Still feel extremely negative towards this company for tweaking an Alacritty fork then using that to get a $50million venture round then giving zero money towards Alacritty, an open source library that the founder completely owes their career too.
Not shocked they partnered with another company that is fine with raping the commons for profit, OpenAI.
They definitely did some git cleanup to remove this fact too going by their commit history.
Warp founder here. Totally understood on the feedback - one thing I would call out is that we actually worked with Alacritty on the initial implementation and they were super helpful and we are grateful for their support.
I sort of can't tell if this is supposed to be a joke or not. It seems like you're explaining that in addition to not supporting the project from which your company spawned 50M, they also supplied free work for which they were never compensated. That's supposed to be better or something?
There's an interview that got scrubbed from the internet with Zach on the 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings. This comment and its lack of self-awareness exemplify what was on display for 60 minutes.
Zach is undoubtedly smart but for anyone who is not an SV insider, they would listen to that podcast they same way you are looking at this comment and wonder if it's all one big joke.
I mean, if they have a working relationship with each other then I guess the alacritty folks don't hate their guts. That's meaningful from my perspective.
Also remember that the $50m is not revenue that they can use however they want. They have an obligation to their investors to make money with it.
So if I use vim or emacs for free, or VS Code for that matter, I have to hunt down the maintainers and pay them? Do I need to empty my wallet for every project I use for free? Because that's not sustainable for normal people, let alone businesses.
If you use them for free to spawn a 50M business, yeah, give back a little. Nobody's saying every user should open their wallet, let alone "empty" it as you hyperbolate.
I don't have particularly strong preference for copyleft (I use the Apache license for my personal projects), but these don't seem like particularly compelling arguments.
> So if I use vim or emacs for free, or VS Code for that matter
Vim and emacs both use licenses that require you to share any source code modifications if you distribute binaries that you change, so that's kind of a strange comparison. You literally couldn't do the things that Warp did with Alacritty. As for VS Code, it seems pretty disingenuous to compare a single solo developer to a multi-trillion dollar company.
> I have to hunt down the maintainers and pay them?
I don't understand why you think it would be hard to "hunt down" someone when an email is literally in every commit in the git history of open source software.
> Do I need to empty my wallet for every project I use for free? Because that's not sustainable for normal people
Most "normal people" do not have access to $50 million of VC money
> let alone businesses
Paying the developer of the one piece of software that they forked for the entire basis of their business $100,000 of the VC money would not meaningfully have hurt their ability to succeed. They could have just as easily reached the same level of success they have now with $49.9 million.
This isn't feedback. This is saying your company and your leadership are absolutely toxic to the tech community if this is how you treat people that made you wealthy.
you shouldn’t be surprised though. most people in tech only care about money and you already know if you align yourself with Altman, your morals already aren’t in the right place.
This should be banned on this platform. If you are against Altman or his values or morals, that is fine, but calling others who do feel aligned with him immoral… well that kind of hate leads to attempts on Altman’s life of which we have already seen one. You better stop with this behaviour before you encourage others to do actions that you will regret
You don't understand why people are upset at an individual that is proudly proclaiming that 100s of millions of Americans will become unemployed and there is nothing to do be done about it? In a country where being unemployed is a literal death sentence?
What kind of responses do you expect in return? I'm sorry but everyone in his orbit needs to be publicly shamed as well. These people are ghouls and we're seeing them create the next generation of ghouls in real time.
lol you’re a moron. Altman actively promotes neofeudalist ideas and has shown time and again he does not care about safety or human wellbeing. Sociopathic narcissists like him will be the downfall of our species.
Well. It is open source. We have empires built upon open source code that never give any money back to developers. Now we have AI built upon open source that is never going to pay back those developers.
But you decide to feel extremely negative towards a small fish on this veritable pound of sharks?
I agree with you, BUT, we have licensing right? Ie couldn't the author have chosen a license that would have prevented this - if they had cared?
I'm unsure if we should lose sleep over something the author likely chose. Its their right to not care how the code is used, maybe we should abide their wishes?
Is there perhaps there's an issue with licensing? Eg there's no easy license akin to MIT for small time devs, but less open for $50M VC babies? Ie is there a scenario where an author like this wants something akin to MIT for small groups, but still doesn't want to be taken advantage of by massively backed corporations?
The biggest scam that was ever pulled was convincing software developers that the GPL was somehow bad and out of vogue and that open source should prefer BSD, MIT, Apache, etc instead.
And now we have entire threads like this of people crying because some company used someone's software exactly as the license allows.
It's a shame, but there really is no sympathy for projects that choose the wrong license. Stallman knew this decades ago and somehow even now we're still learning it.
The GPL would not have prevented the scenario that the top-level comment complained about. Nothing in the GPL requires rich downstream projects to send money to poor upstream projects. That's by design. The four freedoms that Stallman preaches intentionally permit distributing the software to free riders.
It would have prevented Warp from forking Alacritty and re-distributing it as a closed source product. That's what it's about. This whole scenario would have been impossible from the start and Warp would have always had to be good open source citizens.
The biggest scam is GPL convincing people that the license will keep things open source. Every try contributing to Chrome's web engine? It started as GPL khtml, but good luck doing anything as google controls it. Meanwhile FreeBSD manages to get plenty of contributors.
Don't get me wrong, license is important. However it doesn't have nearly the effect many people claim.
Venture capital is the shark. Microsoft didn't release Windows Terminal as a subscription service, iTerm isn't part of Apple's Developer fee. All of these companies do not treat their business strategy like Candy Land, they perfectly well understand that "terminal emulator SaaS with telemetry" is the root canal of devrel.
Warp's client going Open Source is the final step in acknowledging that they have no product. The value add is 100% their service offerings, the terminal itself is as useless as those VS Code forks that sell themselves on being "AI native" or similar. It's even possible that their terminal product is what's preventing developers from demoing their (definitely more profitable) agent harness.
I swear I tried. I installed warp maybe 4 times after long intervals. At each time I always ended up with the same feeling as my initial impression: overwhelming.
I think I’m not the target demographic for it, I’m fine with iTerm2 and Ghostty, but I somehow still feel this void where I wish the terminal was a little more abstract and rich, just not to the level Warp takes it.
I wish there were an in-between solution out there.
We hear this feedback a bunch and are trying to make Warp more customizable so you can pick and choose which of the extra, non-terminal features you find most useful . You can turn off all the AI if you want, and also control what editing features are surfaced (e.g. file tree, diff view, etc). Would love feedback on how to improve the experience.
same with me, it looks more or less too flat with just maybe 2 main colors and just one font variant, feels like big pile of flat text - hard to see what is header what is footer and sometimes what is button.
I still use it but I barely used their agent event though I had subscription for lenny bundle. They should also invest in some good quality onboarding tutorial video but please keep your CEO out of this last time I checked 1 year ago - he might be good CEO but not good at job of teaching his product.
We've actually added a ton of controls recently to let users configure how much (or little) UI they want. If that's not enough, would love if you opened an issue on the Warp repo and we can discuss more what needs to change in the product to meet your needs!
Was interested to try until I saw it was no longer a terminal and is now a coding agent? There are already dozens of those, I use my terminal to launch coding agents I don't need it to be one.
May i ask what was the decision process behind this? What was the benefit of open-sourcing warp, as it is already a mature and established product. Also did devin cli had any impact on the decision to open-source warp?
Also how does a repo gets 29k starts in matter of 2 hours?
But the tl;dr is that I actually think we can build a better product, more quickly if we build it with our community + agents. I also think it's a unique product that I hope developers get a bunch of value from being able to customize and help improve. Our business is now mostly around agents and orchestration through Oz (https://oz.dev), so opening up the client and terminal felt natural.
The big thing for the "why now" though was the agent management piece.
Wrt the github stars, we had an issues-only repo prior and already had a significant number of stars before OSS today.
Oh great news. I was recently trying out the Agents layout and it fits my workflow so well. It has a familiar terminal interface but helps me manage multiple agents much easier than just using a ton of tabs in iTerm open at once. I The code review panel is the one thing I find especially useful, and being able to see each terminal pane as a separate “section” in the vertical tab layouts, along with automatic worktree management - I find it a total joy to use.
My only real qualms are monetization - I don’t really need AI credits for anything since my work already just pays for Claude Max + API overage. I really would like a good reason to give them money but the current premium features don’t really appeal to me.
In terms of monetization, we actually don't monetize the terminal at all, we monetize our agent and our orchestration platform (www.oz.dev). Totally happy for you to use Claude or Codex CLI within Warp as your main driver.
Not shocked they partnered with another company that is fine with raping the commons for profit, OpenAI.
They definitely did some git cleanup to remove this fact too going by their commit history.
Zach is undoubtedly smart but for anyone who is not an SV insider, they would listen to that podcast they same way you are looking at this comment and wonder if it's all one big joke.
Also remember that the $50m is not revenue that they can use however they want. They have an obligation to their investors to make money with it.
> So if I use vim or emacs for free, or VS Code for that matter
Vim and emacs both use licenses that require you to share any source code modifications if you distribute binaries that you change, so that's kind of a strange comparison. You literally couldn't do the things that Warp did with Alacritty. As for VS Code, it seems pretty disingenuous to compare a single solo developer to a multi-trillion dollar company.
> I have to hunt down the maintainers and pay them?
I don't understand why you think it would be hard to "hunt down" someone when an email is literally in every commit in the git history of open source software.
> Do I need to empty my wallet for every project I use for free? Because that's not sustainable for normal people
Most "normal people" do not have access to $50 million of VC money
> let alone businesses
Paying the developer of the one piece of software that they forked for the entire basis of their business $100,000 of the VC money would not meaningfully have hurt their ability to succeed. They could have just as easily reached the same level of success they have now with $49.9 million.
So are you going to donate to them or not?
It's disgusting behavior.
Altman has trash morals
What kind of responses do you expect in return? I'm sorry but everyone in his orbit needs to be publicly shamed as well. These people are ghouls and we're seeing them create the next generation of ghouls in real time.
But you decide to feel extremely negative towards a small fish on this veritable pound of sharks?
I'm unsure if we should lose sleep over something the author likely chose. Its their right to not care how the code is used, maybe we should abide their wishes?
Is there perhaps there's an issue with licensing? Eg there's no easy license akin to MIT for small time devs, but less open for $50M VC babies? Ie is there a scenario where an author like this wants something akin to MIT for small groups, but still doesn't want to be taken advantage of by massively backed corporations?
And now we have entire threads like this of people crying because some company used someone's software exactly as the license allows.
It's a shame, but there really is no sympathy for projects that choose the wrong license. Stallman knew this decades ago and somehow even now we're still learning it.
People were optimizing for being the most useful and therefore getting the most use.
Don't get me wrong, license is important. However it doesn't have nearly the effect many people claim.
Warp's client going Open Source is the final step in acknowledging that they have no product. The value add is 100% their service offerings, the terminal itself is as useless as those VS Code forks that sell themselves on being "AI native" or similar. It's even possible that their terminal product is what's preventing developers from demoing their (definitely more profitable) agent harness.
I think I’m not the target demographic for it, I’m fine with iTerm2 and Ghostty, but I somehow still feel this void where I wish the terminal was a little more abstract and rich, just not to the level Warp takes it.
I wish there were an in-between solution out there.
I’ll admit the UI has changed a lot recently and I find it more intimidating than when I was using it a year ago, so I mostly use Ghostty now.
I still use it but I barely used their agent event though I had subscription for lenny bundle. They should also invest in some good quality onboarding tutorial video but please keep your CEO out of this last time I checked 1 year ago - he might be good CEO but not good at job of teaching his product.
We've actually added a ton of controls recently to let users configure how much (or little) UI they want. If that's not enough, would love if you opened an issue on the Warp repo and we can discuss more what needs to change in the product to meet your needs!
Thanks for the tip, I’ll give this a try and see how it goes.
no requirement to use it--and you can turn off all of the AI features if you don't want to use them at all
May i ask what was the decision process behind this? What was the benefit of open-sourcing warp, as it is already a mature and established product. Also did devin cli had any impact on the decision to open-source warp?
Also how does a repo gets 29k starts in matter of 2 hours?
They used the repo for issue tracking since the beginning but before today the repo did not include source code of the client.
Big bucks from OpenAI is my guess. I could guess the strategy is to try to take a shotgun approach at Claude Code.
I outline the thought process in detail in our blog (https://www.warp.dev/blog/warp-is-now-open-source)
But the tl;dr is that I actually think we can build a better product, more quickly if we build it with our community + agents. I also think it's a unique product that I hope developers get a bunch of value from being able to customize and help improve. Our business is now mostly around agents and orchestration through Oz (https://oz.dev), so opening up the client and terminal felt natural.
The big thing for the "why now" though was the agent management piece.
Wrt the github stars, we had an issues-only repo prior and already had a significant number of stars before OSS today.
You gave the answer: by being a mature, established product
My only real qualms are monetization - I don’t really need AI credits for anything since my work already just pays for Claude Max + API overage. I really would like a good reason to give them money but the current premium features don’t really appeal to me.
In terms of monetization, we actually don't monetize the terminal at all, we monetize our agent and our orchestration platform (www.oz.dev). Totally happy for you to use Claude or Codex CLI within Warp as your main driver.
We've added features to make using CLI coding agents easier (e.g. a file tree and code review) but they are all optional and customizable.
Getting a Zawinski's Law vibe there, "every program attempts to expand until it can read mail"