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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
> They have an obligation to their investors to make money with it.
It's bit more nuanced. The company management have fiducial responsibilities to the investors but also have responsibility to the company itself and its employees. E.g. Milton Friedman's shared-holder primacy is a crap philosophy and one of the most damaging ones to actual healthy free market economies. For example, in corporate bankruptcy in the US workers get paid before shareholders.
The courts have also tended to favor the company management as long as they're acting reasonably, so I've read. IANAL, but it shouldn't be too hard to say hey this support contract for a core piece of software reduces risk for us by X, Y or helps get Z feature.
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.
> 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.
I use Arch Linux, tell me which of the thousands of packages am I obligated to donate to? Im not exactly a money fountain to be giving money away to strangers I am grateful for, but it I put something on the internet as open source, for free, I dont cry if nobody reaches out to give me money. Honestly, I rather just be informed that my project is being used to make someone a profitable business, thats good enough for me personally. If I thought different, I wouldnt open source said projects.
People are upset they raised 50 million, how many employees? How long does that keep their lights on? Maybe if they were raking in hundreds of millions I would be inclined to be outraged but if I make a startup tomorrow I cant just donate my VC bucks to every open source project I like until I have some real income coming in or my investors will want my head.
Not saying its not, I guess the core of my argument is that people are outraged that these guys raised 50 million… how much of that is going to employees and infrastructure? Is the owner sitting on 50 million in his personal bank account? Because the outrage feels very premature, not to mention they just open sourced the project when they really did not need to under any obligation. Far as I can tell they also did a lot of custom work on top of Alacritty, so its not 100% Alacritty.
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.
The charitable read is that the original project team willingly worked with Warp, knowing the direction they were going. I don't know any background on the drama FWIW.
I feel obligated to chime in here a bit. I was the Alacritty member who was contacted and who offered some feedback.
I have absolutely no hard feelings.
Would it have been a good idea to charge them for my time, IDK. I was in between a research role and a new job at the time and more than happy to help. Do I feel like I missed out on something, maybe a little bit, but that's more on me than them. I'm sure if I had angled for a position working for or with them, they would have considered it seriously.
Would it be nice to have more support for Alacritty, perhaps. But there are a lot of conflicting opinions on what to work on and what features are good for the project, so it's not as simple as just adding money and people. I was always hoping alacritty could be a minimal library others could use, and I'm glad it has turned out that way.
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 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.
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 because Warp would have been forced by the license to be good open source citizens.
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.
genuinely asking, what is the appropriate compensation/donation/split for a company that uses open source heavily in their early days but later makes money off of it?
Why doesn't it answer the question? If you are a selfish individual that doesn't believe in giving back. there simply isn't much to discuss.
These companies literally could not exist without the massive public dollars + support poured into them. Warp couldn't exist without the funds from public pensions being gambled with. Since these same companies have zero qualms in raping public resources, the government should simply start taking their money or nationalizing their businesses.
These leaders have shown they will absolutely destroy society to make a few dollars. We should reject them on the basis of being a member of the human race.
Their greed is literally destroying society and we have to ask if they should give more or not? We're beyond the point of giving, people are going to start taking and they're already starting off trying to take things you can't ever give back.
I don't really understand the controversy; there are plenty of licenses an author can choose that restricts commercial use of a project. It feels a bit dishonest to release something under a permissive license and then be upset when someone uses your stuff well within the ways you said is perfectly ok.
So many proprietary companies are built on the back of open-source software. Yes, there is no legal responsibility for Warp to donate to Allacritty. But there is a moral obligation. It's not hard to see open-source maintainers and enthusiasts looking at Warp with skepticism. I didn't know that and will be uninstalling Warp, though I stopped using it months ago.
To be fair, they did reach out to me at the time (I was an active contributor) and I gave them some initial feedback on the design, but ultimately didn't decide to engage much more. I think the direction Alacritty wants to go in and they wanted to go in was pretty different.
It is telling though that few underlying issue were found. Zed however has contributed back in a few places.
It's technically legal to take photos of people through their windows, but we don't worry about anybody but big tech creeps actually doing it on a regular basis.
This is what AI companies do. They steal stuff and then do not give credit to anyone, not even a "thank you". If doing so was needed to get money, that's what they'd have done. Anyways, i was very surprised to see they chose my favorite free software license -- the AGPLv3
And for requiring you to login with an email account to use the terminal.. (They finally removed this after years of complaints, but I dont trust any company with this type of culture)
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.
