Hacker News Reader

Comment by dcreater | Hacker News Reader

thanks for clarifying. I guess my comment was more directed to the fact that pydantic, the company is 1) VC backed 2) Unclear how/when/what you will monetize 3) how that will affect the open source stuff.

I strongly believe you guys should be compensated very well for what you bring to the ecosystem but the probability of open source projects being enshittified by private interests is non-trivially high.

View on HN

I work at Pydantic and while the future is obviously unpredictable I can vow for all of us in that we do not intend to ever start charging for any of our open source things. We’ve made a very clear delineation between what is free (pydantic, pydantic-ai, the logfire SDK, etc) and what is a paid product (the Logfire SaaS platform). Everything open source is liberally licensed such that no matter the fate of the company it can be forked. Even the logfire SDK, the thing most integrated to our commercial offering, speaks OTLP and hence you can point it at any other provider, basically no lock in.

I appreciate that and honestly I never doubt the employees, or perhaps even the founders. When looking into the future, Its the investors that are not to be trusted and they call the shots commensurate to their ownership stake - which is again opaque to us in the case of pydantic.

And taking this 1 step further, its not that investors are evil people who want to bad things, but its their explicit job to make returns on their investment - its the basic mechanisms of idiom "show me an incentive and i'll show you the outcome"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com