[devin]

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?

[heymijo]

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.

[rounce]

Found it here: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-e3n2c-28221400

The host is absolutely insufferable.

[qwerpy]

I attempted to listen and couldn't get over the "Wolp" pronunciation of warp.

[zx8080]

> 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?

[unethical_ban]

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.

[zachlloyd]

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

[devin]

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.

[mpyne]

> "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.

[KetoManx64]

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)

[mpyne]

> You're in the minority. Just about every open source project that I use has a "Donate/Contribute" link somewhere on their website/Github

I just checked and I didn't see a Donate/Contribute link for Alacritty.

Is there something I'm missing? Or do we have an entire thread full of people bashing on Warp for doing something Alacritty themselves do not wish to solicit?

As you point out yourself, it's not hard to throw up a Donate link if you're that kind of open source developer.

[unethical_ban]

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.

[qwerpy]

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"?

[giancarlostoro]

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.

[jdiff]

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.

[sroussey]

Enter Cursor

[saghm]

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.

[giancarlostoro]

> 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.

[xnyan]

> 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.

[saghm]

> 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.

[rapind]

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...

[giancarlostoro]

I would once profitable, but early stages where every dollar matters? I can see why they wouldnt just throw money left and right.

[xnyan]

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.

[jdiff]

This isn't left and right, this is one direction: upstream, to the project that forms your very heart.

[Muhammad523]

> 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?

[giancarlostoro]

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.

[jdiff]

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.

[Muhammad523]

Donating to the free software you use, even a little, is good.

[giancarlostoro]

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.

[allarm]

This whole thread is just bonkers. Dude stop pretending you don't understand the situation here. It's been explained to you multiple times.

[ktm5j]

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.

[elcritch]

> 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]

Finance definitely isn't my thing, so thanks for the info.