Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

When you start making your open source project worse for your users because you are not making enough out of it I'll choose to use something else.

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.





I think the part you're missing here is that the author here is under no requirement to accept changes to their project and everyone else is welcome to fork it if they disagree with choices made by the author.

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.


> all they did was not accept a change,

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


For sure, yeah.

I notice that you didn't answer their question: How should OSS be funded?

Ethically

What's the ethically bad thing Tailwind did here? Not merging that pull request?

I'd feel lied to if someone offers me a free tool and later the person that controls it chooses to make it worse just to make more money.

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.


At what point did they make it _worse_? Tailwind didn't remove any existing functionality here. What they did was refuse to merge a PR while they're trying to figure out how to navigate a difficult financial problem, all while being fully transparent about what's going on, and saying that they're open to merging the PR if/when they manage to get things together.

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.


It's not even funcationality to the library code, it's a PR to their docs. If you just want optimized docs for your LLM to consume, isn't that what [Context7](https://context7.com/websites/tailwindcss) already has? Why force this new responsibility to the maintainer.

So which part did he make it worst?

By not adding an extra "feature" you deemed as essential?

Even more surprising is this is from an 2012 account.


How, exactly, have they made Tailwind worse just to make more money? Point to specifics, please.

Did they send you an email or call you? I doubt it.

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?


Please let us know if you launch this open source project, we’d all be excited to use it!

You keep repeating that he makes his project worse – an active action – while in fact he did not do anything at all, he just refused to change something.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: