Posted by kevlened 5 days ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439059
But I'm merely telling the truth. The fact that people don't like it doesn't change the fact that software engineers are largely replaceable with AI now.
We are seeing the second order effects now that people using AI are not buying software products anymore, leading to layoff of software engineers.
For something basic like CSS, it is true. Ask ChatGPT or Claude Code to come up with any Tailwind template, and it will spit out within seconds for free, and even integrate it into the project effortlessly. This approach does not apply to heavy software such as a comprehensive CRM or another type of CRUD platform.
Today, LLMs make the first type of business much harder.
"Information should be free", sure, but lets not kid ourselves, these massive new AI companies are making themselves new gatekeepers with new artificial moats for themselves. Information is not federated / distributed anymore.
We need "GPL for AI" that restricts AI scrapers from performing content theft/repackaging.
Then step aside as the maintainer of the project then and better yet, make something like Tailwind-foundation etc. which is truly open source. Go spend your time building your business, but you can't become the bottleneck and not do anything for something that has become so foundational for Web Dev.
Be Kind, we are all born billionaires with billions of "kindness tokens" in the bank, don't use them sparingly.
Get a grip.
I can empathize with the founder too because I was kind of in their shoes last year. Had been laid off and nearly exhausted my savings but I was more worried about having to let go of folks I employed.
I have done so on countless occasions, but this is about the css "framework".
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529364 and marked it off topic.
Could you delete my comments too ? Thank you
Also it's always funny when someone tries to look up your past instead of giving convincing arguments.
Best read: You are confusing different products. Somebody can do two things and get paid for only one of them.
Worst read: You are really trying to confuse them.
Either you support an economy where everyone gets a meager living wage just for existing and then once that's established you can complain about people trying to make money off open source, or you say "capitalism as it exists is great" and swallow the fact that people who you don't pay don't work for you. Which is it?
/s
They have a free product and a paid product. They've used the documentation as an awareness channel for the paid product. The paid product influences and pays for the free product. A tail as old as time.
They're not asking you to buy the paid product and they're not saying they are going to make it worse. Did you even read thread? He literally says "I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it."
Not prioritizing it now does not make the product worse, it just doesn't make it better in this particular way today.
How is this hard to understand?
Eggcorn klaxon!
I know there may have been some weird stuff going on lately (nginx, redis, etc.) but this is not one of them.
It's okay to be confused, but please do not continue this.
There is a corporate side with other features that has never been free. I pay for it because it's great.
I'm not sure if you're purposefully misstating it at this point or not. Several people have corrected you and you seem to double down incorrectly each time.
The hypocrisy the GP noticed is strong enough to warrant a mention.
HTML and CSS are free to use but the W3C is funded by membership fees.
BTW I'm of the opinion that frontend tooling developers should actually try to contribute things to HTML and CSS instead of building "component libraries" on top of them.
If the native controls were good and if the browsers allowed using "uniformly styled" versions of them then there would be no good reason for such libraries to exist.
I have been on HN since 2008, his comment is by far the worst encounter ever in my memory. The sense of entitlement, not only in one comment by literally every single one of them in this thread and despite all the explanation he still believes he is right.
And to top it off he manage to drag HTML and CSS standards into it.
We are a deeply unserious society.
Anyway; good luck going viral online, everyone. I got lucky, have had generational wealth in my back pocket since birth, am off the hook for you by our social norms. Hopefully it works out for you because I and the rest of us won't be engaged in political action on your behalf. Dance for the organ!
So your answer to "how should open source projects achieve financial sustainability" is "don't even try"?
There's a point where it's too much and it just feels like a trojan horse when later you stop caring for your free users.
The author did not in fact, make the project worse, all they did was not accept a change, and that is entirely different than making it worse.
Even those who stood to benefit from the change have not received a degraded experience in comparison to the current state of affairs, but the same experience as the current state of affairs, since no change occurred. It is truly within the author's rights to do this, in any case.
One should avoid a sense of entitlement to additional and ever-increasing quantities of free work when free work has already been done.
A change to make the documentation easier for LLM scrapers to inhale.
What would be the point? It would, in no way, improve anything. Probably not even for LLMs.
I am astounded the gentleman responded at all. I think all the talk of money (whilst urgent and catastrophic) is a red herring
I got bit by that many times and do my best to avoid it but when it happens it's a stab in the back.
This is very different from, say, the minio situation, where they were actively removing feature before finally closing development down entirely. Whether tailwind will end up going down this route, time will tell. But as of right now, I find this reading to be quite uncharitable.
By not adding an extra "feature" you deemed as essential?
Even more surprising is this is from an 2012 account.
You found their homepage. You found that they didn’t ask for money, and allowed you to use their product for free. You decided to use it.
And now, they’re liars. How dare they try to make money?