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78% Positive

Analyzed from 2037 words in the discussion.

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#warp#terminal#open#more#source#alacritty#features#product#agent#money

Discussion (79 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

shimman•about 2 hours ago
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 by their commit history.

Muhammad523•5 minutes ago
This is what AI companies do. They steal stuff and then do not give credit to anyone, not even a "thank you". If doing so was needed to get money, that's what they'd have done. Anyways, i was very surprised to see they chose my favorite free software license -- the AGPLv3

(I like using em-dashes but i'm not a bot)

nixpulvis•11 minutes ago
To be fair, they did reach out to me at the time (I was an active contributor) and I gave them some initial feedback on the design, but ultimately didn't decide to engage much more. I think the direction Alacritty wants to go in and they wanted to go in was pretty different.

It is telling though that few underlying issue were found. Zed however has contributed bacc in a few places.

lagniappe•8 minutes ago
If you expect payment then put that in the license. Yes it's a dick move, but those are the terms the original developer chose.
zachlloyd•about 2 hours ago
Warp founder here. Totally understood on the feedback - one thing I would call out is that we actually worked with Alacritty on the initial implementation and they were super helpful and we are grateful for their support.
devin•about 2 hours ago
I sort of can't tell if this is supposed to be a joke or not. It seems like you're explaining that in addition to not supporting the project from which your company spawned 50M, they also supplied free work for which they were never compensated. That's supposed to be better or something?
heymijo•about 1 hour ago
There's an interview that got scrubbed from the internet with Zach on the 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings. This comment and its lack of self-awareness exemplify what was on display for 60 minutes.

Zach is undoubtedly smart but for anyone who is not an SV insider, they would listen to that podcast they same way you are looking at this comment and wonder if it's all one big joke.

giancarlostoro•about 1 hour ago
So if I use vim or emacs for free, or VS Code for that matter, I have to hunt down the maintainers and pay them? Do I need to empty my wallet for every project I use for free? Because that's not sustainable for normal people, let alone businesses.
ktm5j•about 1 hour ago
I mean, if they have a working relationship with each other then I guess the alacritty folks don't hate their guts. That's meaningful from my perspective.

Also remember that the $50m is not revenue that they can use however they want. They have an obligation to their investors to make money with it.

nixpulvis•6 minutes ago
I feel obligated to chime in here a bit. I was the Alacritty member who was contacted and who offered some feedback.

I have absolutely no hard feelings.

Would it have been a good idea to charge them for my time, IDK. I was in between a research role and a new job at the time and more than happy to help. Do I feel like I missed out on something, maybe a little bit, but that's more on me than them. I'm sure if I had angled for a position working for or with them, they would have considered it seriously.

Would it be nice to have more support for Alacritty, perhaps. But there are a lot of conflicting opinions on what to work on and what features are good for the project, so it's not as simple as just adding money and people. I was always hoping alacritty could be a minimal library others could use, and I'm glad it has turned out that way.

koolala•about 1 hour ago
Doesn't that make not supporting them even worse???
lucidia•about 2 hours ago
if you’re actually grateful for their support maybe you could support them with some donations out of that 50 million
nixpulvis•5 minutes ago
Alacritty doesn't accept donations.
blitzar•about 2 hours ago
Toss a coin to your Witcher
pear01•about 1 hour ago
> Totally understood on the feedback [...] we are grateful for their support

So are you going to donate to them or not?

nixpulvis•6 minutes ago
Alacritty doesn't accept donations.
shimman•about 2 hours ago
This isn't feedback. This is saying your company and your leadership are absolutely toxic to the tech community if this is how you treat people that made you wealthy.

It's disgusting behavior.

lucidia•about 2 hours ago
you shouldn’t be surprised though. most people in tech only care about money and you already know if you align yourself with Altman, your morals already aren’t in the right place.
peschu•about 2 hours ago
talk is cheap ...
Aeroi•33 minutes ago
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?
shimman•29 minutes ago
Well do you consider yourself a good human or a greedy one? Do you care about others and community or just yourself?
dpe82•16 minutes ago
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.
theturtletalks•10 minutes ago
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.
elzbardico•about 2 hours ago
Well. It is open source. We have empires built upon open source code that never give any money back to developers. Now we have AI built upon open source that is never going to pay back those developers.

