News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by zachlloyd on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @03:46PM (#47939601)
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.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by lucidia on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @03:51PM (#47939679)
if you’re actually grateful for their support maybe you could support them with some donations out of that 50 million
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by nixpulvis on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @05:58PM (#47941418)
Alacritty doesn't accept donations.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by shimman on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @03:52PM (#47939697)
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.

It's disgusting behavior.

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by lucidia on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @03:55PM (#47939742)
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.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by ukblewis on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @04:54PM (#47940616)
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
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by whateveracct on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @05:15PM (#47940903)
we can't say CEOs have bad morals now?

Altman has trash morals

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by shimman on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @05:07PM (#47940784)
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.

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by scubbo on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @05:32PM (#47941124)
Lol, lmao, shut up idiot.

(exactly as lowbrow of a response as your nonsense deserves)

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by lucidia on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @05:14PM (#47940880)
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.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by blitzar on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @04:23PM (#47940156)
Toss a coin to your Witcher
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by devin on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @04:28PM (#47940246)
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?
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by heymijo on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @04:56PM (#47940631)
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.

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by rounce on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:52PM (#47941935)
Found it here: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-e3n2c-28221400

The host is absolutely insufferable.

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by qwerpy on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @07:13PM (#47942137)
I attempted to listen and couldn't get over the "Wolp" pronunciation of warp.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by zx8080 on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:49PM (#47941903)
> free work for which they were never compensated. That's supposed to be better or something?

It's almost the "success" definition in the business language, isn't it?

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by ktm5j on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @04:45PM (#47940486)
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.

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by elcritch on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @05:46PM (#47941300)
> 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.

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by ktm5j on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @09:09AM (#47947872)
Finance definitely isn't my thing, so thanks for the info.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by giancarlostoro on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @04:50PM (#47940544)
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.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by jdiff on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @04:54PM (#47940614)
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.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by sroussey on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @12:58PM (#47951136)
Enter Cursor
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by Muhammad523 on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:03PM (#47941479)
> Not sustainable for normal people, let alone people

I hope you are aware of the fact a business makes way more money than a "normal" person?

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by giancarlostoro on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:06PM (#47941508)
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.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by jdiff on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @07:38PM (#47942314)
You once again drag things in a wildly hyperbolic direction. Nobody's talking about throwing money around wildly at unrelated projects. When there is a single project that sits at your very heart, without which your entire startup is a nonstarter, yes, donate.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by saghm on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @05:11PM (#47940838)
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.

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by giancarlostoro on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:11PM (#47941566)
> 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.

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by xnyan on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:49PM (#47941897)
> I use Arch Linux, tell me which of the thousands of packages am I obligated to donate to?

The ones that a barely-informed stranger could easily identify as having made you 7+ figures.

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by saghm on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @09:38PM (#47943201)
> 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.

If you read past that part of the comment to pick out the one thing you had a rebuttal for out of context, you might have noticed the parts about having $50 million dollars of VC 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.

That's a totally valid take. It's also totally valid to think that a company that takes all that money to release a product that doesn't offer that much more than the original is a waste of resources that could be at least somewhat useful by giving 1/500th of it to the person who did almost all of the work they took.

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by rapind on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @04:58PM (#47940670)
Why wouldn't you throw them a few bucks? Especially if your multi-million dollar business is basically a vim clone entirely based on their source...
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by giancarlostoro on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:12PM (#47941571)
I would once profitable, but early stages where every dollar matters? I can see why they wouldnt just throw money left and right.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by xnyan on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @07:09PM (#47942102)
If you're actually asking the question, I'll give you my answer: I was lucky enough to go to a nice spa resort earlier this year, I just handed a few bills to an attendant who had laid out a towel for me when an older man sitting next to me chuckled and shook his head saying "You don't actually have to give them them anything, they have to do it anyway." Super nice resort, nobody here hurting for a few dollars in tips.

I guess it's valid to take everything you legally can, but personally, I'm saying it's fucked up move not to pay even a token amount. That's their only consequence, (some) people thinking it's a fucked up move.

