[colinmarc]

> Maybe the game has changed with LLMs, but its been a running joke that engineers will build a startup/product/library/thing only to then realize they can’t get any users and that marketing and sales are hard.

I agree with your premise, but you're still viewing this technology through the lens of "a successful product" versus "a successful piece of technology".

Plenty of open source projects stay open source and are popular without ever making any sales whatsoever. I'm not trying to project my own motivations on the Iroh team; they may want to build a product out of it. For me, though, the project has a lot of appeal already, because it exactly and excellently fulfills a technological need, not because they brought me in with a "it's x but for y" narrative.

[falsemyrmidon]

It's still about getting users even if you're not charging money for it. If you want to make an open source thing and don't care about getting users then that's great for you I guess? And there's a good chance it'll stay that way unless you put at least some effort into getting them (eg even putting effort into a readme counts).

[mirrir]

replace "successful product" with "useful artifact" and you'll get more of the common ground with less of the pedantics.