Warp is now open-source • Hacker News Board

Re: Warp is now open-source

#141

Post by meowface » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 11:48 PM UTC

shimman wrote: post #7

Still feel extremely negative towards this company for tweaking an Alacritty fork then using that to get a $50million venture round then giving zero money towards Alacritty, an open source library that the founder completely owes their career too. Not shocked they partnered with another company that is fine with raping the commons for profit, OpenAI. They definitely did some git cleanup to remove this fact too going…

The license is the license. I don't know what you expect. I think, to be a good sport, they ought to mention in an About page that they're forked from Alacritty, with a clear link and thank you/appreciation note for the foundation code, but anything beyond that is both unnecessary and should not ever be expected.

(Side note but I find it odd how anti-corporate and anti-AI HN has become starting in the past decade. I am very much not right-wing and frankly I loathe rightists, but I am also very much not a socialist. Though I'm not a libertarian either, to be clear; I just don't have an instinctive revulsion towards corporations who use open source code - or corporations who have more restrictive licenses to prevent this very thing, like Elasticsearch or MongoDB - or towards AI companies for training on public things, or really towards corporations in general. I am perhaps the rare left-leaning corporate shill.)

Re: Warp is now open-source

#142

Post by stuaxo » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 11:49 PM UTC

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #108

Looking at the headline "Warp is now Open-Source", I really hoped that OS/2 3.0 Warp was open-sourced. :-(

There are dosens of us !

Re: Warp is now open-source

#143

Post by dpe82 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 11:51 PM UTC

theturtletalks wrote: post #75

dpe82 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand the controversy; there are plenty of licenses an author can choose that restricts commercial use of a project. It feels a bit dishonest to release something under a permissive license and then be upset when someone uses your stuff well within the ways you said is perfectly ok.

So many proprietary companies are built on the back of open-source software. Yes, there is no legal responsibility for Warp to donate to Allacritty. But there is a moral obligation. It's not hard to see open-source maintainers and enthusiasts looking at Warp with skepticism. I didn't know that and will be uninstalling Warp, though I stopped using it months ago.

If someone expects to be compensated for their work they should be upfront about it. IMHO it's dishonest/immoral to freely give something away with no expressed expectation of reciprocity and then get upset when someone doesn't reciprocate.

Re: Warp is now open-source

#144

Post by threecheese » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 11:56 PM UTC

Muhammad523 wrote: post #103

zachlloyd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We hear this feedback a bunch and are trying to make Warp more customizable so you can pick and choose which of the extra, non-terminal features you find most useful . You can turn off all the AI if you want, and also control what editing features are surfaced (e.g. file tree, diff view, etc). Would love feedback on how to improve the experience.

> You can turn off they AI if you want Since your company is basically based on this agentic coding thing, i really don't see why anybody would run Warp without AI. Why not use a normal terminal then? Oh yeah, to waste space on disk and to use more RAM: we have plenty

They have interesting features, their initial release had snippets, team sharing, time-saver stuff with a nice UX. Same reason one might use Raycast. I was a paying customer for that release, but when they pivoted I cancelled.

Re: Warp is now open-source

#145

Post by meowface » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 11:57 PM UTC

redlewel wrote: post #52

Was interested to try until I saw it was no longer a terminal and is now a coding agent? There are already dozens of those, I use my terminal to launch coding agents I don't need it to be one.

I was iffy on it at first but they released an update a week or two ago to make it much more "bring-your-own-coding-agent"-driven, where they facilitate you having lots of tabs with Codex and Claude Code rather than trying to shove theirs down your throat. IMO it's quite a good terminal now, even if they do still have a few other remaining throat-shoving dark patterns in the UI they need to strip out. (The big one being that pressing "+" tries to encourage you to start a new Warp Agent rather than just create a new terminal tab, with no way to change/override it, currently. If they fix that I'd say it'd be stellar.)