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by jdiff on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @07:35PM (#47942297)
This isn't left and right, this is one direction: upstream, to the project that forms your very heart.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by Muhammad523 on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:04PM (#47941487)
Donating to the free software you use, even a little, is good.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by giancarlostoro on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:08PM (#47941535)
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.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by allarm on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @12:48PM (#47950979)
This whole thread is just bonkers. Dude stop pretending you don't understand the situation here. It's been explained to you multiple times.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by unethical_ban on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:02PM (#47941471)
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.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by zachlloyd on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:14PM (#47941591)
that's the correct read - we shared what we were building and they helped us integrate alacritty. it's similar to how mitchell h reached out and asked today if we wanted to integrate ghostty.

we have a lot of open source library dependencies and are grateful to the folks who worked on them

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by devin on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:44PM (#47941866)
I thought the negative sentiment being shared here was hyperbolic, but you look absolutely ridiculous in these comments.

"Actually, we are sure people who were critical to our success are happy they received nothing in return for their labor." <- This is you. This is what you sound like.

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by mpyne on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @07:35PM (#47942299)
> "Actually, we are sure people who were critical to our success are happy they received nothing in return for their labor." <- This is you. This is what you sound like.

Have you ever contributed to open source?

Not everyone is doing it out of the expectation of a paycheck. For all the open source code I've worked on, my goal has unironically been for those using it to achieve whatever positive end they were trying to use my software for, and that's it.

The one time I did go further and agree to do some one-off changes for money it actually caused me a hassle that year as I had to account for it under the right tax treatment, I was nearly outside the "hobby" exception you can get.

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by KetoManx64 on Friday May 01, 2026 @02:58PM (#47978652)
You're in the minority. Just about every open source project that I use has a "Donate/Contribute" link somewhere on their website/Github, and I see articles constantly about projects being shut down or archived because the developer couldn't afford the time investment anymore due to lack of income. I keep a list of open source software I use so I can donate every couple of years to pay them for their work, and I've run into maybe 2-5 projects out of the dozens of donations I've done over the years that either don't have a donate option or just tell you to donate to a charity instead (eg. Unlock Origin)
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by mpyne on Sunday May 03, 2026 @03:44PM (#48000645)
> You're in the minority. Just about every open source project that I use has a "Donate/Contribute" link somewhere on their website/Github

I just checked and I didn't see a Donate/Contribute link for Alacritty.

Is there something I'm missing? Or do we have an entire thread full of people bashing on Warp for doing something Alacritty themselves do not wish to solicit?

As you point out yourself, it's not hard to throw up a Donate link if you're that kind of open source developer.

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by qwerpy on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @07:20PM (#47942194)
I have no skin in the game for either side of this, but I looked pretty hard at his comment history and couldn't find anything even remotely sounding like that. All he does is express gratitude for the projects they collaborated with. Alacritty folks themselves are saying as much here.

There's some undercurrent of something that seems to be driving a lot of the rage in the comments here. Anti-AI/OpenAI/"VC money"/"the rich"?

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by unethical_ban on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @07:24PM (#47942225)
I think a conversation about the ethics and morals of forked software hitting it big, and how/how much they should give back to their upstream, is a good one to have, if the tone wasn't so personal and aggressive.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by peschu on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @04:30PM (#47940275)
talk is cheap ...
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by pear01 on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @04:57PM (#47940646)
> Totally understood on the feedback [...] we are grateful for their support

So are you going to donate to them or not?

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by nixpulvis on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @05:57PM (#47941412)
Alacritty doesn't accept donations.
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by koolala on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @05:14PM (#47940879)
Doesn't that make not supporting them even worse???
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by nixpulvis on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @05:57PM (#47941402)
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.

Re:Warp is now Open-Source by zachlloyd on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:15PM (#47941612)
thanks for the support here. we are very grateful for the help you all provided initially, and if you are interested in sponsorship for the repo, we are also happy to provide some. alacritty is awesome
Re:Warp is now Open-Source by peyton on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:39PM (#47941826)
The takes in this thread are insane. There’s nowhere else to put this comment given the framing so I’m putting it here. OSS isn’t a charity movement.