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.
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.
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.
This 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
You 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.
lol 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.
we can't say CEOs have bad morals now?
Altman has trash morals
Lol, lmao, shut up idiot.
(exactly as lowbrow of a response as your nonsense deserves)
Toss a coin to your Witcher
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?
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.
> 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.
Finance definitely isn't my thing, so thanks for the info.
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.
If you use them for free to spawn a 50M business, yeah, give back a little. Nobody's saying every user should open their wallet, let alone "empty" it as you hyperbolate.
Enter Cursor
Why wouldn't you throw them a few bucks? Especially if your multi-million dollar business is basically a vim clone entirely based on their source...
I would once profitable, but early stages where every dollar matters? I can see why they wouldnt just throw money left and right.
If you're actually asking the question, I'll give you my answer: I was lucky enough to go to a nice spa resort earlier this year, I just handed a few bills to an attendant who had laid out a towel for me when an older man sitting next to me chuckled and shook his head saying "You don't actually have to give them them anything, they have to do it anyway." Super nice resort, nobody here hurting for a few dollars in tips.
I guess it's valid to take everything you legally can, but personally, I'm saying it's fucked up move not to pay even a token amount. That's their only consequence, (some) people thinking it's a fucked up move.
This isn't left and right, this is one direction: upstream, to the project that forms your very heart.
I don't have particularly strong preference for copyleft (I use the Apache license for my personal projects), but these don't seem like particularly compelling arguments.
> So if I use vim or emacs for free, or VS Code for that matter
Vim and emacs both use licenses that require you to share any source code modifications if you distribute binaries that you change, so that's kind of a strange comparison. You literally couldn't do the things that Warp did with Alacritty. As for VS Code, it seems pretty disingenuous to compare a single solo developer to a multi-trillion dollar company.
> I have to hunt down the maintainers and pay them?
I don't understand why you think it would be hard to "hunt down" someone when an email is literally in every commit in the git history of open source software.
> Do I need to empty my wallet for every project I use for free? Because that's not sustainable for normal people
Most "normal people" do not have access to $50 million of VC money
> let alone businesses
Paying the developer of the one piece of software that they forked for the entire basis of their business $100,000 of the VC money would not meaningfully have hurt their ability to succeed. They could have just as easily reached the same level of success they have now with $49.9 million.
> I don't understand why you think it would be hard to "hunt down" someone when an email is literally in every commit in the git history of open source software.
I use Arch Linux, tell me which of the thousands of packages am I obligated to donate to? Im not exactly a money fountain to be giving money away to strangers I am grateful for, but it I put something on the internet as open source, for free, I dont cry if nobody reaches out to give me money. Honestly, I rather just be informed that my project is being used to make someone a profitable business, thats good enough for me personally. If I thought different, I wouldnt open source said projects.
> I use Arch Linux, tell me which of the thousands of packages am I obligated to donate to?
The ones that a barely-informed stranger could easily identify as having made you 7+ figures.
> I use Arch Linux, tell me which of the thousands of packages am I obligated to donate to? Im not exactly a money fountain to be giving money away to strangers I am grateful for, but it I put something on the internet as open source, for free, I dont cry if nobody reaches out to give me money.
If you read past that part of the comment to pick out the one thing you had a rebuttal for out of context, you might have noticed the parts about having $50 million dollars of VC money.
> Honestly, I rather just be informed that my project is being used to make someone a profitable business, thats good enough for me personally. If I thought different, I wouldnt open source said projects.
That's a totally valid take. It's also totally valid to think that a company that takes all that money to release a product that doesn't offer that much more than the original is a waste of resources that could be at least somewhat useful by giving 1/500th of it to the person who did almost all of the work they took.
> Not sustainable for normal people, let alone people
I hope you are aware of the fact a business makes way more money than a "normal" person?
People are upset they raised 50 million, how many employees? How long does that keep their lights on? Maybe if they were raking in hundreds of millions I would be inclined to be outraged but if I make a startup tomorrow I cant just donate my VC bucks to every open source project I like until I have some real income coming in or my investors will want my head.
You once again drag things in a wildly hyperbolic direction. Nobody's talking about throwing money around wildly at unrelated projects. When there is a single project that sits at your very heart, without which your entire startup is a nonstarter, yes, donate.
Donating to the free software you use, even a little, is good.
Not saying its not, I guess the core of my argument is that people are outraged that these guys raised 50 million… how much of that is going to employees and infrastructure? Is the owner sitting on 50 million in his personal bank account? Because the outrage feels very premature, not to mention they just open sourced the project when they really did not need to under any obligation. Far as I can tell they also did a lot of custom work on top of Alacritty, so its not 100% Alacritty.
This whole thread is just bonkers. Dude stop pretending you don't understand the situation here. It's been explained to you multiple times.
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.
Found it here: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-e3n2c-28221400
The host is absolutely insufferable.