Re: Warp is now open-source

#146

Post by meowface » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 11:59 PM UTC

jdejean wrote: post #127

I loved using Warp. I used it daily for over a year. Setup workflow scripts and customizations, it worked almost exactly how I wanted it to. Then one day, I opened it up to find the command bar was replaced with a natural language prompt. It changed the behavior subtly, and changed how the prompt looked. I uninstalled. I don’t care that you can opt out. My gripe isn’t about AI. I don’t want my tools and workflows cha…

I agree that was/is an absolutely horrible feature (and it took me way too long to realize I could/should turn it off) and always should've been opt-in, but the current version is honestly quite nice to use. I would not have recommended it a few months ago but I would recommend it now.

Re: Warp is now open-source

#147

Post by theturtletalks » Wed, Apr 29, 2026, 12:02 AM UTC

dpe82 wrote: post #143

theturtletalks wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many proprietary companies are built on the back of open-source software. Yes, there is no legal responsibility for Warp to donate to Allacritty. But there is a moral obligation. It's not hard to see open-source maintainers and enthusiasts looking at Warp with skepticism. I didn't know that and will be uninstalling Warp, though I stopped using it months ago.

If someone expects to be compensated for their work they should be upfront about it. IMHO it's dishonest/immoral to freely give something away with no expressed expectation of reciprocity and then get upset when someone doesn't reciprocate.

>> If someone expects to be compensated for their work they should be upfront about it.

Definitely and the Alacritty devs have never asked for anything in return for using their software and code. It's mainly others in the community looking at a commercial company forking and then raising $50M and not even contributing. I've seen huge companies, or their higher ups, Github sponsor developers who are building code they use. It's not unheard of.

Re: Warp is now open-source

#148

Post by indigodaddy » Wed, Apr 29, 2026, 12:06 AM UTC

zachlloyd wrote: post #19

ipsum2 wrote: post #11

Looking at Warp.dev, it looks exactly like Codex or Cursor. I thought it used to be a terminal?

It's still a terminal at its core, and you can use it to run any CLI coding agent or use our built in agent. We've added features to make using CLI coding agents easier (e.g. a file tree and code review) but they are all optional and customizable.

Have you given any thought to a webui, and a "warp" server I can install on a VPS and interact with it via the webui? I believe this paradigm/approach is the real future.

Re: Warp is now open-source

#149

Post by Aeroi » Wed, Apr 29, 2026, 12:09 AM UTC

shimman wrote: post #64

Aeroi wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

genuinely asking, what is the appropriate compensation/donation/split for a company that uses open source heavily in their early days but later makes money off of it?

Well do you consider yourself a good human or a greedy one? Do you care about others and community or just yourself?

Personally would love to give back, if I ever make it there. I contribute to large open source communities and also benefit from the contributions of many others, but have never personally been in that situation. Curious what best practices have been historically.

Re: Warp is now open-source

#150

Post by lern_too_spel » Wed, Apr 29, 2026, 12:16 AM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #51

petcat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest scam that was ever pulled was convincing software developers that the GPL was somehow bad and out of vogue and that open source should prefer BSD, MIT, Apache, etc instead. And now we have entire threads like this of people crying because some company used someone's software exactly as the license allows . It's a shame, but there really is no sympathy for projects that choose the wrong license. Stallman k…

The biggest scam is GPL convincing people that the license will keep things open source. Every try contributing to Chrome's web engine? It started as GPL khtml, but good luck doing anything as google controls it. Meanwhile FreeBSD manages to get plenty of contributors. Don't get me wrong, license is important. However it doesn't have nearly the effect many people claim.

It is open source. You are free to fork it if you don't like the terms for contributing to that repo so long as your fork remains open source, just as Apple did with KHTML, Google did with Webkit, and Electron and Brave did with Blink. If Warp were open source to begin with, people would have been free to rip out the things they didn't like in it and build upon the things they liked, benefiting the project that was forked to begin with because they can do that as well.