I am guessing this now directly competes with mitchellh's multiplexer / Superlogical.
ValentineC 44 minutes ago [-]
> That’s why I recently switched it from AGPL to Apache: I want everyone to use Herdr freely, without any problem.
I'm curious what the actual problems with AGPL were.
rajangdavis 42 minutes ago [-]
Can't make money if people use your tool and are required to share their source code
spudlyo 25 minutes ago [-]
Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas. Enshitification is sure to follow in one guise or another.
rajangdavis 13 minutes ago [-]
I don’t know that this qualifies as enshitification… on one hand, the author created something that scratched his own itch, shared it, and now it’s become a tool that he wishes to steward into a way where he can make money.
I don’t know that these are terrible things inherently, it kind of depends if he wishes to extract as money as possible from his users by any means necessary or if he’s truly trying to scale it so it can help people. All we have is this article and infinite speculation.
I personally didn’t find herdr useful, so I have no stake in the direction of what the author decides to do with herdr.
tyre 14 minutes ago [-]
The copyleft licenses are toxic for adoption. Companies default away from them because there are a lot of murky unknowns (e.g. if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it? Does that service’s source have to be shared?) that simply aren’t worth the hassle.
If you want your library to get traction with many real world use cases, you need to have a permissive license. If you want to stick to the principles, you’re going to sacrifice adoption.
Not saying one is better than the other, but there’s a tradeoff.
guywithahat 30 seconds ago [-]
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, you're right. Using software that has requires people to contribute back is a huge liability, and hurts adoption, which is the most important metric for herdr right now.
koiueo 16 minutes ago [-]
No money from investors
humblepie 44 minutes ago [-]
Okay, back to tmux it is then.
lrvick 20 minutes ago [-]
I am going to be PRing herdr to stagex as it is my daily driver. This will give it a totally independent release process with multiple parties bootstrapping, reproducing, and signing deterministic binaries for it alongside our tmux releases.
We (the stagex team) will naturally patch out any corpo tracking bullshit that may or may not happen in the future, and follow the dominant community fork should it be needed, as we did with terraform -> opentofu.
As long as herdr does not enshittify though, we will be happy to provide very high supply chain integrity releases for it as-is starting with probably next months stagex release.
Absolutely no problem with FOSS developers finding revenue streams to give themselves more resources to make their projects better.
My own company is 100% FOSS with nothing held back and will stay that way, even though we are in the current YC batch with more customers signing every week. Admittedly this is atypical, but it can be done.
26 minutes ago [-]
barapa 23 minutes ago [-]
gary said gbrain's thick skills were agi. why are they still even funding new projects.
hx8 28 minutes ago [-]
I switched from tmux to Herdr about six weeks ago. It's a great bit of software, the UI is focused on switching between multiple agents quickly. I run Herdr to keep my opencode instances well managed, and it also works great for having a few terminals opens next to your agent. I find myself keeping opencode sessions open for longer like what happens with Codex and Claude code, which is great if I need to revisit a context to do some follow up work. I'm genuinely excited to see if the creators can bring even more value to the application.
If you're worried about enshittification I wouldn't be. It's relatively basic open source software that runs locally. A perfect candidate for a fork if the base app starts degrading.
tyleo 21 minutes ago [-]
Tbh it doesn’t bother me entirely. I love this tool so much I’d pay for it.
VC funding can enshitify things but it can also improve them. Here’s hoping for the latter.
kar1181 22 minutes ago [-]
Oh man - herdr is great. This will not be net good. Sigh.
nlh 48 minutes ago [-]
I am a HUGE herdr fan - discovered it a few months ago and it's exactly what I need for my workflow. Thousands of others have discovered it as well, which is awesome.
I have such mixed feelings about this - YC means VC means commercialization means enshitification. I really wish that weren't the case, but it so very often is.
Here's hoping this one's different...
