These libraries seem really cool, and I can clearly see why that have such popularity.
It's a little less clear to me how you monetize this type of stack. Given such an impressive fundraise, in a tough climate, I wonder what the market opportunity the VC's have backed is.
BTW: At the time of writing, the link to Charm Cloud in your blog post is broken.
Yes, the problem is adding paywall to open source doesn't work as it breaks experience. I use many open source tools that if they are paid I will pay them, but too lazy/frugal to donate them if it doesn't help me.
Their current commercial offering is Charm Cloud (https://charm.sh/cloud/), which seems to offer "next-generation networking, data storage, identity, encryption and multi-machine support". That said, I'm worried it'll go in the direction of Warp (https://www.warp.dev/), where they require a sign-up before using it (etc).
I'm a big fan of Glow, use it all the time for rendering Markdown files in my terminals.
Been looking for the right time/project to use Bubble Tea/Lip Gloss because they seem really cool too.
Let's hope this fundraising doesn't drive them to the "enshitification" we tend to see these days, I'd love to see what else they can make if they remain true OSS.
A venture fails if it becomes a lifestyle business.
Does it make sense that a collection of CLI libraries would be deemed a failure because it "only" pays all of the devs well enough to live deeply comfortable lives but can't produce a 10x return?
Is a CLI library what you think of when you think of "won't be ruined by chasing 10x returns?"
So what are you proposing? You could say the same thing about everything in life: If you take money you are expected to return the favor. Open source is no different.
Life is all about compromises and they definitely need VC money now to pay developers well by putting resources in cloud.
There are almost no cases in life where being extremely profitable and self-sustaining can be considered a failure mode, that's a unique property of venture capital, and venture capital is not the only form of capital.
Most times you're given money you're not expected to pay it back with 900% gains.
I understand the concern is not about the contributors getting paid, but to all possible perverse incentives that come bundled with VC money.
I understand the concern. Charm is a very nice set of open source libraries and tools for the command line, but it is certainly not something easy to monetize. The push to grow and monetize can certainly make it a lot worse.
Love the naming scheme, and I'm pumped that developer tooling is still able to raise this much. Without digging too deep here it's not super clear: Are these tools more for end user developers or are people using these for projects, and if so, what projects currently use these libraries?
Trying to figure out where's a good place to start trying them out...
They have a number of applications they themselves built on top of their libraries (and cloud offering), listed at https://charm.sh/apps/. They claim it's used by enterprises on their landing page (https://charm.sh/#enterprise), but doesn't go into details.
It's not a replacement for zsh or bash; Charm and its libraries are intended for developers to build the user interface for terminal applications. Think of it as an alternative to ncurses.
And with that the usual enshittification brought about by VC funding and incentives will begin. In 2-3 years it'll be unusable. Congrats to the founders though, have a nice exit down the road.
It's not a single product that you install, they publish some very popular Golang libraries for building CLI tools (bubbletea, lipgloss etc.) and some Open Source CLI apps,like their git server & TUI "soft serve", the demo of which you connected to with `ssh git.charm.sh`.
It seems to be a group of people really into building aesthetically pleasing CLI tooling, which I enjoy.
To be honest I have no idea what their business model is or why they need to be Venture funded.
Nothing, but if you want to write a terminal user interface with eyecandy insofar as that's possible in a terminal, Charm's libraries and tooling is an option.
VC funding is where cool products/ideas go to die... or sell off to be assimilated.
I don't think VC funding exists if "premium support/enterprise consulting" is the monetization strategy. Either they see monetary value in the product itself and intend to maximize it (aka subscriptions, paid features, etc), or see the IP value and intend to have the business "flipped" for profit.
I don't disagree, but was there something in this post that suggested their monetization strategy was support and consulting? I do see they are going to be focused on "ethical monetization" but I have no idea what that means.
I like what Charm is doing and their design is on point. I wonder what they're planning to do with this money. Their projects so far consist of fairly small Go CLIs and libraries.
