Top
Best
New

Posted by vrnvu 6 hours ago

Ghostty is now non-profit(mitchellh.com)
731 points | 145 comments
simonw 6 hours ago|
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 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...

conradev 5 hours ago||
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. If you're a student and on here, you should also be in there: https://hackclub.com/slack/

dannyobrien 6 minutes ago|||
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...

kace91 5 hours ago||||
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.

mellowyeller 4 hours ago|||
Seconding this. I pivoted to tech in my early 30s and feel I've missed out on a lot of community building opportunities.
leetrout 4 hours ago|||
Recurse Center might be a good option https://www.recurse.com
conradev 2 hours ago||
I would second Recurse Center. I've heard universally great things!
abnercoimbre 4 hours ago|||
Self-plug: consider Handmade Cities. We have a simple meetups [0] page if you decide you appreciate our ethos. Hopefully we have an active meetup location near you?

In any case, good luck on finding the right community!

[0] https://handmadecities.com/meetups

citizenpaul 1 hour ago|||
I know I'm jaded but anytime I see a business situation and they specifically say you must be a MINOR to work with them... I get kinda suspicious.

>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?....

squigz 21 minutes ago||
Yeah, I get suspicious when schools say only minors can enroll there
sundarurfriend 2 hours ago||||
> The students have one big global Slack instance.

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)

CactusBlue 2 hours ago|||
MMW: this will likely end up being the SVB for nonprofits
garyhtou 3 hours ago|||
I love seeing PSF support the community with fiscal sponsorship! It makes such a huge difference for these open source projects and meetups, letting them focus on software and community rather than the legal/financial back-office work.

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

throwaway290 2 hours ago||
Hack Club was featured on front page not long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913663

It might have improved since then?

caniszczyk 1 hour ago||
If you ever wanted a home for Ghostty at the Linux Foundation for more support, we'd happily work with you and your community: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects/hosting
arjie 4 hours ago||
Mitchell Hashimoto is a real programmer in the old vein. It's lovely to see him succeed. Ghostty is fantastic to use.

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.

catlover76 2 hours ago|
[dead]
RustSupremacist 38 minutes ago||
This highlights the value of having non-profits as a 501(c)(3). The transparency about Hack Club is refreshing.

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.

jyunwai 18 minutes ago|
More context: 501(c)(3) orgs are non-profits that include charities, whereas 501(c)(6) orgs are non-profits with less strict requirements. Both are tax-exempt federally, but 501(c) orgs have higher financial transparency requirements and higher restrictions on political activity (which qualifies donations to 501(c)s as tax-deductible).
bos 6 hours ago||
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.
mindcrash 5 hours ago||
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

veverkap 4 hours ago|||
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.

mindcrash 4 hours ago|||
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 come from.

bdcravens 4 hours ago|||
Money begets the freedom to work on causes. Monetization was always a core part of Hashicorp, rather than being a bolt-on after years of OSS. Which is a good thing. (I was a customer of the first commercial offering from Hashicorp, their VMWare add-on for Vagrant)
jen20 6 minutes ago||||
IBM did not do that, HashiCorp was a public company before their acquisition.
heipei 3 hours ago|||
I'd rather he'd still be working on Nomad to be honest, but Ghostty is a good consolation prize ;)
jarjoura 1 hour ago|||
There are hundreds of thousands of software engineers who, given FU amounts of money, would absolutely keep writing software and do it only for the love of it. The companies that hire us usually make us sign promises that we won't work on side projects. Even if there are legal workarounds to that, it's not quite so simple.

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.

yalok 47 minutes ago||
moonlighting is permitted by law in California (companies legally can't prevent you from doing it, iiuc), as long as there's no conflict of interest with your main job...
fragmede 33 minutes ago||
As long as you don't use their hardware to do it.
zikduruqe 5 hours ago|||
Good. Maybe they'll add search to the terminal now. /s
simonw 5 hours ago|||
https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1993728538344906978 - "Ghostty on macOS now has search [...] GTK to follow soon" - November 26th 2025
mitchellh 5 hours ago|||
GTK is also merged. Main branch has search. Its also exposed via libghostty for embedders.
anorwell 4 hours ago|||
But only in the the tip (nightly) build. I'm somewhat tempted to switch to them for this.
cpach 4 hours ago||
A while ago I compiled Ghostty from HEAD, because it had a bug fix I cared for. It was a very stable and pleasant experience. No hassle whatsoever.
memco 3 hours ago||
If you'd like you can also use `tip` as the update channel to get the nightly build binary without having to compile it yourself: https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#auto-update-channe...
zimpenfish 4 hours ago||||
I'm hoping they'll get around to supporting command-number for switching between windows[0]. command-` is fine but clunky as hell when you have more than three or four windows. Without command-number, I'm still stuck using iTerm2 as my daily driver.

(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...

therealmarv 2 hours ago|||
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)

tristan957 2 hours ago||
Ghostty 1.3 will release in March.
neural_thing 5 hours ago||
"sustainable foundation" it's still one guy funding it, no? seems as sustainable as before
mitchellh 5 hours ago|||
You can't build a house without the foundation (pun intended).

