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Ghostty is now non-profit

mitchellh.com

151–160 of 304 posts

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#151
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.

Rather thank IBM for paying Mitchell an outrageous amount of money for Hashicorp, so he can devote all of his time on awesome projects like Ghostty without ever thinking about sustainable income ever again. So thanks, IBM! <3

IBM did not do that, HashiCorp was a public company before their acquisition.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#152
post #7
post #2

I wasn't aware of Hack Club before and wow, their fiscal sponsorship program is enormous: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/directory/ - looks like they cover more than 2,500 organizations! The Python Software Foundation acts as a fiscal sponsor for a much smaller set of orgs (20 listed on https://www.python.org/psf/fiscal-sponsorees/ ) and it keeps our accounting team pretty busy just looking after those. Hack…

Hack Club builds software, so the students naturally built a banking product to scale their fiscal sponsorship: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/ I was working with Hack Club students on an experimental VPN client ( https://github.com/hackclub/burrow ) but never got the momentum to finish it. Made some great friends, though! It's a really fantastic organization. The students have one big global Slack instance.…

We interviewed their founder Zach Latta on the EFF podcast[1] a few years back: I hadn't heard of them either, but he was pretty impressive, both on the goals and the political issues.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/podcast-episode-hack-f...

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#153

I have yet to see a way that this software is better than leading terminal emulators like Alacritty and WezTerm. Alacritty is simple and blazing fast, WezTerm has a Lua API and is as complicated as you want it to be. All of the fuss seems to be entirely driven by Mitchell's clout, and maybe some interest in Zig. Given that's the real reason everyone is talking about Ghostty (which I'm happy to be wrong about, let me…

This is a terrible comment. Everyone should use the terminal that works for them and anyone who wants to write a terminal should do so. Ghostty is great. I’ve heard Alacritty is great.

This doesn't engage with my comment at all other than to say that you personally found it unpleasant.

If it's true that Alacritty and Ghostty are both great, Alacritty must be some different kind of great because it has a large number of users due only to its own merits, and not due to the online following of the author.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#154
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use Ghostty because it is a native application, and it looks great on macOS and GNOME. WezTerm, Kitty, and Foot don't do that for me. Foot is great though.

They're all native applications.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you're not wrong, I think this undersells a little how much Mitchell has given of his time to OSS. Yes, he's fortunate that he doesn't have to worry about money, but even when he did, he still contributed openly and freely. That's part of what drew lots of us to HashiCorp in the first place - giving back.

It's a little tongue-in-cheek, but as you can see elsewhere in this discussion thread he mentions this himself on his own X account: "get asked the same about terminals all the time. “How will you turn this into a business? What’s the monetization strategy?” The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate." https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964785527741427940 Take a good guess where the three commas…

>The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate."

Having money doesn't mean that you'll have the motivation to continue working on something for free forever.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#156
post #106

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.

> I don't think there are any. It is likely just a social media hype.

It's not hype. Here's a comprehensive review of a lot of terminals and Ghostty did very well--"State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions" [1]

[1]: https://www.jeffquast.com/post/state-of-terminal-emulation-2...

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#157

I have yet to see a way that this software is better than leading terminal emulators like Alacritty and WezTerm. Alacritty is simple and blazing fast, WezTerm has a Lua API and is as complicated as you want it to be. All of the fuss seems to be entirely driven by Mitchell's clout, and maybe some interest in Zig. Given that's the real reason everyone is talking about Ghostty (which I'm happy to be wrong about, let me…

Libghostty is a pretty huge contribution.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#158
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hack Club builds software, so the students naturally built a banking product to scale their fiscal sponsorship: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/ I was working with Hack Club students on an experimental VPN client ( https://github.com/hackclub/burrow ) but never got the momentum to finish it. Made some great friends, though! It's a really fantastic organization. The students have one big global Slack instance.…

This community sounds amazing, is there anything similar for adults rather than teens? The “understanding through building” mentality is something I never got to experience as a group, the obvious answer is open source and the like but I wonder if there’s something more learning oriented.

It's tangential but civic hack groups might offer what you're looking for. There's Code for America in the states and g0v in Taiwan and some other places.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#159
post #52

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.

Using a copyleft license can add friction that reduces the amount of value your software can create in the world. I'd honestly rather Apple and Microsoft ripped off my work if it meant that my work provided more utility to a larger number of people.

I truly respect this statement, and position. I always hope that the benefit I've provided through my software is felt, even if I don't directly benefit from it. It's about taking pride in your work, and what it has brought others. I think of it as a craft, like woodworking, brewing, art, music, etc. While there are far more rules, the love of it is what makes it viable.

I suspect that those who express concern over your work being ripped off are just showing that they are extremely happy with how you run things. Rather than being under the control of another entity, the actual value is in your personal involvement. That's just my two cents, I hope I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth.

EDIT: I realize that you aren't the creator of Ghostty, but my original statement seemed like I was stating this.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#160

So the same Hack Club from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913663 is now managing donations. Yeah, I don't think I'm gonna be donating to Ghostty any time soon. Just seems like a deeply unserious organization all around.

they are great, and I feel your concern is misplaced.

when you support literally thousands of teenagers over the internet (the delightfully overconfident, inexperienced, famous-for-trolling humans that they are) and literally only a handful have beef with you, you are running a really solid ship

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