What if it was actually completing UnoCSS class names that happen to overlap? How about when it's just simple autocomplete based on what classes are visible and what I've used within the same file?
These might sound like snide rhetorical questions, but when you start demanding payment, they're very real.
> How would you possibly enforce this?
The legal system.
If you see a bunch of Tailwind markup on websites without a license key, you can enforce your license. The LLMs can write the code for you, but they either have to negotiate their own license or instruct users to get their own.
The comparable I am familiar with is Font Awesome. Even if you want a free plan, you still have to create an account and get a key.
Then pretty soon people will stop using Tailwind and use another OSS atomic CSS library instead, like UnoCSS. You can't stop the hydra.
Sounds like full employment for IP lawyers. Not a world I'd prefer.
If they tailwind, it sets a precedent for others. They can't pay everyone.
So you're saying that just because they can't pay everyone, they should pay no one?
Yeah I know how that sounds but it's the most logical explanation.
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> It's insane how much AIs use Tailwind and yet the companies aren't contributing anything. It would be trivial for Anthropic or Cursor to pay something.
Paying someone fairly for its contribution to society? This won't pass here in the free world as it sounds like a dangerous communist idea. How are we supposed to become richer than our neighbor that way?