Comment by Ameo
1 day ago
My perspective on this is that maybe Tailwind Labs shouldn't have been a for-profit business, or at least not one of the size that it grew to be.
I was reading a writeup on this history of Tailwind[1] made by Adam Wathan (who created Tailwind).
It seems like he was working on a variety of different business ideas including "Reddit meets Pinterest meets Twitter" and "a developer-focused, webhook-driven checkout platform". He created the basis of Tailwind just to help him build these projects, but it kept getting attention when he would post about his progress building them online.
Here's an important quote from the doc:
"Now at this point I had zero intention of maintaining any sort of open-source CSS framework. It didn’t even occur to me that what I had been building would even be interesting to anyone. But stream after stream, people were always asking about the CSS"
It seems like Adam's main goal was to start a software business, and Tailwind just happened to get popular and became what he pivoted his efforts into. There's obviously nothing wrong with wanting to start a business, but trying to take an open-source CSS framework and turn it into a multi-million dollar business feels unnatural and very difficult to maintain long-term.
To his credit, he did pull it off. He built a seemingly quite successful business and hired a sizable team, and apparently made a decent amount of revenue along the way.
But now, for AI reasons or otherwise, that business is struggling and failing to sustain the scale it was before. To me, it seems like the business is more or less completely separate from the open-source Tailwind project itself. It's, as far as I can understand, a business that sells templates and components built with Tailwind, and it uses Tailwind's popularity to bootstrap customers and sales.
If it were me who ended up building Tailwind, there's no way I would have pursued turning it into a big business. Maybe I would have tried some kind of consulting style, where I'd offer my time to companies evaluating or integrating Tailwind.
Now that Tailwind is getting hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars a year in sponsorships, it feels weird to have this for-profit business on the side at the same time.
Maybe it's just my own sensibilities and worldview, but I feel like Tailwind should just be what it is: an extremely popular and successful open-source CSS framework.
[1] https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...
I don’t understand this conclusion. Why shouldn’t it be a business? Doesn’t it create value? Hasn’t the nature of being a business led to far more maturity and growth in a FOSS offering than if it had been a side project? Just because it can’t afford 8 full time salaries now doesn’t declare it a failure. Your conclusion is that value should be created without any capture.
It wasn’t venture scale and never intended to be venture scale. By any metric you have, it’s a very successful business and has made its creators independent and wealthy as you pointed out.
I agree this is your worldview warping your perception. But I’d argue we need far more tailwinds and far less whatever else is going on. It captured millions in value - but it generated tens, or hundreds of millions, or more. And essentially gave it away for free.
I think a better conclusion is that it’s a flawed business model. In which case, I’d agree - this didn’t come out of nowhere. The product created (TailwindUI) was divorced from the value created (tailwindcss). Perhaps there was a better way to align the two. But they should be celebrated for not squeezing the ecosystem, not vilified. Our society has somewhat perverse incentives.
Sounds like your conclusion is: work hard to create something and just give it away for free.
Ok but the original Github issue involved a community contributor complaining that the core devs have no bandwidth to review/accept PRs. If it's not a business, then the core devs have to rely on spare time, which is scarcer than paid-by-business time. You can't have it both ways. If it's not a business, PRs being left to rot becomes the norm.