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 is telling though that few underlying issue were found. Zed however has contributed back in a few places.
(I like using em-dashes but i'm not a bot)
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.
It's almost the "success" definition in the business language, isn't it?
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.
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.
So are you going to donate to them or not?
It's disgusting behavior.
Sure it would be great for them to give back, and they absolutely should, but I don't see why they deserve any hate (unless they hide what they did or engage in otherwise shady practices, but based on the comments I'm not seeing that).
What a shithole society is
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?
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.
If you want to prevent your own project from being taken from you, then AGPL3 is your best option.
If you don't want to stifle adoption then you can always offer bespoke licenses to companies who need them (at a cost to them, and a profit to you).
Until hackers understand the risk of permissive licenses, this will continue to happen.
(Side note but I find it odd how anti-corporate and anti-AI HN has become starting in the past decade. I am very much not right-wing and frankly I loathe rightists, but I am also very much not a socialist. Though I'm not a libertarian either, to be clear; I just don't have an instinctive revulsion towards corporations who use open source code - or corporations who have more restrictive licenses to prevent this very thing, like Elasticsearch or MongoDB - or towards AI companies for training on public things, or really towards corporations in general. I am perhaps the rare left-leaning corporate shill.)
It had a simple UI with a clear button / key combo to toggle the “agent mode”. That, plus the fact it could “warpify” my SSH connections made this a useful utility.
Then a couple months ago they completely changed the UI. It doesn’t work as it once did. My saved prompt templates didn’t work as they did before, the agent toggle was gone (you can now start some ‘/agent’ command but it is much less intuitive) and they seem to be focusing on these cloud agents and code editing.
I want none of these things. I loved a simple terminal that let me still execute sudo, let me ssh into remote machines but still bring Claude and OpenAI models to interact with my session.
You can still basically get back to the same way of working if you set new terminal sessions to be "agent sessions" and enable natural language detection. that's how i use it.
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.
Seems to fit a good balance for the way I want to use my terminal
Homepage header is "Warp is the agentic development environment", only screenshot on the homepage shows what appears to be a product similar to cursor/antigravity/etc AI IDE. Fair if that's your product direction but there's nothing there that tells new users about your terminal UX improvements. Honestly even if I was in the market for a new AI tool, there's nothing on your website that really tells me why I should pick Warp over any of the many competitors.
Fwiw I think Warp is quite cool, I just mean this as hopefully useful feedback from a new customer perspective.
I think you need a proper gate before you land so that you have different funnels for onboarding rather than a single journey that assumes all users are the same if you really want to try and have a larger market share.
Then, if you want to upsell stuff to these users, let them opt-in, wait for them to become more sticky, give them some incentive, and that's it.
Alternatively, abandon this direction completely, may not be worth your strategy and priorities as a business.
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.
Since your company is basically based on this agentic coding thing, i really don't see why anybody would run Warp without AI. Why not use a normal terminal then? Oh yeah, to waste space on disk and to use more RAM: we have plenty
TLDR; shortcut for the less able
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.
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.
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.
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
Then one day, I opened it up to find the command bar was replaced with a natural language prompt. It changed the behavior subtly, and changed how the prompt looked.
I uninstalled.
I don’t care that you can opt out. My gripe isn’t about AI. I don’t want my tools and workflows changing at random. If you have a new feature, mention it in the “what’s new” log and suggest I opt in.
Not to get meta but I loathe how this sort of thing is commonplace these days. I would pay so much money for app developers to just fucking stop shoveling. Constantly chasing new audiences only stands to ostracize your own. Maybe you care and maybe you don’t. I bounced tho.
My mini vision for Warp when I got really into it was keeping it lightly AI flavored, but leaning into the workflows. The way it multicursors to fill variables was awesome. I don’t care about agents, but I would want to see agents exist as workflows (tools) rather than ephemeral beings like opencode or cursor 3
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.
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.
TIL OS/2 is also called warp
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.
