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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
The ones that a barely-informed stranger could easily identify as having made you 7+ figures.
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.
I hope you are aware of the fact a business makes way more money than a "normal" person?
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.
The host is absolutely insufferable.
we have a lot of open source library dependencies and are grateful to the folks who worked on them
"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.
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"?
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.
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.
It's almost the "success" definition in the business language, isn't it?
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.
So are you going to donate to them or not?
It's disgusting behavior.
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.
Altman has trash morals
(exactly as lowbrow of a response as your nonsense deserves)