> trying to make Warp more customizable so you can pick and choose which of the extra, non-terminal features
I think this will contribute even more to the overwhelming feeling. I don't think people want endless configuration. They want something with an opinionated product direction. It seems like Warp lacks that resolve and is trying to be too much because nobody has decided what it is actually supposed to be.
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.
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.
Pretty happy with Warp so far. The vertical tabs are a game changer, having all my projects down the side and flipping between them (each one having multiple split terminals) works really well compared with horizontal tabs. Looking forward to each update.
I am a paying user of Warp and really enjoy it when it behaves.
I do struggle with having AI forced on me at times, when I press a key errantly and seem to be driven away from the command line and deeper and deeper into AI-land with questions and "are you sure ...".
Looking forward to use all these nice AI features without using the warp account/service. So I can bring my own claude and it will show all the agent panes etc.
I’ve found they have changed the shortcuts I got used to and have kept releasing quite significant UI changes regularly. Not really what I want from a terminal. Tbh it’s felt like they took something nice and just piled AI slop features onto it presumably to hype it to investors. Pity.
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?
Big bucks from OpenAI is my guess. I could guess the strategy is to try to take a shotgun approach at Claude Code.
You gave the answer: by being a mature, established product
They used the repo for issue tracking since the beginning but before today the repo did not include source code of the client.
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.
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.
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.
It's disgusting behavior.
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.
Altman has trash morals
(exactly as lowbrow of a response as your nonsense deserves)
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.
It's bit more nuanced. The company management have fiducial responsibilities to the investors but also have responsibility to the company itself and its employees. E.g. Milton Friedman's shared-holder primacy is a crap philosophy and one of the most damaging ones to actual healthy free market economies. For example, in corporate bankruptcy in the US workers get paid before shareholders.
The courts have also tended to favor the company management as long as they're acting reasonably, so I've read. IANAL, but it shouldn't be too hard to say hey this support contract for a core piece of software reduces risk for us by X, Y or helps get Z feature.
> 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.
I use Arch Linux, tell me which of the thousands of packages am I obligated to donate to? Im not exactly a money fountain to be giving money away to strangers I am grateful for, but it I put something on the internet as open source, for free, I dont cry if nobody reaches out to give me money. Honestly, I rather just be informed that my project is being used to make someone a profitable business, thats good enough for me personally. If I thought different, I wouldnt open source said projects.
I hope you are aware of the fact a business makes way more money than a "normal" person?
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.
So are you going to donate to them or not?
I have absolutely no hard feelings.
Would it have been a good idea to charge them for my time, IDK. I was in between a research role and a new job at the time and more than happy to help. Do I feel like I missed out on something, maybe a little bit, but that's more on me than them. I'm sure if I had angled for a position working for or with them, they would have considered it seriously.
Would it be nice to have more support for Alacritty, perhaps. But there are a lot of conflicting opinions on what to work on and what features are good for the project, so it's not as simple as just adding money and people. I was always hoping alacritty could be a minimal library others could use, and I'm glad it has turned out that way.
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.
These companies literally could not exist without the massive public dollars + support poured into them. Warp couldn't exist without the funds from public pensions being gambled with. Since these same companies have zero qualms in raping public resources, the government should simply start taking their money or nationalizing their businesses.
These leaders have shown they will absolutely destroy society to make a few dollars. We should reject them on the basis of being a member of the human race.
Their greed is literally destroying society and we have to ask if they should give more or not? We're beyond the point of giving, people are going to start taking and they're already starting off trying to take things you can't ever give back.
It is telling though that few underlying issue were found. Zed however has contributed back in a few places.
What a shithole society is
(I like using em-dashes but i'm not a bot)
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"
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 think this will contribute even more to the overwhelming feeling. I don't think people want endless configuration. They want something with an opinionated product direction. It seems like Warp lacks that resolve and is trying to be too much because nobody has decided what it is actually supposed to be.
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.
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
I do struggle with having AI forced on me at times, when I press a key errantly and seem to be driven away from the command line and deeper and deeper into AI-land with questions and "are you sure ...".
My ESC key is wearing out.
TIL OS/2 is also called warp