Comment by elzbardico

1 day ago

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?

    • The biggest scam that was ever pulled was convincing software developers that the GPL was somehow bad and out of vogue and that open source should prefer BSD, MIT, Apache, etc instead.

      And now we have entire threads like this of people crying because some company used someone's software exactly as the license allows.

      It's a shame, but there really is no sympathy for projects that choose the wrong license. Stallman knew this decades ago and somehow even now we're still learning it.

      13 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.