Congrats to the herdr team! Please don't abandon the open source part of the business when the cash starts flowing... every open source project that does a bait'n'switch is a stab at the viability of open source as a whole
Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open
141–150 of 197 posts
Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open
#142What's the purpose of this project? Only to close the lid and let agent work in the background? Really that's what I found useful on project's homepage
Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open
#143I only heard about Herdr recently and was pleasantly surprised that I had invented the same thing 6 months ago as an emacs package called Magnus :)
Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just wouldn't bet against Mitchell. He doesn't need the money. He does it for the love of it.
Though what I genuinely don't understand is, why then Mitchel needs funding? If he needs funding - why accept it from weird contraversial figures? He has the freedom of choice, like no other.
What are some examples of uncontroversial figures who would be willing to offer funding, in your opinion?
Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open
#145> 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.
Can't make money if people use your tool and are required to share their source code
You can totally make money if people use your tool
It's companies using your tool that don't want to give back to the people
Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open
#146What's the purpose of this project? Only to close the lid and let agent work in the background? Really that's what I found useful on project's homepage
I dropped it in to replace zellij, and get better agent integration in the process.
Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Though what I genuinely don't understand is, why then Mitchel needs funding? If he needs funding - why accept it from weird contraversial figures? He has the freedom of choice, like no other.
What are some examples of uncontroversial figures who would be willing to offer funding, in your opinion?
Why not Mitchel himself? Without anyone else.
Seeding superlogical wouldn’t make a dent to his “10 digit bank account”. Probably not much more expensive than airplane hobby.
Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are you lamenting the death of proprietary UNIX and paid compilers, too? You are straw-manning a point no-one made. Herdr is open source and if the users would like to see it maintained for a long time, they would donate $$$. Clearly the donations were no-where enough and raising money was. The point is maintaining open source projects for free is NOT sustainable and most HNers in this thread clearly struggle with…
> if the users would like to see it maintained for a long time, they would donate $$$. That's a bad-faith dilemma, you know it. The users can want to see it maintained without necessarily having the money, userbase or motivation to sponsor the lead dev. It's not criminal to have a tight pocketbook, and that's why free devtools succeed while paid ones rot. There will be always be a FOSS version of Herdr, and thanks to…
> That's a bad-faith dilemma, you know it.
No it isn't, it is the reality. It's perfectly fine for you to say you don't pay for your tools, but don't be surprised to see them funded by VCs instead of donations from multiple backers if it is useful enough.
> The users can want to see it maintained without necessarily having the money, userbase or motivation to sponsor the lead dev. It's not criminal to have a tight pocketbook, and that's why free devtools succeed while paid ones rot. There will be always be a FOSS version of Herdr, and thanks to vibe coding it will probably retain feature parity with the paid version.
You understand both can rot without enough donations / backers? There are free (as in libre) software that has tens or hundreds of backers (Mastodon, ffmpeg, curl, OBS and Blender) and they are not VC backed.
Even when there is a FLOSS version of Herdr, it will run into the same funding issues (Herdr was FLOSS software). What we do know is that open source maintainers do not get paid enough for maintaining their projects [0] [1].
So the smaller but useful popular projects usually running on less backers, are more likely to spin-off and turn to VC funding anyway.
> Everyone is happier with this arrangement, you're one of the only ones fulminating at the outcome.
Except for the lead developer / maintainer.
> Clearly he's content releasing the software for free. Let me guess, you're going to complain that the free market "forced" him to work without pay?
You seem to be still confused with was was "free" here. He already released the software as libre software, but it is the maintenance of the software that is never free. There are already examples of FLOSS software that has hundreds of backers, even when it is released for $0.
Again, another thing HNers don't seem to understand or care about.
[1] https://www.sonarsource.com/open-source-maintainer-survey-20...
[0] https://assets-eu-01.kc-usercontent.com/ef593040-b591-0198-9...
Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open
#149> 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…
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Re: Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Not sarcasm at all. I think you might overestimate the time and effort needed for this. When you maintain a _personal_ fork with no users except yourself, you only ever need to change something when you encounter a bug or need a new feature.
E.g. I have personal forks of mosh and cmux, each took maybe 1 hour of my time total?
I found this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156111 resonating with me, except I obviously don't do stuff like "nightly cron to sync with main", I just never touch the code unless it breaks or I want a new feature.