Comment by shimman
20 hours ago
Still feel extremely negative towards this company for tweaking an Alacritty fork then using that to get a $50million venture round then giving zero money towards Alacritty, an open source library that the founder completely owes their career too.
Not shocked they partnered with another company that is fine with raping the commons for profit, OpenAI.
They definitely did some git cleanup to remove this fact too going by their commit history.
To be fair, they did reach out to me at the time (I was an active contributor) and I gave them some initial feedback on the design, but ultimately didn't decide to engage much more. I think the direction Alacritty wants to go in and they wanted to go in was pretty different.
It is telling though that few underlying issue were found. Zed however has contributed back in a few places.
This is what AI companies do. They steal stuff and then do not give credit to anyone, not even a "thank you". If doing so was needed to get money, that's what they'd have done. Anyways, i was very surprised to see they chose my favorite free software license -- the AGPLv3
(I like using em-dashes but i'm not a bot)
I didn't suspect you were a bot; I'm a fan of the semicolon and ()'s myself.
Warp founder here. Totally understood on the feedback - one thing I would call out is that we actually worked with Alacritty on the initial implementation and they were super helpful and we are grateful for their support.
I sort of can't tell if this is supposed to be a joke or not. It seems like you're explaining that in addition to not supporting the project from which your company spawned 50M, they also supplied free work for which they were never compensated. That's supposed to be better or something?
There's an interview that got scrubbed from the internet with Zach on the 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings. This comment and its lack of self-awareness exemplify what was on display for 60 minutes.
Zach is undoubtedly smart but for anyone who is not an SV insider, they would listen to that podcast they same way you are looking at this comment and wonder if it's all one big joke.
2 replies →
> free work for which they were never compensated. That's supposed to be better or something?
It's almost the "success" definition in the business language, isn't it?
So if I use vim or emacs for free, or VS Code for that matter, I have to hunt down the maintainers and pay them? Do I need to empty my wallet for every project I use for free? Because that's not sustainable for normal people, let alone businesses.
14 replies →
I mean, if they have a working relationship with each other then I guess the alacritty folks don't hate their guts. That's meaningful from my perspective.
Also remember that the $50m is not revenue that they can use however they want. They have an obligation to their investors to make money with it.
2 replies →
The charitable read is that the original project team willingly worked with Warp, knowing the direction they were going. I don't know any background on the drama FWIW.
5 replies →
if you’re actually grateful for their support maybe you could support them with some donations out of that 50 million
Alacritty doesn't accept donations.
Doesn't that make not supporting them even worse???
I feel obligated to chime in here a bit. I was the Alacritty member who was contacted and who offered some feedback.
I have absolutely no hard feelings.
Would it have been a good idea to charge them for my time, IDK. I was in between a research role and a new job at the time and more than happy to help. Do I feel like I missed out on something, maybe a little bit, but that's more on me than them. I'm sure if I had angled for a position working for or with them, they would have considered it seriously.
Would it be nice to have more support for Alacritty, perhaps. But there are a lot of conflicting opinions on what to work on and what features are good for the project, so it's not as simple as just adding money and people. I was always hoping alacritty could be a minimal library others could use, and I'm glad it has turned out that way.
thanks for the support here. we are very grateful for the help you all provided initially, and if you are interested in sponsorship for the repo, we are also happy to provide some. alacritty is awesome
1 reply →
Toss a coin to your Witcher
> Totally understood on the feedback [...] we are grateful for their support
So are you going to donate to them or not?
Alacritty doesn't accept donations.
This isn't feedback. This is saying your company and your leadership are absolutely toxic to the tech community if this is how you treat people that made you wealthy.
It's disgusting behavior.
you shouldn’t be surprised though. most people in tech only care about money and you already know if you align yourself with Altman, your morals already aren’t in the right place.
5 replies →
talk is cheap ...
If you expect payment then put that in the license. Yes it's a dick move, but those are the terms the original developer chose.
Yeah I don't understand why people are acting so hurt by this. If you want to be paid for something, don't make it open source. If you want to force users to keep the source open, make it GPL/AGPL/whatever. If you want to prevent commercial use, use an appropriate license. This company didn't do any wrong from my limited knowledge of this thread.