Would be cool if these terminals apps could be converted to a web app. Would love to make a multiplayer terminal game but make if accessible with the web.
nice to see effort to shake a little the terminal space, and that you can receive 6MM dollars to play with it, but, having tried things like nushell i came back to zsh after i realized that is too much of an investment for something that can disappear in 5 minutes, get poisoned by VC money or be out shined by the next bright thing, and you are competing with 100s of little binaries and ways to do things that have been around for decades here.
also i find those star graph so cringe, who cares?, is someone going to decide to use this based on that?, i mean that trend can be cause of a marketing move, that is.it says nothing about the project it self.
The "gum" stuff that walks you through setting inputs for a command line tool feels like it might be leveraged by connecting it to one of those argument parser generators that do all the hard work of pasing args for your quick shell script. One gives you a human way to enter the required info, one generates the standard command line interface for scripting. Getting both from one input (as far as possible) would be nice.
No, no it wouldn't. There are plenty of companies that play fair staying true to their roots. And then there are those that are forced to defend themselves from the cloud vendors. And then there are those that pull shenanigans like Docker & RedHat.
My point was that this particular company and product seems too slight to survive the onslaught of so much VC cash.
Used Charm for a Shell AI cli assistant (https://github.com/ibigio/shell-ai) - bubble tea and lip gloss. It was so pleasant to use (an absolute charm), super easy syntax highlighting and streaming updates. Absolutely love their work.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadIt's a little less clear to me how you monetize this type of stack. Given such an impressive fundraise, in a tough climate, I wonder what the market opportunity the VC's have backed is.
BTW: At the time of writing, the link to Charm Cloud in your blog post is broken.
Nowadays it is less clear.
Been looking for the right time/project to use Bubble Tea/Lip Gloss because they seem really cool too.
Let's hope this fundraising doesn't drive them to the "enshitification" we tend to see these days, I'd love to see what else they can make if they remain true OSS.
Does it make sense that a collection of CLI libraries would be deemed a failure because it "only" pays all of the devs well enough to live deeply comfortable lives but can't produce a 10x return?
Is a CLI library what you think of when you think of "won't be ruined by chasing 10x returns?"
Life is all about compromises and they definitely need VC money now to pay developers well by putting resources in cloud.
There are almost no cases in life where being extremely profitable and self-sustaining can be considered a failure mode, that's a unique property of venture capital, and venture capital is not the only form of capital.
Most times you're given money you're not expected to pay it back with 900% gains.
I understand the concern. Charm is a very nice set of open source libraries and tools for the command line, but it is certainly not something easy to monetize. The push to grow and monetize can certainly make it a lot worse.
Trying to figure out where's a good place to start trying them out...
As for who else uses it, I'm not sure, but you can use github search in go.mod files to see which projects import it; sloppy search query: https://github.com/search?q=%22github.com%2Fcharmbracelet%2F...
Spinnaker does the same thing and it's just not easy to follow. Same questions for echo, rosco, deck and whatever other service they have.
Why not call it charm-tui, charm-md, and spinnaker-ui, spinnaker-events, spinnaker-bakery. It would make understanding the software so much easier.
Because for sure I'm their target market but I've got no idea what it does.
I spent 10 seconds trying to figure it out then I was gone.
Leaving the blog to https://charm.sh/ didn't help
After `ssh git.charm.sh` and one more click I did find a brew command, which oddly isn't copy'able!?
It seems to be a group of people really into building aesthetically pleasing CLI tooling, which I enjoy. To be honest I have no idea what their business model is or why they need to be Venture funded.
I don't think VC funding exists if "premium support/enterprise consulting" is the monetization strategy. Either they see monetary value in the product itself and intend to maximize it (aka subscriptions, paid features, etc), or see the IP value and intend to have the business "flipped" for profit.
I got to the "Why Open Source?" part, and my brain filled in: "Because bait-and-switch needs some bait."
Please prove me wrong.
Would pointing you to the dozens of publicly traded companies with open core models "prove you wrong"?
Not at all @slap_shot.
> Would pointing you to the dozens...
No, no it wouldn't. There are plenty of companies that play fair staying true to their roots. And then there are those that are forced to defend themselves from the cloud vendors. And then there are those that pull shenanigans like Docker & RedHat.
My point was that this particular company and product seems too slight to survive the onslaught of so much VC cash.