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 Club must have this down to a very fine art.
I wrote a bit more about PSF fiscal sponsorship here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/18/board-of-the-python-so...
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. If you're a student and on here, you should also be in there: https://hackclub.com/slack/
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.
In any case, good luck on finding the right community!
>Yes, I'm a teenager ,18 and under
So not actually a teenager but a minor is what they mean and use what I would call deceptive language around it. But why?....
It's an organization for hacking working with high schools and young people. They don't want small children enrolled, and they don't want older people.
"teenager 18 and under" is perfectly fine description for 13-18 or 7th to 12th grade.
Are you back on Slack as the primary comms channel after their sudden attempt to upcharge you (followed by the U-turn after the PR backlash)? Do you have some mirroring and other kind of fallback strategy if something like that happens again?
(Context for those who missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887)
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/podcast-episode-hack-f...
Ouch, that is enormous. They forgot to handle images properly, so they’re serving ginormous images in inefficient formats instead of scaled thumbnails in efficient formats—just the first page transfers more than 40MB, and the second page is just as bad, and the third significantly worse. You get things like 11827×13107 “17230 Aluminium Falcons” logo being rendered at 64px high. (I’m surprised that one’s under 9MB.) Across pages 1–3, it’s averaging 1MB per item, which if it continues all the way to page 53 would exceed 2.5GB. Done properly, I’d expect most to be under 10KB, with a few up as high as 50KB, staying well under 1MB per page, and comfortably under 50MB for all 53 pages. It’d load faster and be cheaper to serve too.
(I know this isn’t what you meant, but it loaded so slowly that I looked, and that’s easily big enough to cause problems for some users.)
Hack Club's been a fiscal sponsor for about 7 years now (since 2018), and it's evolved quite a bit since the early days. I run engineering & product for the fiscal sponsorship program there and would be happy to chat/share any tips!
oh, and while it's on my mind, the codebase was open-sourced earlier this year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43519802), and we just launched a mobile app yesterday! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130402
It might have improved since then?
There was a devtools blackhole era once where if you got in that business you were just giving things away and never got to reap the rewards. Then there was this era of founders who figured out how to make it sticky and capture value in a Pareto-optimal way.
Love to see it.
Also, didn't said company piss people off in some way that led to Open Tofu being created?
It had very little to do with self aggrandizing and more to do with the tax authorities need a name and time was limited. The names were used mostly as placeholders and then stuck. Branding is hard.
So thanks, IBM! <3
That's part of what drew lots of us to HashiCorp in the first place - giving back.
"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 come from.
Having money doesn't mean that you'll have the motivation to continue working on something for free forever.
I'm not as talented as Mitchell tho.
Even still, whatever high salaries they do give us just flow right back into the neighborhoods through insane property values and other cost-of-living expenses that negate any gains. So, it’s always just the few of us who can win that lottery and truly break out of the cycle.
You break out of the cycle by selling your HCOL home and moving to LCOL after a few years. That HCOL home will have appreciated fast enough given the original purchase price that the growth alone would easily pay for a comparable home in a LCOL area. This is the story of my village in Texas, where Cali people have been buying literal mansions after moving out of their shitboxes in LA and the Bay Area.
Every company I've worked for has had very explicit rules that say, you must get written permission from someone at some director or VP level sign off on your "side project," open source or not.
You might want to check your company guidelines around this just to make sure you're safe.
For Linux compiling is actually the only way to get tip.
(It'd be nice if it supported other standard macOS UI conventions[1] too)
[0] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/8131
[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues?q=is%3Aissue%2...
Seems I will wait a little longer before search is in the regular build (and not nightly ones)
I said in the linked post that I remain the largest donor, but this helps lay bricks such that we can build a sustainable community that doesn't rely on me financially or technically. There simply wasn't a vehicle before that others could even join in financially. Now there is.
All of the above was mentioned in the post. If you want more details, please read it. I assume you didn't.
I'll begin some donor reach out and donor relationship work eventually. The past few months has been enough work simply coordinating this process, meeting with accountants and lawyers to figure out the right path forward, meeting with other software foundations to determine proper processes etc. I'm going to take a breather, then hop back in. :)
(UWash CompSci strikes again, not that I'm biased)
Ghostty is blazing fast and the attention to detail is fabulous.
The theme picker is next level, for example; so are the typographical controls.
It feels like an app made by a craftsman at the top of his game.
Asking in good faith -- could someone tell me what's special about Ghostty compared to alternatives?
Zero trolling when I say this: Two things also make it (more) popular on HN: (1) Mitchell Hashimoto (a well respected hacker who got rich, then kept on hacking) and (2) Zig. (Only Rust could attract more attention.)
1. Feels 'native' and is built for each platform. This means I can use for example familiar right click context menu's and tabs that I find on every other app. I have the option to use the mouse as well as the keyboard which I appreciate.
