Warp is now Open-Source

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?

Big bucks from OpenAI is my guess. I could guess the strategy is to try to take a shotgun approach at Claude Code.

You gave the answer: by being a mature, established product

They used the repo for issue tracking since the beginning but before today the repo did not include source code of the client.

I outline the thought process in detail in our blog (https://www.warp.dev/blog/warp-is-now-open-source)

But the tl;dr is that I actually think we can build a better product, more quickly if we build it with our community + agents. I also think it's a unique product that I hope developers get a bunch of value from being able to customize and help improve. Our business is now mostly around agents and orchestration through Oz (https://oz.dev), so opening up the client and terminal felt natural.

The big thing for the "why now" though was the agent management piece.

Wrt the github stars, we had an issues-only repo prior and already had a significant number of stars before OSS today.

[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.

I still use it but I barely used their agent event though I had subscription for lenny bundle. They should also invest in some good quality onboarding tutorial video but please keep your CEO out of this last time I checked 1 year ago - he might be good CEO but not good at job of teaching his product.

We've actually added a ton of controls recently to let users configure how much (or little) UI they want. If that's not enough, would love if you opened an issue on the Warp repo and we can discuss more what needs to change in the product to meet your needs!

Thanks for the tip, I’ll give this a try and see how it goes.

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's disgusting behavior.

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.

Altman has trash morals

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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

So are you going to donate to them or not?

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.

But you decide to feel extremely negative towards a small fish on this veritable pound of sharks?

I'm unsure if we should lose sleep over something the author likely chose. Its their right to not care how the code is used, maybe we should abide their wishes?

Is there perhaps there's an issue with licensing? Eg there's no easy license akin to MIT for small time devs, but less open for $50M VC babies? Ie is there a scenario where an author like this wants something akin to MIT for small groups, but still doesn't want to be taken advantage of by massively backed corporations?

And now we have entire threads like this of people crying because some company used someone's software exactly as the license allows.

It's a shame, but there really is no sympathy for projects that choose the wrong license. Stallman knew this decades ago and somehow even now we're still learning it.

People were optimizing for being the most useful and therefore getting the most use.

Don't get me wrong, license is important. However it doesn't have nearly the effect many people claim.

Warp's client going Open Source is the final step in acknowledging that they have no product. The value add is 100% their service offerings, the terminal itself is as useless as those VS Code forks that sell themselves on being "AI native" or similar. It's even possible that their terminal product is what's preventing developers from demoing their (definitely more profitable) agent harness.

These companies literally could not exist without the massive public dollars + support poured into them. Warp couldn't exist without the funds from public pensions being gambled with. Since these same companies have zero qualms in raping public resources, the government should simply start taking their money or nationalizing their businesses.

These leaders have shown they will absolutely destroy society to make a few dollars. We should reject them on the basis of being a member of the human race.

Their greed is literally destroying society and we have to ask if they should give more or not? We're beyond the point of giving, people are going to start taking and they're already starting off trying to take things you can't ever give back.

It is telling though that few underlying issue were found. Zed however has contributed back in a few places.

What a shithole society is

(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.

We've added features to make using CLI coding agents easier (e.g. a file tree and code review) but they are all optional and customizable.

Getting a Zawinski's Law vibe there, "every program attempts to expand until it can read mail"

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.

I think this will contribute even more to the overwhelming feeling. I don't think people want endless configuration. They want something with an opinionated product direction. It seems like Warp lacks that resolve and is trying to be too much because nobody has decided what it is actually supposed to be.

Since your company is basically based on this agentic coding thing, i really don't see why anybody would run Warp without AI. Why not use a normal terminal then? Oh yeah, to waste space on disk and to use more RAM: we have plenty

Seems to fit a good balance for the way I want to use my terminal

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.