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Comment by figassis | Hacker News Reader

Today, I wanted to add tailwind to a new project and realized I had purchased it back in 2022. So I went to the website and realized it had moved to tailwind plus. That’s how distracted I’ve been. To my surprise my access worked and I could still download the full UI kit.

I know they promised lifetime, but I did not expect updates forever. This looks like the first issue to fix. I would have no issues paying 20% of purchase price for an updated version, that gave me access to 12 months of free updates.

Also, what about paid access to skills or MCP server for design systems and components?

I know these may be things he already considered, so don’t want to presume I have an answer. But as a customer, totally willing to support a good product that has supported me.

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Lovable while claiming they are making $250m ARR heaving using Tailwind, doesnt even pay to support tailwind at all. Although with the AI companies you can never trust the numbers as they play the giving free trials and counting as future ARR game.

And that's totally fine what Lovable is doing. Tailwind offers an MIT-licensed library that anyone is free to use without paying for it. Tailwind's paid offering is optional, and many businesses won't need it. Just as non-paying users of OSS are not entitled to anything from the maintainers, maintainers are not entitled to revenue from users who are complying with the license terms of their free offering.

As an open source developer myself, it concerns me that so much of what we do us under- and un-funded, but that's the licensing model Tailwind chose. If you want something different, then release it under the AGPL (or something else that businesses aren't comfortable using, or cannot use), and charge for commercial licensing for any use of your product. Yes, you'll have fewer users, but that may be the trade off you need to make in order to build a sustainable business.

Great point here, the only thing that feels greedy to me is that these larger companies do not contribute back to the foundational libraries that they are building on, even to a minor extent for ecosystem improvements. Perhaps greedy is a strong word.

i’ve always felt that oss licenses needs to include responsible use terms or something. some orgs dont mind paying for value contributed but you need to provide a structure to do so, even if that is on a voluntary basis.

If anyone from Lovable etc sees these comments, great opportunity for sponsorship where it can make a difference upstream.

Some companies have done this well, at a stage Retool use to sponsor a number of open source libs which greatly helped them with exposure to devs. Surely a better way to spend ad revenue imo.

If you give something away for free, don't complain when people take it for free. Make it AGPL instead then.

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