It's really hard to run a company, especially when your product is mostly OSS... Tailwind has helped thousands of companies save (or make) millions of dollars, and AI almost by default uses it to generate beautiful websites. This is such a hard position to be in... to watch your product take off, but your financials plummet. It really sucks how affected the team is after all the good work they've done.

If I was considering that purchase in today's landscape, I would surely not buy it. At $299 USD I can have a decent model do the job of writing custom tailored components for me and iterate extensively on them.

Hard sell with a "UI Kit" versus a "UI Brain".

If I were Adam I would drop to $29.99 and accept the status quo, but not make it lifetime access to try and not piss off existing owners, and I would pivot to building a Frontend AI Agent and a Tailwind Labs Model.

OSS without founders having it's own managed software company is always a difficult position. (e.g. database vendors open source but also have their own company providing managed service and support allowing sustainable development). Hope of getting strong support from companies is unsustainable.

Curious what should be the business model for a library something like tailwind?

They could add a premium features but entry users not allowed to use certain features is a bad experience

Frontend output from LLMs is (in my experience) subpar when compared to human-built components. However, I am not primarily a frontend dev. I would definitely pay for something that let me easily build frontends using vetted components, in ways they were designed to work together.

This seems like something that would sit solidly in the bailiwick of framework designers like Tailwind Labs. But it seems they primarily target frontend developers, so their focus is elsewhere.

Despite any of my preferences, it was real work that deserved a chance. It cannot be denied that AI slurping their content contributed to less paying customers.

IMHO, this is content draught starting to appear. To an extreme, it should lead to no one having any real incentive (possible business, possible recognition, etc) to do new and original stuff.

I don't see a way of changing this. I think jobs will be fine, but content of all kinds (especially code) won't.

I think the solution is one of the big companies with lots of money to acquire tailwind. Specifically Vercel. They use it, their v0 thing uses tailwind allover, they have bought a bunch of open source companies in the past, and they should have deep enough pockets. Last year they acquired tremor blocks, which is a UI library, that uses tailwind!

Makes perfect sense, lets get it done.

Something simple and obvious, like sticking a license file that has certain expected fields in /.well-known. I wouldn't be surprised if this is already being discussed because it would easily allow agents to check for special license requirements that only apply to them, directing them how to share content while remaining in compliance.