(PS I am a big YC fan in general! I don't mean to sound anti-YC or anti-VC or anti-capitalism. But when it comes to low-level essential development tools, I'll never forget what happened to Warp, which started out as such a nice clean terminal project and turned into an absolute money-chasing mess.)
an0malous 20 minutes ago [-]
It’s literally the VC playbook, the whole point of the funding is to undermine competitors with subsidized/free products and then raise prices/enshittify. Anyone who thinks it’ll be different this time is fooling themselves.
tamimio 47 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, it’s great but with this, it’s probably the time to find an alternative, I probably can see where this will be in a year or so.
pecheny 40 minutes ago [-]
why “find” an alternative? if you’re a herdr user you’re perfectly capable of maintaining a fork just for yourself :)
sarky-litso 20 minutes ago [-]
I can't tell if this is sarcasm but in case its not, being capable of doing something and having the desire and resources to do it are not the same thing
rvz 39 minutes ago [-]
Quick question: Would you have actually donated to Herdr if they were asking for donations? I don't think any of you would have, unless stated otherwise.
So this is another reason why developers do not pay for their tools and instead the developers of these tools go to VCs anyway. It's not the fault of the author, but most of the users (developers themselves) always want their tools for free at $0.
You have to pay and support the tools you use or else the VCs will do it for you so you can't complain when scenarios like this keep happening.
hx8 25 minutes ago [-]
I don't love this framing among software developers. This framing is very transactional, when many of the authors are explicitly trying to make their work free. The best thing a software dev can do is donate some of their time to do more open source development, and in that way we all benefit from having more and better open source tools. If someone wants to exchange code for money there are plenty of avenues to do that. Starting an open source project and using it to attract VC funding is one path.
bigyabai 18 minutes ago [-]
Are you lamenting the death of proprietary UNIX and paid compilers, too? This status quo is fine.
applfanboysbgon 32 minutes ago [-]
Yep. It's funny how much open source maximalists harm their own cause. Everything must be "free", ergo everything must be VC or big tech backed because free doesn't put bread on the table, so in the end devs just put more power in the hands of corporations and less power in the hands of themselves and other independent devs/small businesses, and then have the gall to complain when everything gets enshittified.
dominotw 41 minutes ago [-]
wtf is "runtime"
albertgoeswoof 14 minutes ago [-]
What does stays open mean
fwip 8 minutes ago [-]
It means the headline was vomited out by an LLM.
EGreg 47 minutes ago [-]
Wow, congrats! Can you discuss how you got YCombinator to select your open source project? I know they sometimes fund open source… I’ve been building several large platforms since 2011 but I have never considered applying like that.
I'm curious what the actual problems with AGPL were.
I don’t know that these are terrible things inherently, it kind of depends if he wishes to extract as money as possible from his users by any means necessary or if he’s truly trying to scale it so it can help people. All we have is this article and infinite speculation.
I personally didn’t find herdr useful, so I have no stake in the direction of what the author decides to do with herdr.
If you want your library to get traction with many real world use cases, you need to have a permissive license. If you want to stick to the principles, you’re going to sacrifice adoption.
Not saying one is better than the other, but there’s a tradeoff.
We (the stagex team) will naturally patch out any corpo tracking bullshit that may or may not happen in the future, and follow the dominant community fork should it be needed, as we did with terraform -> opentofu.
As long as herdr does not enshittify though, we will be happy to provide very high supply chain integrity releases for it as-is starting with probably next months stagex release.
Absolutely no problem with FOSS developers finding revenue streams to give themselves more resources to make their projects better.
My own company is 100% FOSS with nothing held back and will stay that way, even though we are in the current YC batch with more customers signing every week. Admittedly this is atypical, but it can be done.
If you're worried about enshittification I wouldn't be. It's relatively basic open source software that runs locally. A perfect candidate for a fork if the base app starts degrading.
VC funding can enshitify things but it can also improve them. Here’s hoping for the latter.
I have such mixed feelings about this - YC means VC means commercialization means enshitification. I really wish that weren't the case, but it so very often is.
Here's hoping this one's different...
(PS I am a big YC fan in general! I don't mean to sound anti-YC or anti-VC or anti-capitalism. But when it comes to low-level essential development tools, I'll never forget what happened to Warp, which started out as such a nice clean terminal project and turned into an absolute money-chasing mess.)
So this is another reason why developers do not pay for their tools and instead the developers of these tools go to VCs anyway. It's not the fault of the author, but most of the users (developers themselves) always want their tools for free at $0.
You have to pay and support the tools you use or else the VCs will do it for you so you can't complain when scenarios like this keep happening.
Would something like this qualify:
https://github.com/Qbix
https://github.com/Intercoin
https://github.com/Safebots/Safecloud