Here adoption is a combination on the tool and the model.
If people can’t pay the model to use the tool, they might not use the tool even if it’s better.
That’s what anthropic is doing.
It might be faster, but it’s more expensive.
The only way remains to try and lock consumers into your ecosystem.
Aside: it is pretty easy to let our appreciation* of OSS turn into a kind of confirmation bias about its value to other people/orgs.
* I can understand why people promote OSS from various POVs: ethics, security, end user control, pro-innovation, goodwill, and so on. I value all of these things. But I’m wary of reasoning and philosophies that offer merely binary judgments.
Adoption is how one wins. Look at all the crappy solutions out there that are still around.
It's not unheard of for companies that have strong customer mindshare to find themselves intermediated by competitors or other products to the point that they just became part of the infrastructure and eventually lose that mindshare.
I doubt Anthropic wants to become a swappable backend for the actual thing that developers reach for to do their work (the CLI tool).
Don't get me wrong, I think developers should 100% have the choice of tooling they want to use.
But from a business standpoint I think maintaining that direct or first-party connection to the developer is what Anthropic are trying to protect here.