Ghostty is now non-profit • Hacker News Board

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#101

Post by mitchellh » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

Arcuru wrote: post #91

tcdent wrote: post #10

I'm making an effort to support Open Source projects that I use everyday; much in the way I support creators on YouTube via Patreon with small monthly commitments, so it's a welcome opportunity that GhosTTY has made that easy to accomplish.

I give a lot of money to the free things I use as well, but even if I used Ghostty I'd struggle to give them any money since the founder is extraordinarily wealthy. Please fund projects that actually need it, and don't voluntarily gift money to a literal billionaire. > I get asked the same about terminals all the time. “How will you turn this into a business? What’s the monetization strategy?” The monetization strate…

My intention is that the project isn't wholly dependent on me, so that I can move on (one day) and refocus my efforts elsewhere. I think no matter who the donor is, any charity dependent on the welfare of a single large whale is not a healthy organization. I intend to resolve this over time.

That all being said, everyone should give where they want, and if you don't want to give to a terminal emulator non-profit project, then don't! Don't let anyone bully you (me, the person I'm responding to, or anyone else) into what you should and shouldn't charitably support. Enjoy.

(Also, I don't want to repeat this everywhere but I paid taxes and I lost a comma, so no need to worry about that anymore! Everyone please pull out your most microscopic violins! )

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#102

Post by UPerfect » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:47 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#103

Post by chrysoprace » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 9:59 PM UTC

tolerance wrote: post #73

Is anyone opposed or at least of two minds concerning what could be described as the bureaucratization of FOSS? Or has this always been a thing. But it feels like a common—and celebrated—outcome for a lot of projects.

Non-profits allow projects to grow beyond hobbies. Covering costs (whether that's the expense of hosting / running the project or hiring talented people to work on it) is going to be a better incentive to keep the projects alive in the long term, meaning that people can rely on them instead of being wary that the project might become abandonware in a year.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#104

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 10:16 PM UTC

skywhopper wrote: post #83

tolerance wrote: post #73

Is anyone opposed or at least of two minds concerning what could be described as the bureaucratization of FOSS? Or has this always been a thing. But it feels like a common—and celebrated—outcome for a lot of projects.

Ever heard of the Free Software Foundation? Apache Software Foundation? FreeBSD Foundation? Linux Foundation?

[deleted]

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#105

Post by defen » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 10:17 PM UTC

Arcuru wrote: post #91

tcdent wrote: post #10

I'm making an effort to support Open Source projects that I use everyday; much in the way I support creators on YouTube via Patreon with small monthly commitments, so it's a welcome opportunity that GhosTTY has made that easy to accomplish.

I give a lot of money to the free things I use as well, but even if I used Ghostty I'd struggle to give them any money since the founder is extraordinarily wealthy. Please fund projects that actually need it, and don't voluntarily gift money to a literal billionaire. > I get asked the same about terminals all the time. “How will you turn this into a business? What’s the monetization strategy?” The monetization strate…

> don't voluntarily gift money to a literal billionaire.

The entire point of this post is that the money is not going to him.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#106

Post by neop1x » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 10:23 PM UTC

helterskelter wrote: post #29

Is there a compelling reason to use ghostty on Linux, over say, gnome-terminal or foot?

Or WezTerm which is much more usable and polished than this. I don't think there are any. It is likely just a social media hype.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#107

Post by kccqzy » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 10:31 PM UTC

VerifiedReports wrote: post #30

Cool. I hadn't heard of it before. What advantages does it offer over the Mac's Terminal, for example?

It’s just faster when you accidentally dump large amount of text or binary onto the Terminal. You can measure this by running `time cat` on a multi-gigabyte file and observing the wall clock time.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#108

Post by Karliss » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 10:32 PM UTC

purpleidea wrote: post #37

This is great work and good news, however if you want to guarantee a long-term public benefit, use copyleft without a CLA! A more well-funded company can fork this and make the new work proprietary, meaning you did all that initial development work for them for free. Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so here. This isn't a theoretical risk.

Does anyone have good examples of this actually happening for end user software (like Ghostty is) and where in the long term proprietary fork won? Most of the recent variations of this that come to my mind are related to cloud infrastructure. Stuff where you have serious business customers.

And in some of those cases GPL wasn't enough to prevent it. Niche end user utilities, where original is available for free have little room for monetization. And in many cases existing users are already choosing the open source option despite the existence of commercial solutions, or where it's too niche for commercial solutions to exist.

Only thing that comes to my mind is VScode with all the AI craze. But that doesn't quite fit the pattern neither is the Microsoft underdog, nor it's clear that any of AI based editors derived from VScode will survive by themselves long term.

There are also occasional grifters trying to sell open source software with little long term impact.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#109

Post by mmaunder » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 10:33 PM UTC

Thanks for doing this Mitchell, if you're on here, and for contributing to open source. Donated.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#110

Post by therealmarv » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 10:34 PM UTC

zikduruqe wrote: post #6

bos wrote: post #3

Really nice to see a solidly valuable project develop a sustainable foundation instead of turning into yet another VC-backed devtools startup that will inevitably die in a few years.

Good. Maybe they'll add search to the terminal now. /s

A little unfair that this is downvoted. No search is like a dealbreaker for me. I'm happy with iTerm and for 99% of my use cases I don't need a "very fast" terminal. Thanks for pointing this out.

Seems I will wait a little longer before search is in the regular build (and not nightly ones)