Does your landlord stand for election? That's a huge huge difference. The landlord is only out for themselves, but the government can potentially make decisions that benefit society as a whole and are rational.
The basic problem in America today is an absolute lack of democratic control of the government and our capitalist class. I can go into this in some detail but it is a large digression from the topic at hand. But I will add, that even Donald Trump is afraid to directly cut popular programs, or at least has some limits.
Yes, every time my lease was up, I elected to stay or move. I did that multiple times for 15 years. By contrast, every time I moved, I was in the same state, so never changed governments.
The purpose of an election would be to effect a change in "management". For 15 years, whenever I wanted a change in management for where I was living, I simply changed what property I was renting at the end of my lease. And every time I signed a new lease, I got to choose how long I wanted to have to wait before I could change again. Within any given area, I would have a choice of tens to hundreds of different managers. And if something is sufficiently important that voters feel it's necessary for all rentals to implement, we still have the option of voting for a legislative body to craft those laws.
By comparison, if I had lived in a world where all residential property was owned by the state, I would likely have to wait anywhere from 2-6 years before I could even begin to make a change in management. Then I would have to hope that the majority of voters in my area wanted the same things I wanted from my management. Then assuming that my preferences carried the day, I would have to hope that whatever changes I voted for were implemented before the next election or run the risk that they would be overturned by a subsequent election loss. And all of that for no additional upsides. The ability of the public to dictate rental law remains the same. The only difference is now every possible change, whether it would normally rise to the importance of a legislative debate or not, is now subject to that legislative debate process.
Landlords also contribute to educational and class mobility. Students can study at distant but better schools because they don't need to buy a home before they can move and they can return home or anywhere else much easier because they don't have to then find a buyer for the property to cash out. Job seekers can take a job across the country and not need enough spare cash to make multiple flights back and forth across the country to house hunt first. Landlords allow people to take vacations and trips to places they would otherwise never see because they don't live there. Landlords allow small businesses to launch without first needing to buy commercial real estate.
I spent 15 years living in my current state before I bought a home. In that time I moved on average every 2 years often due to changing jobs or changing living circumstances. There is no way I could have afforded to buy a home when I first moved here, and even if I could have, I didn't know anywhere near enough about the area or where I would be in 5 years let alone 10 or 20 to have made a good choice for where to buy that home. I love my home but owning this home has cost me well over 50k in repairs and maintenance in the 15 years I've owned it. That is absolutely money I would not and did not have when I first moved to this state and it would have financially ruined me to have bought and owned a home when I first moved here.
Have I had some crappy landlords? Sure. I've also had some great ones too and have very fond memories of some of the places I've lived over the years. None of which would have been possible without landlords in general.
> a follow up, sparkfun seems to still be doing business with while not doing business,
The linked website indicates this decision was made on or around Jan 7. Your own liked page is dated for the 12. Unless you’re asserting that the decision was made and effective before Q4 2025, this sounds like them putting in writing that they intend to follow through on preexisting contractual obligations for prior sales. Not really “doing business with while not doing business” IMO.
I would argue that laws are “bad” if there’s no way to get a proper hearing when you’re accused of violating them. Laws should constrain both sides of the law (the person subject to them and the person enforcing them) otherwise they’re just arbitrary rules by the person with more power. And while that’s a perfectly valid way to run something, it’s dishonest to dress “arbitrary personal decisions” up in the trappings of law. And realistically that applies to all the things you listed, COC, NDA, TOS etc.
But if someone can just drag out a law and vaguely accuse someone else of violating that law and then enforce a punishment with no way for the accused to get a hearing or present their case and have a real chance to prevail, then yes I would say the law is bad.
I'll propose my pie in the sky plan here again. We should overhaul the copyright system completely in light of AI and make it mostly win-win for everyone. This is predicated on the idea that the NIST numbers set is sort of the "hello world" dataset for people wanting to learn machine vision and having that common data set is really handy. Numbers made up off the top of my head/subject to tuning but the basic idea is this:
1) Cut copyright to 15-20 years by default. You can have 1 extension of an additional 10-15 years if you submit your work to the "National Data Set" within say 2-3 years of the initial publication.
