Stop trying to monetize everything.
Also it's always funny when someone tries to look up your past instead of giving convincing arguments.
Best read: You are confusing different products. Somebody can do two things and get paid for only one of them.
Worst read: You are really trying to confuse them.
Either you support an economy where everyone gets a meager living wage just for existing and then once that's established you can complain about people trying to make money off open source, or you say "capitalism as it exists is great" and swallow the fact that people who you don't pay don't work for you. Which is it?
/s
They have a free product and a paid product. They've used the documentation as an awareness channel for the paid product. The paid product influences and pays for the free product. A tail as old as time.
They're not asking you to buy the paid product and they're not saying they are going to make it worse. Did you even read thread? He literally says "I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it."
Not prioritizing it now does not make the product worse, it just doesn't make it better in this particular way today.
How is this hard to understand?
Eggcorn klaxon!
I know there may have been some weird stuff going on lately (nginx, redis, etc.) but this is not one of them.
It's okay to be confused, but please do not continue this.
There is a corporate side with other features that has never been free. I pay for it because it's great.
I'm not sure if you're purposefully misstating it at this point or not. Several people have corrected you and you seem to double down incorrectly each time.
The hypocrisy the GP noticed is strong enough to warrant a mention.
We are a deeply unserious society.
Anyway; good luck going viral online, everyone. I got lucky, have had generational wealth in my back pocket since birth, am off the hook for you by our social norms. Hopefully it works out for you because I and the rest of us won't be engaged in political action on your behalf. Dance for the organ!
HTML and CSS are free to use but the W3C is funded by membership fees.
BTW I'm of the opinion that frontend tooling developers should actually try to contribute things to HTML and CSS instead of building "component libraries" on top of them.
If the native controls were good and if the browsers allowed using "uniformly styled" versions of them then there would be no good reason for such libraries to exist.
I have been on HN since 2008, his comment is by far the worst encounter ever in my memory. The sense of entitlement, not only in one comment by literally every single one of them in this thread and despite all the explanation he still believes he is right.
And to top it off he manage to drag HTML and CSS standards into it.
So your answer to "how should open source projects achieve financial sustainability" is "don't even try"?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
By not adding an extra "feature" you deemed as essential?
Even more surprising is this is from an 2012 account.
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?
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529364 and marked it off topic.
Could you delete my comments too ? Thank you
1) Lower amount of impressions on the google search pages due to the AI answers
2) Lower amount of searches since people are using code generators
I wonder which one it is primarily.
Wall that's the problem, and it's tractable problem. Seems like tailwind needs a sales strategy beyond hoping people read the docs. And that it gives rise to a perverse incentive--making a less intuitive product to drive the need for documentation--is bound to affect the product.
If LLMs are really the problem, and it seems possible that they are, then you might need to lean in. Maybe selling access to mcps and skills. I'd still bet on hiring someone to chase down some contracts is going to be the easiest way out of the hole though.
This isn't novel either. Expo offers an MCP with its paid subscription, for instance. It's helpful. In fact, I wish the tamagui crew would get on that...
Like what, exactly, now that most people interact with tailwind purely via AI agents?
I started work on a front end project React/Astro/Tailwind project for the first time in about a year, building out with CLI agents, and one things that's changed compared to a year ago is that I have the entire UI basically working and I haven't even looked at the tailwind classes. I just say yes that's fine but can you improve the width for the sidebar on mobile (obviously paraphrasing here, I write the requirements for the agent carefully) and within a couple of iterations it's working. I keep expecting to have to jump in to manually fix things but so far I haven't needed to.
I worked in FE for years and I know tailwind and CSS quite deeply. But the entire extent of what I've needed to know for this project so far can be summed up as "it's some kind of styling tool". I never had to look at the docs, I never went to their website, or or Twitter or anywhere else that might have worked for marketing.
I did make an informed decision in choosing this stack, but it's equally likely that the AI could have recommended it to me, and the AI entirely set up the project scaffolding and config for me.
So where in this could they possibly have marketed paid components to me? And even if they did, why would I have paid for them when Shadcn is free and was added automatically by the AI?
I'm not a web dev, I've heard of Tailwind CSS but my actual knowledge is "I know what the CSS in that name means, therefore it's some kind of styling tool".
One of my experiments before Christmas with Claude Code, was to see what it does in pure vibe-coding mode, where I just say "yes" and then see what kind of mess (if any) it made.
It did not use Tailwind CSS. There was a lot of… if a human had done it I'd say "copy-paste" CSS, but I think it just regenerated it all fresh each time rather than actually using the pasteboard? And it was raw CSS, no dependencies that I noticed.
Sounds like they did just that. Ereyesterday.
I've watched open source projects get lambasted because their developers dared to make a buck. Being conservative with their marketing is what is expected of them even if it isn't fair.
> [...] the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month. [...]
> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.