The Python Software Foundation acts as a fiscal sponsor for a much smaller set of orgs (20 listed on https://www.python.org/psf/fiscal-sponsorees/) and it keeps our accounting team pretty busy just looking after those. Hack Club must have this down to a very fine art.
I wrote a bit more about PSF fiscal sponsorship here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/18/board-of-the-python-so...
I was working with Hack Club students on an experimental VPN client (https://github.com/hackclub/burrow) but never got the momentum to finish it. Made some great friends, though! It's a really fantastic organization.
The students have one big global Slack instance. If you're a student and on here, you should also be in there: https://hackclub.com/slack/
The “understanding through building” mentality is something I never got to experience as a group, the obvious answer is open source and the like but I wonder if there’s something more learning oriented.
In any case, good luck on finding the right community!
Hack Club's been a fiscal sponsor for about 7 years now (since 2018), and it's evolved quite a bit since the early days. I run engineering & product for the fiscal sponsorship program there and would be happy to chat/share any tips!
oh, and while it's on my mind, the codebase was open-sourced earlier this year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43519802), and we just launched a mobile app yesterday! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130402
So thanks, IBM! <3
That's part of what drew lots of us to HashiCorp in the first place - giving back.
"get asked the same about terminals all the time. “How will you turn this into a business? What’s the monetization strategy?” The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate."
https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964785527741427940
Take a good guess where the three commas come from.
(It'd be nice if it supported other standard macOS UI conventions[1] too)
[0] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/8131
[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues?q=is%3Aissue%2...
I said in the linked post that I remain the largest donor, but this helps lay bricks such that we can build a sustainable community that doesn't rely on me financially or technically. There simply wasn't a vehicle before that others could even join in financially. Now there is.
All of the above was mentioned in the post. If you want more details, please read it. I assume you didn't.
I'll begin some donor reach out and donor relationship work eventually. The past few months has been enough work simply coordinating this process, meeting with accountants and lawyers to figure out the right path forward, meeting with other software foundations to determine proper processes etc. I'm going to take a breather, then hop back in. :)
Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so here. This isn't a theoretical risk.
I'd honestly rather Apple and Microsoft ripped off my work if it meant that my work provided more utility to a larger number of people.
I can take a guess with respect to Linux: that's the kind of software where forcing companies to submit code back to it is enormously beneficial due to the need for an operating system to have drivers for vast ranges of different hardware.
That "friction" is by design. It prevents someone else from screwing over the users.
The people that oppose copyleft are those it was specifically design to protect against.
You should watch his talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g
(He used to be a maintainer of busybox, a GNU clone for embedded devices. He then ended up writing toybox, a similar project under the more free MIT license.)
(UWash CompSci strikes again, not that I'm biased)
Yeah, OpenAI has shown us that this is more negotiable than we might have believed. Fortunately nobody will ever think terminal emulation is a trillion dollar industry, so I think we’re ok.
There was a devtools blackhole era once where if you got in that business you were just giving things away and never got to reap the rewards. Then there was this era of founders who figured out how to make it sticky and capture value in a Pareto-optimal way.
Love to see it.
What does he mean, isn't this what OpenAI just did, I'm confused guys
- easy to customise using a simple, easy to understand config
- supports non-native full screen so I don’t need to wait for the virtual desktop transition animation on Mac to finish…
- has a friendly community
- it’s a good model for building sustainable products/tools
and, with all of the above: it doesn’t feel like a compromise
Yet, I use WezTerm, won't be switching soon.
Software that takes text input should interpret that as the end of the input.
Shells decide that end of input means it's time to exit. Terminals usually decide that if the shell exits, there's nothing else to do and so close the window.
macOS Terminal.app instead prints "Process exited", which I can't quite fathom the value of. I guess it's marginally less confusing than making the window disappear. :)
(Note though -- I can't find it in Terminal.app settings, but there must be a way to change the behaviour to close the window instead. Mine is configured that way, but it's not the default)
i didnt even consider that having to configure everything with a config file allows apps like this https://github.com/zerebos/ghostty-config to exist. neat
Please fund projects that actually need it, and don't voluntarily gift money to a literal billionaire.
> I get asked the same about terminals all the time. “How will you turn this into a business? What’s the monetization strategy?” The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate.
Original post: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964785527741427940
Given features it's more comparable to Kitty than foot IMO.
Foot is way more my speed. Fast, extremely stable, and (most importantly) barely noticed. When it comes to terminals, the slightest flicker -- the merest bug -- and I'm gone. And that happened to me with both ghostty and alacritty.
Or has this always been a thing. But it feels like a common—and celebrated—outcome for a lot of projects.
In a world of VC backed open source projects with big profit motivations, it's refreshing to see things like this. Definitely going to give ghostty another try!
You can run tmux inside Ghostty.
“What the monetization strategy of Ghostty?”
“My monetization strategy is that my bank account has 10 digits in it…” lol, epic.
> I get asked the same about terminals all the time. “How will you turn this into a business? What’s the monetization strategy?” The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate.
Another thing - when it went public it was valued at 13B and Hashimoto owned 8.5% of it according to the filing.
So, depending on when he sold or converted his shares it is pretty plausible that he got a billion.
Lowers the risk of a rug pull or the project becoming suddenly abandoned.
Reminds me of Signal.
I mean, after the OpenAI debacle, surely this type of assurance doesn't hold much weight anymore? (Though Ghostty is ofc very unlikely to pull shenanigans)
Wow.
A millionaire donating the relative equivalent would be $150.
One of my pet peeves is people trotting out “I believe” statements. (Usually) I care much more about the evidence that backs the belief than the belief.
Putting aside my cantankerousness, I am glad Michael believes in setting up good incentives for the organization that will manage Ghostty. (But being glad right now doesn’t count for much.)
At a deeper level, my more precise complaint is people broadcasting “I believe” statements as if doing so should persuade us. It should not. “I believe” statements may often be personal and genuine, but they are so easily abused that perhaps they should be enumerated among the dark patterns of rhetoric.
(There are some ridiculous quote from the first episode of Silicon Valley by Mike Judge that pokes fun at the zealotry behind belief, but I can’t quote it off the top of my head.)
In the case of software projects with broad benefits that want continuity over a long period of time, I want to agree that the not-for-profit structure is a good choice and often than the alternatives. But I don’t know that this has been carefully studied.
My hunch would be there are stronger causal predictors such as governance mechanisms. Choosing an organization form is just step one. Smart governance, and long-term execution can only be shown with time.
Individuals with unaligned incentives will challenge any organization’s set of rules. In the same way that our immune system has to evolve over time to win, organizational rules at all levels have to evolve.
Also, I do think there’s a lot of opportunity for smarter legal structures after the machinations pulled by OpenAI.
Your laundry list of everything that might possibly go wrong with an open software project is not exactly useful. There is no legal structure that can protect from all bad actors forever.
But the good news is that if you hate this, you can fork the code and set up your own perfect legal entity to solve all the problems only you can see! Enjoy!