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Posted by EdwinHoksberg 1 day ago

Shopify acquires Tailwind(tailwindcss.com)
1080 points | 417 commentspage 7
bbg2401 1 day ago|
The most pertinent part for many:

> On the commercial side, we'll no longer be trying to grow the business around Tailwind. All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify.

cube00 1 day ago|
> All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify.

You've got to wonder how long that model can continue if no new customers are allowed in.

They've even removed the Plus splash page so clicking Plus on the homepage or going to /plus takes you to a login page with no detail about what it was.

otherayden 1 day ago||
Very glad they got their exit. Provided huge value for years
sodapopcan 23 hours ago||
That's too bad, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
BatteryMountain 19 hours ago||
Where we are going, we won't need css.
nish__ 21 hours ago||
I knew this would happen.
Zarkex01 1 day ago||
Well I guess that's good?
croes 23 hours ago||
I guess they wanted to prevent losing their voting rights if Lütke‘s idea becomes reality
LoganDark 1 day ago||
Ugh. I remember how much Tailwind Labs has struggled for funding and it sucks to see Shopify get them. It also sucks to see they're discontinuing their paid products permanently, effective immediately -- they're not making them free, they're taking them away. You simply can't get them now. I understand why this had to happen but it is sad to see.
weird-eye-issue 1 day ago||
Struggled for funding because their business model collapsed overnight and isn't coming back, this is probably a best case scenario.
game_the0ry 1 day ago|||
Why does it suck that shopify got them? They seem to be a good steward of open source, especially with rails.
LoganDark 1 day ago||
Usually when stuff like this happens, it means that Tailwind's developers are moving to work on Shopify instead, which means Tailwind CSS itself goes into maintenance mode. That's what usually happens when a dependency is picked up by a company with a huge, "more interesting" product -- the dependency starts to depend on the more interesting product for attention, and stops receiving attention on its own merits. It grows only to support the more interesting product.

Furthermore, I already have specific experience with Tailwind Labs neglecting their other libraries that aren't Tailwind CSS itself, probably because they were only meant to support their paid products (which now will no longer exist! so maybe those other libraries will just stop getting updates altogether). Headless UI was something I wanted to rely on heavily, but it's not built to be flexible enough and basic issues from 2021 or earlier haven't been resolved or seemingly even reviewed.

Now that they have Shopify, I'll be surprised if Tailwind CSS continues to receive any more attention than Headless UI did all those years ago. This acquisition puts Tailwind CSS in exactly that position.

(Edited to fix "Spotify" typos...)

hbn 21 hours ago|||
Tailwind is more relevant than ever in web development, it's practically the native language for UIs in the LLM world.

I don't see why they'd put Tailwind into maintenance mode when they just purchased a pretty major building block in the modern web stack.

game_the0ry 22 hours ago|||
> which means Tailwind CSS itself goes into maintenance mode.

You are making quite an assumption here.

Bootstrap was a twitter os library that is still in development today.

moralestapia 1 day ago||
For some definition of "struggling" that encompasses a situation where you get $3M/year for renaming CSS variables.
xyst 12 hours ago||
well at least the founders got a bailout.

Sad to see this company bailed out by a racist tho

grzes 23 hours ago|
tailwindcss is an anti-pattern that breaks fundamental rule of software engeneering - separation of concerns. just learn how to use CSS - it will benefit you in the long run. i suspect they will be "paywalling" more and more features in the future.
hbn 21 hours ago|
HTML and CSS are not a separation of concerns in anything I've ever built. They're both representing the layout/design. I don't want them separate.

You end up having to keep them synchronized anyway, messing with your HTML is frequently gonna break your CSS. Tailwind is infinitely more pleasant to write than a separate CSS file that has to be kept in sync with the HTML.

grzes 21 hours ago||
dude, have you heard about single file components where you have HTML & CSS in one place? XD
ldsd 1 hour ago|||
> separation of concerns

> everything in one place

Kiro 18 hours ago|||
You're destroying your own argument.
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