2) Content in the National set is well categorized and cleaned up. It's the cleanest data set anyone could want. The data set is used both to train some public models and also licensed out to people wanting to train their own models. Both the public models and the data sets are licensed for nominal fees.
3) People who use the public models or data sets as part of their AI system are granted immunity from copyright violation claims for content generated by these models, modulo some exceptions for knowing and intentional violations (e.g. generating the contents of a book into an epub). People who choose to scrape their own data are subject to the current state of the law with regards to both scraping and use (so you probably better be buying a lot of books).
4) The license fees generated from licensing the data and the models would be split into royalty payments to people whose works are in the dataset, and are still under copyright protection, proportional to the amount of data submitted and inversely proportional to the age of that data. There would be some absolute caps in place to prevent slamming the national data sets with junk data just to pump the numbers.
Everyone gets something out of this. AI folks get clean data, that they didn't have to burn a lot of resources scraping. Copyright holders get paid for their works used by AI and retain most of the protections they have today, just for a shorter time), the public gets usable AI tooling without everyone spending their own resources on building their own data sets, site owners and the like get reduced bot/scraping traffic. It's not perfect, and I'm sure the devil is in the details, but that's the nature of this sort of thing.
This alone will kill off all chances of that ever passing.
Like, I fully agree with your proposal... but I don't think it's feasible. There are a lot of media IPs/franchises that are very, very old but still generate insane amounts of money to this day with active developments. Star Wars and Star Trek obviously, but also stuff like the MCU or Avatar is on its best way to two decades of runtime, Iron Man 1 was released in 2008, or Harry Potter which is almost 30 years old. That's dozens of billions of dollars in cumulative income, and most of that is owned by Disney.
Look what it took to finally get even the earliest Disney movies to enter the public domain, and that was stuff from before World War 2 that was so bitterly fought over.
In order to reform copyright... we first have to use anti-trust to break up the large media conglomerates. And it's not just Disney either. Warner, Sony, Comcast and Paramount also hold ridiculous amounts of IP, Amazon entered the fray as well with acquiring MGM (mostly famous for James Bond), and Lionsgate holds the rights for a bunch of smaller but still well-known IPs (Twilight, Hunger Games).
And that's just the movie stuff. Music is just as bad, although at least there thanks to radio stations being a thing, there are licensing agreements and established traditions for remixes, covers, tribute bands and other forms of IP re-use by third parties.
According to that document, they spent ~1.5M eur (1.75 USD) on developer salaries. If we count up all the people in the "Development Team" section (other than the ones paid by grant, which I excluded from the number above), we have 22 full time developer listed. That's ~$80k (USD) / developer for the all in costs, so the actual salary is probably lower than that. US News tells us[1] that the median US developer is getting ~$132k / year. To put that into a bit of perspective, the local gas station by me is paying staff $15 / hour. That's ~30k / year.
As a side note, what the heck is with all the griping about costs in this discussion? So what if it's "just a big CSS library". Don't we want people to be paid good salaries? I swear software developers are one of the only groups of people I've ever met who actively complain about being paid too much money.
Let's say you're paying your devs $100k / year. All in costs on those devs are probably $150k or so. That means your $1m / year will fund 6 full time developers with a little left over. This podcast from the CEO[1] says their engineering team was 4 people and the remaining staff is the 3 owners, the 1 remaining engineer, and one part time customer support person. So assuming every full time person was costing $150k in salary and other costs, you're already over $1m / year before you pay for any other expenses.
$1M / year is a lot of runway when it's just you. It's a lot less runway once you're paying other people's livelihoods too.
The question isn't "what is the lowest cost that a CSS library could be maintained for"
The question is rather, how can the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) have a healthy business model?
Think of the immense value that Tailwind is bringing to all the companies and developers using it. Surely there should be a way for the creators to capture a small slice of that in our economic system.
