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Comment by spudlyo | Hacker News Reader

Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas. Enshitification is sure to follow in one guise or another.

I don’t know that this qualifies as enshitification… on one hand, the author created something that scratched his own itch, shared it, and now it’s become a tool that he wishes to steward into a way where he can make money.

I don’t know that these are terrible things inherently, it kind of depends if he wishes to extract as money as possible from his users by any means necessary or if he’s truly trying to scale it so it can help people. All we have is this article and infinite speculation.

I personally didn’t find herdr useful, so I have no stake in the direction of what the author decides to do with herdr.

In my cynical view, herder now seems to be an attempt to commercialize tmux by adding superficial polish. I am wary of VC backed developer tools that seek to innovate in well established open source niches. Herdr by default is mouse focused, has very friendly UI interactions, and has some niche UI support for agents running in panes. Great. Now it also has a profit motive and ROI pressures. I don't see this ending well.

If he wants to make money he needs to sell licenses, not give them away for free. To that end, making the free version AGPL is generally a good move. It ensures people can get hooked on your product and when they start working at corporations they have to pay to keep using it.

Enshitification is 100% guaranteed with any vc backing. Maybe not now, but definitely in the future it is the literal point of venture capital. Gain adoption, then exploit to the maximum extent possible.

It’s fine to use these kind of tools, just don’t get too attached and be ready for the rug pull.

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