Please don't fulminate or post flame bait on HN. This low-effort comment started just the kind of flamewar we're trying to avoid on HN. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't post dunks like this here. HN is for curious conversation and the guidelines ask us to be kind. We have no idea whether the thing they had in mind when they asked that question 8 years ago is relevant to what they think about the current topic. You could ask them rather than piling on like this.
I didn't ask how to do a bait and switch to offer a good free product and later ask for more money or else I'm going to make it worse. But I guess nuance is hard to understand.
Also it's always funny when someone tries to look up your past instead of giving convincing arguments.
So fork and offer your better free version. Holy fuck. What's with this persistent attitude that open source creators should slave away for free forever?
Either you support an economy where everyone gets a meager living wage just for existing and then once that's established you can complain about people trying to make money off open source, or you say "capitalism as it exists is great" and swallow the fact that people who you don't pay don't work for you. Which is it?
There is no bait and switch and it's ridiculous to suggest there is.
They have a free product and a paid product. They've used the documentation as an awareness channel for the paid product. The paid product influences and pays for the free product. A tail as old as time.
They're not asking you to buy the paid product and they're not saying they are going to make it worse. Did you even read thread? He literally says "I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it."
Not prioritizing it now does not make the product worse, it just doesn't make it better in this particular way today.
This attitude really tires open source maintainers enormously. They are not allowed to earn money connected to the thing they are giving away for free?
I know there may have been some weird stuff going on lately (nginx, redis, etc.) but this is not one of them.
It's okay to be confused, but please do not continue this.
This breaks down because Tailwind is not monetized, is completely free, and hasn't indicated it won't be.
There is a corporate side with other features that has never been free. I pay for it because it's great.
I'm not sure if you're purposefully misstating it at this point or not. Several people have corrected you and you seem to double down incorrectly each time.
Which of those are evolving at the rate of frameworks?
BTW I'm of the opinion that frontend tooling developers should actually try to contribute things to HTML and CSS instead of building "component libraries" on top of them.
If the native controls were good and if the browsers allowed using "uniformly styled" versions of them then there would be no good reason for such libraries to exist.
Your comments in this thread are terrible, all of them. You are part of the reason why working on open source projects is so hard for people who obviously want to do good in this world. Check Adam's work: his work has been a net positive for the OSS community. Go spread your poison and nasty comments elsewhere please.
As someone who paid for a lifetime license of Tailwind UI, unlike, I strongly suspect, simlevesque - I 100% agree with this. The negativity is completely uncalled for, please take this somewhere else and do some self-reflection.
> Go spread your poison and nasty comments elsewhere please.
I have been on HN since 2008, his comment is by far the worst encounter ever in my memory. The sense of entitlement, not only in one comment by literally every single one of them in this thread and despite all the explanation he still believes he is right.
And to top it off he manage to drag HTML and CSS standards into it.
I like how we recognize this necessity to our biology but commit everyone to Hunger Games-lite performative, fiat (by decree alone), economics due to lack of political action in the face of some walking dead politicians who can't get through a day or week without handfuls of pills, they're that pathetic.
We are a deeply unserious society.
Anyway; good luck going viral online, everyone. I got lucky, have had generational wealth in my back pocket since birth, am off the hook for you by our social norms. Hopefully it works out for you because I and the rest of us won't be engaged in political action on your behalf. Dance for the organ!
I think the part you're missing here is that the author here is under no requirement to accept changes to their project and everyone else is welcome to fork it if they disagree with choices made by the author.
The author did not in fact, make the project worse, all they did was not accept a change, and that is entirely different than making it worse.
Even those who stood to benefit from the change have not received a degraded experience in comparison to the current state of affairs, but the same experience as the current state of affairs, since no change occurred. It is truly within the author's rights to do this, in any case.
One should avoid a sense of entitlement to additional and ever-increasing quantities of free work when free work has already been done.
At what point did they make it _worse_? Tailwind didn't remove any existing functionality here. What they did was refuse to merge a PR while they're trying to figure out how to navigate a difficult financial problem, all while being fully transparent about what's going on, and saying that they're open to merging the PR if/when they manage to get things together.
This is very different from, say, the minio situation, where they were actively removing feature before finally closing development down entirely. Whether tailwind will end up going down this route, time will tell. But as of right now, I find this reading to be quite uncharitable.
It's not even funcationality to the library code, it's a PR to their docs. If you just want optimized docs for your LLM to consume, isn't that what [Context7](https://context7.com/websites/tailwindcss) already has? Why force this new responsibility to the maintainer.
You keep repeating that he makes his project worse – an active action – while in fact he did not do anything at all, he just refused to change something.
The answer to "how should free things make money" is to not make them free. Any counterexamples are very fortunate. I don't know why people insist on giving away things for free while they actually desire to make money from those things. If the thing is valuable enough, someone will pay for it. Else...not
Stop trying to monetize everything.