Today, I wanted to add tailwind to a new project and realized I had purchased it back in 2022. So I went to the website and realized it had moved to tailwind plus. That’s how distracted I’ve been. To my surprise my access worked and I could still download the full UI kit.
I know they promised lifetime, but I did not expect updates forever. This looks like the first issue to fix. I would have no issues paying 20% of purchase price for an updated version, that gave me access to 12 months of free updates.
Also, what about paid access to skills or MCP server for design systems and components?
I know these may be things he already considered, so don’t want to presume I have an answer. But as a customer, totally willing to support a good product that has supported me.
Lovable while claiming they are making $250m ARR heaving using Tailwind, doesnt even pay to support tailwind at all. Although with the AI companies you can never trust the numbers as they play the giving free trials and counting as future ARR game.
And that's totally fine what Lovable is doing. Tailwind offers an MIT-licensed library that anyone is free to use without paying for it. Tailwind's paid offering is optional, and many businesses won't need it. Just as non-paying users of OSS are not entitled to anything from the maintainers, maintainers are not entitled to revenue from users who are complying with the license terms of their free offering.
As an open source developer myself, it concerns me that so much of what we do us under- and un-funded, but that's the licensing model Tailwind chose. If you want something different, then release it under the AGPL (or something else that businesses aren't comfortable using, or cannot use), and charge for commercial licensing for any use of your product. Yes, you'll have fewer users, but that may be the trade off you need to make in order to build a sustainable business.
Great point here, the only thing that feels greedy to me is that these larger companies do not contribute back to the foundational libraries that they are building on, even to a minor extent for ecosystem improvements. Perhaps greedy is a strong word.
i’ve always felt that oss licenses needs to include responsible use terms or something. some orgs dont mind paying for value contributed but you need to provide a structure to do so, even if that is on a voluntary basis.
If anyone from Lovable etc sees these comments, great opportunity for sponsorship where it can make a difference upstream.
Some companies have done this well, at a stage Retool use to sponsor a number of open source libs which greatly helped them with exposure to devs. Surely a better way to spend ad revenue imo.
I don’t think we were ever supposed to be programmers. A lot of us are scared because they assumed knowing every detail of a system or language and being able to conjure a system with code was the point of your profession. But it was always building things, or, engineering, just with different tools. If we get to the point where we can ask AI to 3d print a spaceship and also build JARVIS into it for navigation, then your job will become something else, like figuring out how to build brain computer interfaces as we get on our way to becoming cyborgs or whatever for FTL journeys. Building interfaces will not be a thing we will do anymore, as UIs will just be conjured on the fly, contextually, by the AI.
Our challenge will always be to keep track of all the foundational knowledge so we can rebuild it all if it comes crashing down (AI or some other event tries to end us).
You should feel exited about it, and level up to the next thing where you will be needed, which is to build reliable heterogeneous, self healing systems, often without having a contract between them.
This will mean you can conjure up an entire tax management system, a financial system, a government management system, quickly and have them all talk to each other so people can just go about their lives.
A dam is built, and you immediately have a system that can operate it and all of its equipment.
This may give manufacturers freedom to innovate without worrying about breaking things. Just install it and let the AI learn it, tell you if it needs to calibrate the new equipment, or adjust the existing system to better integrate it, take better advantage of it, etc.
There is so much to do in that and many other directions (I mean healthcare, etc, why not eat bigpharma’s lunch?) that we should be excited and not afraid. Of course current AI is nowhere near this, and maybe what enables this will be in an entirely different shape, but that we’re all putting effort into getting there instead of worrying about Angular vs React is what I love the most.
Sounds like a great idea. I would love to be able to swap technologies, like use a go or node backend, maybe use an entire framework like Echo or NestJS (I’m going for maintainability here, and I feel frameworks provide good guardrails). Bonus if it can be self host able (paid or licensed regardless) and maybe adding in browser rendering so AI can do visual testing. I could be one of the first customers.
I love and live inside linux, so please go easy on me but...there is some level of product design that an OS needs to be a viable consumer OS. Linux has 100 ways to do any thing, this is 1: paralysis inducing, 2: causes high cognitive load when all you need is to edit/share a spreadsheet, 3: does not create a common experience that you can share with people across jobs. Everyone will do it differently, so you will have an issue communicating how to do task X.
But I see no product people on Linux, I see only engineers wanting maximum Linux. We aren't willing to be more single minded, we want to be nothing like Microsoft (good), but we also want to be nothing like Apple (good in some ways, very bad in others).
Regular users do not need to know what apt is, what a repository is, or any of the 1000 linux things. But those things need to work so consistently well that they could use the OS without ever, and I mean ever, having to know what they are.
Then, I haven't used a linux desktop in a while (tried elementaryOs 2y ago, was a bit lacking), but the desktop environments need to stop looking like some college student's java GUI project.
Finally, I don't know much about the driver/nvidia issues that I hear so much about (that's not where my job takes me), but I don't think we need to solve those before we can get Linux to be a daily desktop driver. I mean let's some up with a list of Linux certified cards and let OEMs pick from those? Maybe this is already done, but if not, we could start there.
I think this would be a great product, and yes, I see value in it. Maybe this could go deeper. Many engineer founders want a Christmas tree of features. This process could help them trim the fat and actually optimize for PMF.
Spot on. That 'Christmas Tree' effect is the #1 pattern I see—founders try to jam every feature into the deck because they worked hard on them.
You're absolutely right about the depth—the narrative constraint acts as a forcing function. When you have to explain your value in just 10 slides, you realize 80% of those features don't actually drive the core mission. It definitely ends up being a PMF exercise as much as a pitch exercise.
Being an intelligent being is not the same as being considered intelligent relative to the rest of your species. I think we’re just looking to create an intelligence, meaning, having the attributes that make a being intelligent, which mostly are the ability to reason and learn. I think the being might take over from there no?
With humans, the speed and ease with which we learn and reason is capped. I think a very dumb intelligence with stay dumb for not very long because every resource will be spent in making it smarter.
I agree, but this would mean that almost anything can’t be called hacking, bc it usually relies on vulnerabilities and implementation defects. If something is poorly encrypted and you retrieve data, you didn’t hack because it wasn’t encrypted to begin with. That can’t be the standard.
There is a line, it is fuzzy, but if all you did was find something which was there for anyone to find, I would place that firmly on the not hacking side. If it was rot 13 I would put that marginally closer to hacking than this.
Agreed, but when the source is mass media, they should be attributed the blame, not social media.
Social media is responsible for spreading much more misleading/manipulative information than even mass media would report on.
That is, if we saw a chart of how social media manipulated the news, it would be way more exaggerated than this.
Not defending mass media — I just believe social media can be 10x more misleading than what this chart would have us believe (whereas mass media is already terrible.)
Yup. All my servers are behind Tailscale. The only thing I expose is a load balancer that routes tcp (email) and http. That balancer is running docker, fully firewalled (incl docker bypasses). Every server is behind herzner’s firewall in addition to the internal firewall.
App servers run docker, with images that run a single executable (no os, no shell), strict cpu and memory limits. Most of my apps only require very limited temporary storage so usually no need to mount anything. So good luck executing anything in there.
I used, way back in the day, to run Wordpress sites. Would get hacked monthly every possible way. Learned so much, including the fact that often your app is your threat. With Wordpress, every plugin is a vector. Also the ability to easily hop into an instance and rewrite running code (looking at you scripting languages incl JS) is terrible. This motivated my move to Go. The code I compiled is what will run. Period.
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