Comment by f311a
1 day ago
They got like 10 new sponsors, you can see it on their page. They are one of the top OSS projects in terms of revenue.
I can't recall any other OSS project that makes so much money and has nothing to do with infra/cloud.
They were making around $1M a year back when they complained about the revenue. A lot of Linux distros can only dream about such an amount of money.
$1M a year isn't a lot of money if you are paying for full-time employees.
They achieved $2 million revenue in the first 5 months of the first Tailwind UI release.[1]
They had a very good run for such a project.
[1] - https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...
This was after they laid everyone off, so it was just Adam and Steve left. An they surpassed $2M a year in sponsorships a couple of months after that. They were not struggling for cash at all.
I'm not sure from "they could afford payroll because they laid everyone off" I would conclude that they weren't struggling for cash.
Right, and as a consequence lots of very important software (orders of magnitude more important than tailwind) does not have full-time employees. Good for them if they can manage it, but it's a gravy train.
Given how hard it is to build any form of financially sustainable model around an open source project I think we should actively celebrate anyone who manages to build a model that works, not dismiss it as a "gravy train".
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