But you decide to feel extremely negative towards a small fish on this veritable pound of sharks?

shimman•about 2 hours ago
Yes, these people need to know their actions are routinely hated in the community. They should be boo'd at conferences too.
unshavedyak•about 2 hours ago
I agree with you, BUT, we have licensing right? Ie couldn't the author have chosen a license that would have prevented this - if they had cared?

I'm unsure if we should lose sleep over something the author likely chose. Its their right to not care how the code is used, maybe we should abide their wishes?

Is there perhaps there's an issue with licensing? Eg there's no easy license akin to MIT for small time devs, but less open for $50M VC babies? Ie is there a scenario where an author like this wants something akin to MIT for small groups, but still doesn't want to be taken advantage of by massively backed corporations?

bigyabai•about 2 hours ago
Venture capital is the shark. Microsoft didn't release Windows Terminal as a subscription service, iTerm isn't part of Apple's Developer fee. All of these companies do not treat their business strategy like Candy Land, they perfectly well understand that "terminal emulator SaaS with telemetry" is the root canal of devrel.

Warp's client going Open Source is the final step in acknowledging that they have no product. The value add is 100% their service offerings, the terminal itself is as useless as those VS Code forks that sell themselves on being "AI native" or similar. It's even possible that their terminal product is what's preventing developers from demoing their (definitely more profitable) agent harness.

outlore•5 minutes ago
The thing that has kept me away from Warp has been support for bind keys and Atuin. Excited for this!
allenrb•7 minutes ago
Was briefly surprised to see IBM open-sourcing OS/2 after all these years. Alas, this appears to be some AI widget.
hmokiguess•about 2 hours ago
I swear I tried. I installed warp maybe 4 times after long intervals. At each time I always ended up with the same feeling as my initial impression: overwhelming.

I think I’m not the target demographic for it, I’m fine with iTerm2 and Ghostty, but I somehow still feel this void where I wish the terminal was a little more abstract and rich, just not to the level Warp takes it.

I wish there were an in-between solution out there.

zachlloyd•about 1 hour ago
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.
petcat•20 minutes ago
> trying to make Warp more customizable so you can pick and choose which of the extra, non-terminal features

I think this will contribute even more to the overwhelming feeling. I don't think people want endless configuration. They want something with an opinionated product direction. It seems like Warp lacks that resolve and is trying to be too much because nobody has decided what it is actually supposed to be.

joshribakoff•about 1 hour ago
Check out kitty if you haven’t yet.
jeffyaw•about 1 hour ago
check out my yaw terminal. iterm2 was absolutely an inspiration.
Esophagus4•about 2 hours ago
I really like Warp.

I’ll admit the UI has changed a lot recently and I find it more intimidating than when I was using it a year ago, so I mostly use Ghostty now.

pzo•about 2 hours ago
same with me, it looks more or less too flat with just maybe 2 main colors and just one font variant, feels like big pile of flat text - hard to see what is header what is footer and sometimes what is button.

I still use it but I barely used their agent event though I had subscription for lenny bundle. They should also invest in some good quality onboarding tutorial video but please keep your CEO out of this last time I checked 1 year ago - he might be good CEO but not good at job of teaching his product.

alokedesai•about 2 hours ago
Hey, Aloke from Warp here.

We've actually added a ton of controls recently to let users configure how much (or little) UI they want. If that's not enough, would love if you opened an issue on the Warp repo and we can discuss more what needs to change in the product to meet your needs!

Esophagus4•about 2 hours ago
Hey Aloke!

Thanks for the tip, I’ll give this a try and see how it goes.

jonotime•14 minutes ago
Looking forward to use all these nice AI features without using the warp account/service. So I can bring my own claude and it will show all the agent panes etc.
morgango•19 minutes ago
I am a paying user of Warp and really enjoy it when it behaves.

I do struggle with having AI forced on me at times, when I press a key errantly and seem to be driven away from the command line and deeper and deeper into AI-land with questions and "are you sure ...".