> the most popular UI system (especially for AI models)
Like others earlier in the thread I'm symphatetic to this company/project, but your code/project being referenced often in AI output in itself doesn't imply that the thing needs to be a business.
bash, curl, awk, Python code with numpy imports, C++, all sorts of code is constantly being generated by AI, doesn't mean curl or numpy should be its own company, or that the AI Labs need to fund them.
As other fave written, making $1M+ already feels like a lot, maybe this shouldn't be a company, just 1-2 people who have a great time supporting this thing. I wonder if curl or awk have that kind of funding even..
Apparently they have an annual budget of ~$10M. From the contributors, it's easy to recognize the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (so Meta), Google, MSFT. This is great.
Having said that, I'd still say that $1-2M for a CSS library seems more than enough. Not everything needs to be "scaled"..
That’s the All Modern Digital Infrastructure relying on a dependency a Nebraskan has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003 one: https://xkcd.com/2347/
> The question is rather, how can the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) have a healthy business model?
My question is why does it need one? Most web libraries I've used for the last few decades have not had any corporate structure and certainly haven't made a profit. They're done because someone wanted to showcase their skills and others got involved to help, or for fun or because a company who does something else built them internally and decided to open source.
We don't need to apply capitalism to everything. Not everything needs a profit and scale.
Profit is the life blood of a business. It’s what pays for, mistakes, new ideas, responding to changes in the market. It tells you your are doing good things and that you are doing them well
It’s the engineering tolerance that allows a company to operate and remain reliable.
It’s amazing to me that engineers don’t understand this concept.
I think you've missed my point. Most of the libraries I'm talking about are not part of a business. And they didn't need anything to pay for mistakes, new ideas, etc.
I understand companies needing to profit, my question is why does an open source library need a company?
> I understand companies needing to profit, my question is why does an open source library need a company?
Because people like to eat and have homes and not everyone wants to work full time on someone else's code and then come home and work full time on their own. Because paying people for the work that they do is a good thing.
I think this is a very capitalistic lens you're viewing through. Open source projects (and the web in general) are traditionally not paid work or often seen as "work" at all. The web was built by people who just wanted to do a cool thing, and motivation of profit was much less common.
I challenge the concept of "paying people for the work that they do is a good thing", at least in this context. I don't think everything needs to be profitable and paid, people can just make cool things for love and passion.
If you can find a way to do it better or cheaper you’re welcome to try. No one else has. Don’t think it’s a small problem. The number of user agents and platforms supported by Tailwind would melt plenty of larger organizations.
This doesn't really answer my question and is quite a flippant response. I didn't claim I could do better, I'm asking why they need so many resources to do what they do.
Yes, they’re struggling because a large part of their business was selling the pro product of pre-built themes, pages and components and whatever else.
Now, LLMs have all but killed that side of their business. The latest models are incredibly good at writing Tailwind, to the point where no one is buying the pre-builts.
Nah, Tailwind is way more important for LLMs than vanilla CSS.
Models work in contexts. If my context is "my entire app's styling", then it's going to be really difficult to write styles in line unless it's already pretty perfect.
Tailwind doesn't have that problem. It's local. I can define a single theme and KNOW FOR A FACT how something will look before it even touches my code. That's the beauty of utility-like libraries.
I stopped working in marketing and advertising (which DID need custom styles), and went to strictly app dev where my needs completely changed.
lol People don't realize that Tailwind democratized styling for a lot of people who didn't want to or didn't know how to write CSS. We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs. LLMs, by their nature, work better with Tailwind since it needs a much smaller context to make the right decision.
> We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs.
A lot of us have never stopped writing hand-crafted CSS. Also, in my experience, Gemini 3 Pro is an absolute monster at writing layouts and styling in pure CSS with very basic descriptions of what I want (tested it while I was experimenting with vibe coding in some sleepless night LOL).