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. :)

simonw 5 hours ago||||
33 additional people funding it as of this announcement: https://hcb.hackclub.com/ghostty/transactions
fragmede 40 minutes ago||||
To be fair, that one guy happens to be the OG Mitchell Hashimoto, who's worth a giant pile of money from selling terraform to IBM, and he's the guy actually writing it in the first place, so I don't think that's, like, a terrible horrible no good issue.
skywhopper 4 hours ago|||
How do you expect that to change? What is the next step in your mind? Maybe asking for donations? If only he would set up some way that the general public could contribute money to the project! That’d be the smart thing to do. Then he could write a blog post about it, and maybe someone would post a link to HN. That’d really be something.
xrd 4 hours ago||
I'm really excited about Ghostty (and Zig mostly because of my exposure via ghostty). Until ghostty I hadn't really considered that a terminal would be a catalyst for innovation and even startups. But, libghostty is REALLY fascinating. And, all the good AI coding tools, IMHO, operate inside a terminal, and my head is spinning with ideas about hammering on the container for these new CLIs.

(UWash CompSci strikes again, not that I'm biased)

TheRoque 58 minutes ago|
I'm curious as to why you are so excited ? What makes Ghostty so special ? (Especially compared to Kitty or Wezterm which I use)
alwillis 23 minutes ago||
WezTerm was my daily driver for a long time—it’s a great app.

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.

simonw 4 hours ago||
Inspired by this I just posted a resonably niche feature request to the Ghostty discussion forum (copy and paste to support text/rtf)... and found out within half an hour that the equivalent of what I was asking for was already available on their main branch: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/9798
purpleidea 5 hours ago||
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.

simonw 4 hours ago||
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.

dulvui 4 hours ago|||
On the other hand having a copyleft license without CLA makes rug pulls nearly impossible (once there are multiple contributors and copyright holders). But you are right, from a (commercial) value perspective, permissive wins.
purpleidea 4 hours ago||||
> Using a copyleft license can add friction that reduces the amount of value your software can create in the world.

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.

thewebguyd 3 hours ago||
It's sad, people have really been shitting on copyleft licenses the past few years, when they are critical to ensuring our computing freedoms are preserved.

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.

miclill 4 hours ago|||
I recently heard the argument that the license-friction of copyleft sometimes is actually a good thing. Think linux kernel that arguably is more successful than all the BSDs combined (citation needed)...
knowknow 4 hours ago|||
Keep in mind that Linux doesn’t use the GPL3 and stuck with the GPL2 since the maintainers and Linus Torvalds thought that it was overly restrictive [1]. So at some point the license friction becomes too large to be practical for organizations to use or contribute to.

[1] https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU

simonw 4 hours ago||||
I'd be really interested in hearing more about that argument.

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.

bsimpson 4 hours ago|||
BSD-0 is a public-domain-equivalent license. The guy who published it is one of the few people who has actually been involved in a lawsuit to try to assert a copyleft license. The whole thing was such a bad experience for him that he decided copyleft licenses are a false goal.

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.)

Karliss 2 hours ago||
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.

tristan957 2 hours ago||
> 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?

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.

asim 4 hours ago||
Kudos to Mitchell for doing it. Unfortunately the "rug pull" issue has been severely crippled by OpenAI's about face turn on their non profit status, but knowing Mitchell, he's not about the money, power, status, etc so the project is in good hands and you can expect this to stay free.
sevensor 3 hours ago|
> A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed for commercial gain

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.

geophph 2 hours ago||
Terminals are the next bubble to burst
neural_thing 2 hours ago|
Donating in Chrome didn't work, only in Safari.

FullStory namespace conflict. Please set window["_fs_namespace"]. script.pageview-props.tagged-events.js:1 Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENTUnderstand this error edge.fullstory.com/s/fs.js:1 Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENTUnderstand this error ghostty:1 Access to XMLHttpRequest at 'https://d3hb14vkzrxvla.cloudfront.net/v1/e3d6bbe1-aa48-43cb-...' from origin 'https://hcb.hackclub.com' has been blocked by CORS policy: Request header field beacon-device-instance-id is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Headers in preflight response.Understand this error installHook.js:1 Unable to Load Beacon overrideMethod @ installHook.js:1Understand this error installHook.js:1 $ overrideMethod @ installHook.js:1Understand this error d3hb14vkzrxvla.cloudfront.net/v1/e3d6bbe1-aa48-43cb-8f8b-be1e33945bab:1 Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FAILEDUnderstand this error [Violation] Potential permissions policy violation: payment is not allowed in this document.Understand this error rs.fullstory.com/rec/page:1 Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENTUnderstand this error 29[Intervention] Unable to preventDefault inside passive event listener due to target being treated as passive. See <URL>

garyhtou 1 hour ago|
Hi there! Gary here from HCB (Hack Club's fiscal sponsorship program).

Sorry about that! I've just pushed a fix for one of those errors. Although I wasn't able to reproduce this donation behavior on Chrome, I will continue investigating.

I appreciate you reporting this!

More comments...