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Comment by elicash | Hacker News Reader

I remember that HN discussion, but it seemed to me from the outside that after that post they got Google as a sponsor and I just had assumed the community was rallying together for them a bit.

But I guess not.

Too bad, they seem like such good people. Not that they're dead or something but I don't think this was their ideal end state for Tailwind.

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They got like 10 new sponsors, you can see it on their page. They are one of the top OSS projects in terms of revenue.

I can't recall any other OSS project that makes so much money and has nothing to do with infra/cloud.

They were making around $1M a year back when they complained about the revenue. A lot of Linux distros can only dream about such an amount of money.

$1M a year isn't a lot of money if you are paying for full-time employees.

Right, and as a consequence lots of very important software (orders of magnitude more important than tailwind) does not have full-time employees. Good for them if they can manage it, but it's a gravy train.

Given how hard it is to build any form of financially sustainable model around an open source project I think we should actively celebrate anyone who manages to build a model that works, not dismiss it as a "gravy train".

I really just think they got lucky, I don't see anything to celebrate. It's like celebrating one of your friends winning the lottery - good for them, but it's not really an indication the system is working well at all.

9 years of work to "get lucky".

Again, lots of people put in 9 years of work and never get anywhere with it. The success tailwind has had is not a consequence of the work.

The success of tailwind would not have happened without the work.

Just because others have worked nine years without success doesn't mean you shouldn't get credit when you put that work in and are successful.

They achieved $2 million revenue in the first 5 months of the first Tailwind UI release.[1]

They had a very good run for such a project.

[1] - https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...

This was after they laid everyone off, so it was just Adam and Steve left. An they surpassed $2M a year in sponsorships a couple of months after that. They were not struggling for cash at all.

I'm not sure from "they could afford payroll because they laid everyone off" I would conclude that they weren't struggling for cash.

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