2. It has sensible defaults with a "Zero Configuration Philosophy" meaning that many of the things I would usually need to fiddle with are already set.
3. It performs comparably to advanced terminal emulators such as kitty.
The combination of all three (and especially the first) is why I use it.
1. Terminal emulators that feel 'native' are ubiquitous. Sure, there are also a lot that have idiosyncratic UIs, but I'm not generally using those -- my go-to when working within a GUI environment is xfce4-terminal, which is about as native as I can imagine, given that I'm using XFCE as my primary desktop environment.
2. Sensible defaults may be good for new users, but I already have my terminal emulators configured exactly as I like them, and my benchmark for switching from one tool to another within the same category isn't how welcoming it is to novice users out of the box, it's how easily I can adjust its configuration to match my long-established preferences. The "zero configuration" philosophy is actually a detriment here, as it leads to configurability being obscured to some extent.
3. When I tested it, its performance was worse than xfce4-terminal, both objectively and subjectively. Its memory consumption was higher and it felt laggier in responding to input.
I find it a bit messy to build but I'm not exactly a compile binaries kind of person anymore so it's probably a good sign that I still manage to figure it out. If stuff like Zig is your thing you'll probably enjoy this part.
My main terminal emulator is the bog slow but reliable Terminator, though in a while I'll probably flip the i3 commands and move over entirely to Ghostty.
(I haven't used ghostty so I wouldn't know whether it's actually fast to start up, but what you wrote reminded me about this particular issue.)
So, perhaps? For a while I was on a local compile of 1.0.0, and a while ago I started pulling the nightly sources and build from those.
BTW, I recently discovered shaders and cursor_blaze is absolutely awesome.
I use a company managed/provided machine that runs windows, I do not have to bother maintaining it. All I use is basically Firefox and a MinGW to have a bash
I also like the “ghostty +list-themes” command and the splash page animation on their site.
Yes, it's just another terminal emulator, but a pretty solid one that just works.
Yeah, OpenAI has shown us that this is more negotiable than we might have believed. Fortunately nobody will ever think terminal emulation is a trillion dollar industry, so I think we’re ok.
The situations aren't comparable.
OpenAI was a non-profit foundation that held a controlling share in a for-profit organisation. It's model is based around controlling access to their data (which was never open), and controlling access to their models (which are also not open).
If Ghostty does sets up a for-profit org with the NFP as the majority holder then we can have the conversation, but even at that fork + move on (like OpenTofu, Valkey, CentOS, MariaDB, Jenkins) is an option.
Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so here. This isn't a theoretical risk.
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.
That "friction" is by design. It prevents someone else from screwing over the users.
The people that oppose copyleft are those it was specifically design to protect against.
Copyleft protects the user. The friction is, like you said, by design. It ensures that something that started free, stays free, and can't be rug pulled out from under you.
Big monied interests have been trying, and succeeding, in changing the discourse around free software away from free and to simply just "open source" and moving toward permissive licenses, specifically so community effort can be extracted and monetized without contributing back.
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.
I can take a guess with respect to Linux: that's the kind of software where forcing companies to submit code back to it is enormously beneficial due to the need for an operating system to have drivers for vast ranges of different hardware.
Also, though, GCC got Objective-C support, and still has it, because the FSF told NeXT it would violate the GPL for them to attempt to make Objective-C a proprietary add-on to the GCC compiler, even if it wasn't literally linked with it. And a lot of GCC backends probably would have been kept proprietary by one or another hardware company if the license had allowed it.
I don't think there is any citation needed. Linux powers all the cloud providers, 80% of the mobile market, a ton of random devices. At this point Linux is the most important OS on the planet, ahead of Windows and Apple OSes. It's just not as visible.
You should watch his talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g
(He used to be a maintainer of busybox, a GNU clone for embedded devices. He then ended up writing toybox, a similar project under the more free MIT license.)
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.
VSCode is a proprietary fork of code-oss, the product located at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode. It might not be an example that you're looking for though.
The Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) and not a 501(c)(3). The Rust Foundation would do better for the community if they were a 501(c)(3) and more transparent about finances. Follow this example for the greater good.
This was exactly my issue with the Rust Foundation back in 2021 when it was formed, 501(c)(6) are for trade organisations. To this day, individuals still CANNOT donate to the Rust Foundation which means it is not community led.
> Note: At this time, the Rust Foundation [still] does not offer individual memberships.
https://rustfoundation.org/get-involved/#donations
The main issue of the Rust Foundation is that makes it easy for companies to buy influence in the project by buying a board seat as a benefit.
I agree that the Rust Foundation should change their governance structure to a 501(c)(3) instead of a 501(c)(6).
The very same page you link contradicts this claim:
> The Rust Foundation gratefully accepts donations from individuals and non-member organizations alike!
The difference is that the Rust Foundation accepts individual donations but does not (currently) accept individual memberships.