Sure it would be great for them to give back, and they absolutely should, but I don't see why they deserve any hate (unless they hide what they did or engage in otherwise shady practices, but based on the comments I'm not seeing that).
Alacritty doesn't accept donations.
This is such an HN take. "If you want money you have to force people into it"
What a shithole society is
It's technically legal to take photos of people through their windows, but we don't worry about anybody but big tech creeps actually doing it on a regular basis.
Then tech leaders suddenly act shocked when society violently starts rejecting them.
Well. It is open source. We have empires built upon open source code that never give any money back to developers. Now we have AI built upon open source that is never going to pay back those developers.
But you decide to feel extremely negative towards a small fish on this veritable pound of sharks?
Yes, these people need to know their actions are routinely hated in the community. They should be boo'd at conferences too.
I agree with you, BUT, we have licensing right? Ie couldn't the author have chosen a license that would have prevented this - if they had cared?
I'm unsure if we should lose sleep over something the author likely chose. Its their right to not care how the code is used, maybe we should abide their wishes?
Is there perhaps there's an issue with licensing? Eg there's no easy license akin to MIT for small time devs, but less open for $50M VC babies? Ie is there a scenario where an author like this wants something akin to MIT for small groups, but still doesn't want to be taken advantage of by massively backed corporations?
14 replies →
Venture capital is the shark. Microsoft didn't release Windows Terminal as a subscription service, iTerm isn't part of Apple's Developer fee. All of these companies do not treat their business strategy like Candy Land, they perfectly well understand that "terminal emulator SaaS with telemetry" is the root canal of devrel.
Warp's client going Open Source is the final step in acknowledging that they have no product. The value add is 100% their service offerings, the terminal itself is as useless as those VS Code forks that sell themselves on being "AI native" or similar. It's even possible that their terminal product is what's preventing developers from demoing their (definitely more profitable) agent harness.
genuinely asking, what is the appropriate compensation/donation/split for a company that uses open source heavily in their early days but later makes money off of it?
Well do you consider yourself a good human or a greedy one? Do you care about others and community or just yourself?
Personally would love to give back, if I ever make it there. I contribute to large open source communities and also benefit from the contributions of many others, but have never personally been in that situation. Curious what best practices have been historically.
You didn't answer their question. Asking your own questions isn't an answer.
2 replies →
This is a shortcoming with permissive licenses (such as MIT).
If you want to prevent your own project from being taken from you, then AGPL3 is your best option.
If you don't want to stifle adoption then you can always offer bespoke licenses to companies who need them (at a cost to them, and a profit to you).
Until hackers understand the risk of permissive licenses, this will continue to happen.
Seems silly to bash a company for using open source exactly in accordance with the license. If they expected to be compensated, they picked the wrong licensing terms.
I don't really understand the controversy; there are plenty of licenses an author can choose that restricts commercial use of a project. It feels a bit dishonest to release something under a permissive license and then be upset when someone uses your stuff well within the ways you said is perfectly ok.
So many proprietary companies are built on the back of open-source software. Yes, there is no legal responsibility for Warp to donate to Allacritty. But there is a moral obligation. It's not hard to see open-source maintainers and enthusiasts looking at Warp with skepticism. I didn't know that and will be uninstalling Warp, though I stopped using it months ago.
If someone expects to be compensated for their work they should be upfront about it. IMHO it's dishonest/immoral to freely give something away with no expressed expectation of reciprocity and then get upset when someone doesn't reciprocate.
1 reply →
And for requiring you to login with an email account to use the terminal.. (They finally removed this after years of complaints, but I dont trust any company with this type of culture)
The license is the license. I don't know what you expect. I think, to be a good sport, they ought to mention in an About page that they're forked from Alacritty, with a clear link and thank you/appreciation note for the foundation code, but anything beyond that is both unnecessary and should not ever be expected.
(Side note but I find it odd how anti-corporate and anti-AI HN has become starting in the past decade. I am very much not right-wing and frankly I loathe rightists, but I am also very much not a socialist. Though I'm not a libertarian either, to be clear; I just don't have an instinctive revulsion towards corporations who use open source code - or corporations who have more restrictive licenses to prevent this very thing, like Elasticsearch or MongoDB - or towards AI companies for training on public things, or really towards corporations in general. I am perhaps the rare left-leaning corporate shill.)