I attempted to listen and couldn't get over the "Wolp" pronunciation of warp.
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.
that's the correct read - we shared what we were building and they helped us integrate alacritty. it's similar to how mitchell h reached out and asked today if we wanted to integrate ghostty.
we have a lot of open source library dependencies and are grateful to the folks who worked on them
I thought the negative sentiment being shared here was hyperbolic, but you look absolutely ridiculous in these comments.
"Actually, we are sure people who were critical to our success are happy they received nothing in return for their labor." <- This is you. This is what you sound like.
I have no skin in the game for either side of this, but I looked pretty hard at his comment history and couldn't find anything even remotely sounding like that. All he does is express gratitude for the projects they collaborated with. Alacritty folks themselves are saying as much here.
There's some undercurrent of something that seems to be driving a lot of the rage in the comments here. Anti-AI/OpenAI/"VC money"/"the rich"?
I think a conversation about the ethics and morals of forked software hitting it big, and how/how much they should give back to their upstream, is a good one to have, if the tone wasn't so personal and aggressive.
> "Actually, we are sure people who were critical to our success are happy they received nothing in return for their labor." <- This is you. This is what you sound like.
Have you ever contributed to open source?
Not everyone is doing it out of the expectation of a paycheck. For all the open source code I've worked on, my goal has unironically been for those using it to achieve whatever positive end they were trying to use my software for, and that's it.
The one time I did go further and agree to do some one-off changes for money it actually caused me a hassle that year as I had to account for it under the right tax treatment, I was nearly outside the "hobby" exception you can get.
You're in the minority. Just about every open source project that I use has a "Donate/Contribute" link somewhere on their website/Github, and I see articles constantly about projects being shut down or archived because the developer couldn't afford the time investment anymore due to lack of income. I keep a list of open source software I use so I can donate every couple of years to pay them for their work, and I've run into maybe 2-5 projects out of the dozens of donations I've done over the years that either don't have a donate option or just tell you to donate to a charity instead (eg. Unlock Origin)
> 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?
talk is cheap ...
> 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.
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
The 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.
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.
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
Then tech leaders suddenly act shocked when society violently starts rejecting them.
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.
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).
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.
It’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.
Alacritty is an application. Most of us use GPL applications at work.
Neither I nor the comment I replied to are talking about Alacritty
The comment you replied to is talking about how a company used the Alacritty code exactly how its license allows.
The comment I replied to is speaking about the industry at large and how we’ve all had the wool pulled over our eyes by nefarious actors, presumably at Amazon and friends.
The biggest scam is GPL convincing people that the license will keep things open source. Every try contributing to Chrome's web engine? It started as GPL khtml, but good luck doing anything as google controls it. Meanwhile FreeBSD manages to get plenty of contributors.
Don't get me wrong, license is important. However it doesn't have nearly the effect many people claim.
Without it, chrome would be closed source entirely.
KHTML was LGPL, just as with the rest of the KDE libraries. Otherwise Apple wouldn't have been able to fork it in the first place.
LGPL yes. However the rest is false. GPL would have made a bit more of their fork open source, but Apple would have otherwise had no problem forking it and not allowing contributors. KHTML developers often complained in those early years that their fork was in theory open source, but it quickly became so different that it wasn't possible to figure out which changes were wroth porting and which not.
I suspect a lawyer could look at the state of WebKit and Chrome these days and conclude there is so little original code remaining that it can be re-licensed to closed source (see a lawyer for what this complex bit of law means) - worst case they only have to rewrite a small amount.
It is open source. You are free to fork it if you don't like the terms for contributing to that repo so long as your fork remains open source, just as Apple did with KHTML, Google did with Webkit, and Electron and Brave did with Blink. If Warp were open source to begin with, people would have been free to rip out the things they didn't like in it and build upon the things they liked, benefiting the project that was forked to begin with because they can do that as well.
In theory yes. In practice a web engine is so complex you need a large team. Your fork may start out good, but quickly it will become so far behind everyone else that it isn't usable as a browser for the latest sites. Plus you won't hear about many security issues/fixes until you are exploited.
Unless you can find a large team willing to maintain your system a fork is something that is not realistically possible. As volunteers I doubt you can get enough help, but if you are rich you can hire plenty of developers who would love to help.
The GPL would not have prevented the scenario that the top-level comment complained about. Nothing in the GPL requires rich downstream projects to send money to poor upstream projects. That's by design. The four freedoms that Stallman preaches intentionally permit distributing the software to free riders.
It would have prevented Warp from forking Alacritty and re-distributing it as a closed source product. That's what it's about. This whole scenario would have been impossible from the start because Warp would have been forced by the license to be good open source citizens.
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?
You didn't answer their question. Asking your own questions isn't an answer.
Why 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.
Every 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).
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.
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.
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)
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.
>> 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.
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.)
You 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?
I 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.