My ESC key is wearing out.

ahmadyan•about 3 hours ago
Congrats on open-sourcing warp.

May i ask what was the decision process behind this? What was the benefit of open-sourcing warp, as it is already a mature and established product. Also did devin cli had any impact on the decision to open-source warp?

Also how does a repo gets 29k starts in matter of 2 hours?

tnkuehne•about 2 hours ago
> Also how does a repo gets 29k starts in matter of 2 hours?

They used the repo for issue tracking since the beginning but before today the repo did not include source code of the client.

ahmadyan•about 1 hour ago
this make sense, thanks
brunoborges•14 minutes ago
Makes sense but doesn't explain why open sourcing it, therefore doesn't directly answer the question.
AirMax98•about 3 hours ago
> OpenAI is the founding sponsor of the new, open-source Warp repository.

Big bucks from OpenAI is my guess. I could guess the strategy is to try to take a shotgun approach at Claude Code.

pzo•about 1 hour ago
Wondering if additionally OpenAI afraid of Cursor being bought by xAI
zachlloyd•about 2 hours ago
Warp founder here. Great question.

I outline the thought process in detail in our blog (https://www.warp.dev/blog/warp-is-now-open-source)

But the tl;dr is that I actually think we can build a better product, more quickly if we build it with our community + agents. I also think it's a unique product that I hope developers get a bunch of value from being able to customize and help improve. Our business is now mostly around agents and orchestration through Oz (https://oz.dev), so opening up the client and terminal felt natural.

The big thing for the "why now" though was the agent management piece.

Wrt the github stars, we had an issues-only repo prior and already had a significant number of stars before OSS today.

ahmadyan•about 1 hour ago
make sense, thank you for your response.
dgellow•about 2 hours ago
> Also how does a repo gets 29k starts in matter of 2 hours?

You gave the answer: by being a mature, established product

redlewel•about 1 hour ago
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.
alokedesai•43 minutes ago
Warp is still a terminal, but it also has a coding agent.

no requirement to use it--and you can turn off all of the AI features if you don't want to use them at all

throwatdem12311•about 2 hours ago
Oh great news. I was recently trying out the Agents layout and it fits my workflow so well. It has a familiar terminal interface but helps me manage multiple agents much easier than just using a ton of tabs in iTerm open at once. I The code review panel is the one thing I find especially useful, and being able to see each terminal pane as a separate “section” in the vertical tab layouts, along with automatic worktree management - I find it a total joy to use.

My only real qualms are monetization - I don’t really need AI credits for anything since my work already just pays for Claude Max + API overage. I really would like a good reason to give them money but the current premium features don’t really appeal to me.

zachlloyd•about 1 hour ago
Glad the workflow is working for you!

In terms of monetization, we actually don't monetize the terminal at all, we monetize our agent and our orchestration platform (www.oz.dev). Totally happy for you to use Claude or Codex CLI within Warp as your main driver.

alokedesai•about 1 hour ago
Awesome to hear that the features are reasonating with you, thanks for the kind words!
morelish•12 minutes ago
I’ve found they have changed the shortcuts I got used to and have kept releasing quite significant UI changes regularly. Not really what I want from a terminal. Tbh it’s felt like they took something nice and just piled AI slop features onto it presumably to hype it to investors. Pity.
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mulhoon•28 minutes ago
Pretty happy with Warp so far. The vertical tabs are a game changer, having all my projects down the side and flipping between them (each one having multiple split terminals) works really well compared with horizontal tabs. Looking forward to each update.
ipsum2•about 2 hours ago
Looking at Warp.dev, it looks exactly like Codex or Cursor. I thought it used to be a terminal?
zachlloyd•about 2 hours ago
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.

ipsum2•about 2 hours ago
From the website it definitely does not look like a terminal anymore.
Cthulhu_•about 2 hours ago
(note: I'm trolling)

Getting a Zawinski's Law vibe there, "every program attempts to expand until it can read mail"

NoGravitas•about 1 hour ago
Was hoping this was about OS/2, was very disappointed.
kayo_20211030•14 minutes ago
Me too. Super disappointed. I was thinking, yeah that sounds fun. But, nope.
ChrisArchitect•about 2 hours ago