Comment by eddythompson80
21 hours ago
> Tailwind Labs relied on a weird monetization scheme. Revenue was proportional to the pain of using the framework.
Really? To me, Tailwind seemed like the pinnacle of how anyone here would say “open source software” should function. Provide a solid, truly open source, software and make money from consulting or helping others use it and selling custom built solutions around it. The main sin of Tailwind was assuming that type of business could scale to a “large business” structure as opposed to “a single dev”-type project. By a “single dev”-type I don’t mean literally one guy, but more a very lean and non-corporate or company-like structure.
Vercel (and redislabs, mongo, etc) are different because they are in the “we can run it for you” business. Which is another “open source” model I have dabbled in for a while in my career. Thinking that the honest and ethical position is to provide open source software, then offer to host it for people who don’t want to selfhost and charge for that.
From the developer perspective not much changes despite organization structure being completely different in this comparison (trillion dollar company vs 10 individual contributors).
Tailwind Labs revenue stream was tied to documentation visit, that was the funnel. The author's argument was this revenue stream was destroyed by a slight quality of life improvement (having llms fill in css classes). Tailwind Labs benefits from: a) documentation visit b) inability to implement desired layout using the framework (and CSS being unpleasant). It seems there is a conflict of interest between the developer expecting the best possible experience and the main revenue stream. Given that a slight accidental improvement in quality of life and autonomy for users destroyed the initiative main revenue stream, it would be fair to say it doesn't just "seems like a conflict of interest". Definitely disagree with it being the "pinnacle" of how open source should function but I also won't provide any examples because it is besides the point. I will point out that fsf is fine for many decades now, and a foundation with completely different structure like zig foundation seems to be ok with a somewhat proportional revenue (orders of magnitude less influence, adoption and users, maybe 10-20x less funding)
Wasn't the tailwind team just a few people? Might be misremembering but my impression was a team under 10 people, which is tiny