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?
Still feel extremely negative towards this company for tweaking an Alacritty fork then using that to get a $50million venture round then giving zero money towards Alacritty, an open source library that the founder completely owes their career too.
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.
genuinely asking, what is the appropriate compensation/donation/split for a company that uses open source heavily in their early days but later makes money off of it?
I don't really understand the controversy; there are plenty of licenses an author can choose that restricts commercial use of a project. It feels a bit dishonest to release something under a permissive license and then be upset when someone uses your stuff well within the ways you said is perfectly ok.
To be fair, they did reach out to me at the time (I was an active contributor) and I gave them some initial feedback on the design, but ultimately didn't decide to engage much more. I think the direction Alacritty wants to go in and they wanted to go in was pretty different.
It is telling though that few underlying issue were found. Zed however has contributed back in a few places.
This is what AI companies do. They steal stuff and then do not give credit to anyone, not even a "thank you". If doing so was needed to get money, that's what they'd have done. Anyways, i was very surprised to see they chose my favorite free software license -- the AGPLv3
And for requiring you to login with an email account to use the terminal.. (They finally removed this after years of complaints, but I dont trust any company with this type of culture)
Seems silly to bash a company for using open source exactly in accordance with the license. If they expected to be compensated, they picked the wrong licensing terms.
The license is the license. I don't know what you expect. I think, to be a good sport, they ought to mention in an About page that they're forked from Alacritty, with a clear link and thank you/appreciation note for the foundation code, but anything beyond that is both unnecessary and should not ever be expected.
(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.)
You don't understand why tech workers are suddenly visibly, even violently, angry at an industry they helped usher into power whose leadership hold deeply anti-human and anti-democratic views?
Honest Q just for you: have you been in a coma for the last 10 years?
I swear I tried. I installed warp maybe 4 times after long intervals. At each time I always ended up with the same feeling as my initial impression: overwhelming.
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.
Terminal should be just a terminal and all the features should be on the server side. All these fancy client side toy terminals are for ppl who are unable to set it up correctly. Test - connect from another (random) terminal, does everything still work?
Oh great news. I was recently trying out the Agents layout and it fits my workflow so well. It has a familiar terminal interface but helps me manage multiple agents much easier than just using a ton of tabs in iTerm open at once. I The code review panel is the one thing I find especially useful, and being able to see each terminal pane as a separate “section” in the vertical tab layouts, along with automatic worktree management - I find it a total joy to use.
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.
Was interested to try until I saw it was no longer a terminal and is now a coding agent? There are already dozens of those, I use my terminal to launch coding agents I don't need it to be one.
Pretty happy with Warp so far. The vertical tabs are a game changer, having all my projects down the side and flipping between them (each one having multiple split terminals) works really well compared with horizontal tabs. Looking forward to each update.
I am a paying user of Warp and really enjoy it when it behaves.
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 ...".
Looking forward to use all these nice AI features without using the warp account/service. So I can bring my own claude and it will show all the agent panes etc.
I’ve found they have changed the shortcuts I got used to and have kept releasing quite significant UI changes regularly. Not really what I want from a terminal. Tbh it’s felt like they took something nice and just piled AI slop features onto it presumably to hype it to investors. Pity.
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.
I loved using Warp. I used it daily for over a year. Setup workflow scripts and customizations, it worked almost exactly how I wanted it to.
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
I found out today that if you block internet access to the warp terminal through opensnitch it will refuse to start, I imagine it does the same thing if you don't have internet access?
I ended up uninstalling it after that. Just silly that my terminal is sending a bunch of analytics and also refuses to start of there's no internet.
40 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 58.1 ms ] threadMay 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?
[0]: https://www.warp.dev/blog/warp-is-now-open-source
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.
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)
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.)
Honest Q just for you: have you been in a coma for the last 10 years?
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
TLDR; shortcut for the less able
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.
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.
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.
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
I ended up uninstalling it after that. Just silly that my terminal is sending a bunch of analytics and also refuses to start of there's no internet.