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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 towar
by shimman 6mo 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.
- zachlloyd 6mo agoWarp 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.
- lucidia 6mo agoif you’re actually grateful for their support maybe you could support them with some donations out of that 50 million
- nixpulvis 6mo agoAlacritty doesn't accept donations.
- shimman 6mo agoThis 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.
- lucidia 6mo agoyou 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.
- ukblewis 6mo agoThis should be banned on this platform. If you are against Altman or his values or morals, that is fine, but calling others who do feel aligned with him immoral… well that kind of hate leads to attempts on Altman’s life of which we have already seen one. You better stop with this behaviour before you encourage others to do actions that you will regret
- shimman 6mo agoYou don't understand why people are upset at an individual that is proudly proclaiming that 100s of millions of Americans will become unemployed and there is nothing to do be done about it? In a country where being unemployed is a literal death sentence? What kind of responses do you expect in return? I'm sorry but everyone in his orbit needs to be publicly shamed as well. These people are ghouls and we're seeing them create the next generation of ghouls in real time.
- lucidia 6mo agolol you’re a moron. Altman actively promotes neofeudalist ideas and has shown time and again he does not care about safety or human wellbeing. Sociopathic narcissists like him will be the downfall of our species.
- whateveracct 6mo agowe can't say CEOs have bad morals now? Altman has trash morals
- scubbo 6mo agoLol, lmao, shut up idiot. (exactly as lowbrow of a response as your nonsense deserves)
- blitzar 6mo agoToss a coin to your Witcher
- devin 6mo agoI 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?
- ktm5j 6mo agoI 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.
- elcritch 6mo ago> They have an obligation to their investors to make money with it. It's bit more nuanced. The company management have fiducial responsibilities to the investors but also have responsibility to the company itself and its employees. E.g. Milton Friedman's shared-holder primacy is a crap philosophy and one of the most damaging ones to actual healthy free market economies. For example, in corporate bankruptcy in the US workers get paid before shareholders. The courts have also tended to favor the company management as long as they're acting reasonably, so I've read. IANAL, but it shouldn't be too hard to say hey this support contract for a core piece of software reduces risk for us by X, Y or helps get Z feature.
- ktm5j 6mo agoFinance definitely isn't my thing, so thanks for the info.
- giancarlostoro 6mo agoSo 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.
- peschu 6mo agotalk is cheap ...
- pear01 6mo ago> Totally understood on the feedback [...] we are grateful for their support So are you going to donate to them or not?
- nixpulvis 6mo agoAlacritty doesn't accept donations.
- koolala 6mo agoDoesn't that make not supporting them even worse???
- nixpulvis 6mo agoI 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.
- zachlloyd 6mo agothanks 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
- junofan 6mo agoThe takes in this thread are insane. There’s nowhere else to put this comment given the framing so I’m putting it here. OSS isn’t a charity movement.
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- elzbardico 6mo agoWell. 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?
- shimman 6mo agoYes, these people need to know their actions are routinely hated in the community. They should be boo'd at conferences too.
- unshavedyak 6mo agoI 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?
- petcat 6mo agoThe 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.
- u_fucking_dork 6mo agoIt’s not that complicated. Most of us program for work, and can’t use GPL stuff at work. People were optimizing for being the most useful and therefore getting the most use.
- Aeroi 6mo agogenuinely 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?
- shimman 6mo agoWell do you consider yourself a good human or a greedy one? Do you care about others and community or just yourself?
- SuperHeavy256 6mo agoYou didn't answer their question. Asking your own questions isn't an answer.
- shimman 6mo agoWhy doesn't it answer the question? If you are a selfish individual that doesn't believe in giving back. there simply isn't much to discuss. These companies literally could not exist without the massive public dollars + support poured into them. Warp couldn't exist without the funds from public pensions being gambled with. Since these same companies have zero qualms in raping public resources, the government should simply start taking their money or nationalizing their businesses. These leaders have shown they will absolutely destroy society to make a few dollars. We should reject them on the basis of being a member of the human race. Their greed is literally destroying society and we have to ask if they should give more or not? We're beyond the point of giving, people are going to start taking and they're already starting off trying to take things you can't ever give back.
- lanakei 6mo agoEvery tech company could not exist without the internet, developed by the US government/universities and released for free. Should they all be nationalized? Are they all "raping public resources"? Open-source developers have plenty of ways to make money from their work. You can even stipulate in your license that companies who use the code to make more than a certain amount of money pay a fee. If developers choose not to do that, that's fine, but it means nobody is obligated to pay them. Imagine Warp donated $1000 to Alacritty. Would you be happy then? What about $10k, or $1 million? What would be the appropriate compensation? Sure, Warp wouldn't exist without Alacritty, but they also wouldn't exist without the ARPANET. At the same time, Alacritty's developers didn't raise $50 million in funding, pay developers to build Warp's features, or do any of the marketing. How do we know how to compensate them? Answer: we look at Alacritty's licensing terms, which explicitly permit free use of the software as long the license is included in all copies (which the Warp devs have complied with).
- dpe82 6mo agoI 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.
- theturtletalks 6mo agoSo 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.
- dpe82 6mo agoIf 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.
- theturtletalks 6mo ago>> If someone expects to be compensated for their work they should be upfront about it. Definitely and the Alacritty devs have never asked for anything in return for using their software and code. It's mainly others in the community looking at a commercial company forking and then raising $50M and not even contributing. I've seen huge companies, or their higher ups, Github sponsor developers who are building code they use. It's not unheard of.
- nixpulvis 6mo agoTo 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.
- lagniappe 6mo agoIf you expect payment then put that in the license. Yes it's a dick move, but those are the terms the original developer chose.
- nixpulvis 6mo agoAlacritty doesn't accept donations.
- ramon156 6mo agoThis is such an HN take. "If you want money you have to force people into it" What a shithole society is
- argc 6mo agoYeah 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).
- Muhammad523 6mo agoThis 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)
- shimman 6mo agoI didn't suspect you were a bot; I'm a fan of the semicolon and ()'s myself.
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- dcreater 6mo agoAnd 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)
- ferfumarma 6mo agoThis 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.
- ajam1507 6mo agoSeems 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.
- meowface 6mo agoThe 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.)
- shimman 6mo agoYou don't understand why tech workers are suddenly visibly, even violently, angry at an industry they helped usher into power whose leadership hold deeply anti-human and anti-democratic views? Honest Q just for you: have you been in a coma for the last 10 years?
- meowface 6mo agoI detest the "tech right" very deeply. But most tech execs and employees voted for the Democratic candidate in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Hatred should be directed at the actual people involved. The Andreessens of the world. I see no evidence the creators of Warp have done anything illiberal or pro-Trump.