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Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

herdr.dev

21–30 of 197 posts

Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

#21
post #9
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it’s great but with this, it’s probably the time to find an alternative, I probably can see where this will be in a year or so.

why “find” an alternative? if you’re a herdr user you’re perfectly capable of maintaining a fork just for yourself :)

I can't tell if this is sarcasm but in case its not, being capable of doing something and having the desire and resources to do it are not the same thing

Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

#22

Okay, back to tmux it is then.

I am going to be PRing herdr to stagex as it is my daily driver. This will give it a totally independent release process with multiple parties bootstrapping, reproducing, and signing deterministic binaries for it alongside our tmux releases.

We (the stagex team) will naturally patch out any corpo tracking bullshit that may or may not happen in the future, and follow the dominant community fork should it be needed, as we did with terraform -> opentofu.

As long as herdr does not enshittify though, we will be happy to provide very high supply chain integrity releases for it as-is starting with probably next months stagex release.

Absolutely no problem with FOSS developers finding revenue streams to give themselves more resources to make their projects better.

My own company is 100% FOSS with nothing held back and will stay that way, even though we are in the current YC batch with more customers signing every week. Admittedly this is atypical, but it can be done.

Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

#23
post #10

Quick question: Would you have actually donated to Herdr if they were asking for donations? I don't think any of you would have, unless stated otherwise. So this is another reason why developers do not pay for their tools and instead the developers of these tools go to VCs anyway. It's not the fault of the author, but most of the users (developers themselves) always want their tools for free at $0. You have to pay an…

Are you lamenting the death of proprietary UNIX and paid compilers, too? This status quo is fine.

Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

#26

> That’s why I recently switched it from AGPL to Apache: I want everyone to use Herdr freely, without any problem. I'm curious what the actual problems with AGPL were.

The copyleft licenses are toxic for adoption. Companies default away from them because there are a lot of murky unknowns (e.g. if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it? Does that service’s source have to be shared?) that simply aren’t worth the hassle.

If you want your library to get traction with many real world use cases, you need to have a permissive license. If you want to stick to the principles, you’re going to sacrifice adoption.

Not saying one is better than the other, but there’s a tradeoff.

Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

#27
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't make money if people use your tool and are required to share their source code

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.

Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

#29
post #26

> That’s why I recently switched it from AGPL to Apache: I want everyone to use Herdr freely, without any problem. I'm curious what the actual problems with AGPL were.

The copyleft licenses are toxic for adoption. Companies default away from them because there are a lot of murky unknowns (e.g. if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it? Does that service’s source have to be shared?) that simply aren’t worth the hassle. If you want your library to get traction with many real world use cases, you need to have a permissive license. If you want to sti…

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, you're right. Using software that has requires people to contribute back is a huge liability, and hurts adoption, which is the most important metric for herdr right now.

Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

#30
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The copyleft licenses are toxic for adoption. Companies default away from them because there are a lot of murky unknowns (e.g. if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it? Does that service’s source have to be shared?) that simply aren’t worth the hassle. If you want your library to get traction with many real world use cases, you need to have a permissive license. If you want to sti…

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, you're right. Using software that has requires people to contribute back is a huge liability, and hurts adoption, which is the most important metric for herdr right now.

Seems like the path is to use LLMs to launder code from VC funded efforts and their public codebases into codebases with a copyleft license. Otherwise you have to wait for the rug pull before taking action (Terraform and Vault->OpenTofu and OpenBao). It is fair use to train and create derivative works after all, as courts have ruled so far.
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