There are still a lot of developers who loathe using Tailwind and avoid touching it like the plague. Handwritten CSS still offers more opportunities for optimization and keeps your markup much cleaner than spamming utility classes everywhere (I understand the appeal of rapidly iterating with it, though).
That I can agree with hahaha. Even though I'm not a fan of Tailwind, there's absolutely no reason developers who like utility libraries will abandon them because of LLMs.
Agents are not yet very good at figuring out how things look on the screen.
Or at least in my experience this is where they need most human guidance. They can take screenshots and study those, but I’m not sure how well they can spot when things are a bit off.
Well they clearly don't "need" that many devs just to maintain it, since they just laid off most of their devs. But "need" and "want / have the revenue/work to hire and sustain" are different questions. I've never worked a single development position where there wasn't always more work to do and not enough people or time to do it. It appears they previously did have the revenue, and presumably had the work. Now they don't have the revenue, and so they had to let people go, and some of that work will go undone or take longer.
It was more than a library of prewritten css, though, they did quite a bit of engineering work on tooling (speeding up the code scans and dynamically creating custom classes, etc). I respect the team's productivity.
This is more a question about the business model of open source, which has always had some challenges. I don't think you can support OSS with premium templates, training, and support once the knowledge is baked into LLMs.
Yes but Tailwind Plus has a flawed business model, AI was not really the reason nobody bought it, it's that it's a lifetime purchase and that shadcn + LLMs has eaten their cake left right and central.
If LLMs didn't exist but shadcn still did, do you think people would pay and use Tailwind+ or shadcn?
Tailwind UI is tool companies buy to save dev time mostly on internal/back office tools. It's usually bought per project. The math is pretty easy - if it saves you few hours of devtime you buy TailwindUI. Shadcn and bazillion other similar things are certainly competition but TailwindUI is very broad and of high quality so why not pick the nicest version.
The problem is that Tailwind is extremely portable (thats why it's so popular) and since LLMs have been fed all TailwindUI code... people using LLMs don't even have to know that TailwindUI exists they just get some Tailwind styled components. They would probably look pretty confused if you told them you used to buy these templates.
It's the difference between one-off revenue and recurring revenue. If you're making new components, making new changes for the new version, adding new css and browser support it's hard to keep going with only income from new customers.
Sponsorships are a supplemental income stream, though, right? They have paid services in addition as I understand it. So covering several full time developers seems pretty good sponsorship wise, when the maintenance should be fairly simple at this point given the maturity of the offering and the tech stack. It’s not like they have to keep up with security vulnerabilities or a mobile version update churn.
They just sell lifetime licenses to extra content at a fixed (relatively small) fee.
> Because every project is different and the way independently authored pieces of code interact can be complex and time-consuming to understand, we do not offer technical support or consulting.
> Looking up records now, it looks like most of these equity firm purchases are back to actual people owners! Interesting. What does this mean? Firm bought property and resold at a profit?
I never went far enough to get all the details back when I was considering a move, but my impression is a lot of these "buy your home and close fast" corporate purchasers were offering just enough to make the speed and ability to not have to make a lot of major improvements worth the lost money from selling on the market. Then they do just enough work to clean up any "show stopper" problems and re-sell at market prices.
So (very simplified) if you have a home that might sell for 200k on the market if you put 10k of work into it, but you need to move in a few months, and you need to pay off 100k on the loan, the company offers you something like 180k. You walk away with 80k (instead of 90k) in your pocket and avoid the various real estate agent fees and the need to do any of the fix up work or deal with trying to sell and move at the same time. The company puts the $10k of work into it and sells for the 200k, pocketing the $10k you gave up.
Part of the problem is how hard it is to sell a home in the first place. I'm not interested now, but for a while I was looking at needing to move states, and that was going to involve selling my home and buying (or renting) in the new location. And all the math was saying that anything other than getting really lucky with a sale just before moving was going to cost me a LOT of extra money and be a drain and a hassle on top of all of the stresses involved with moving to a completely new state.
I really hate the idea of selling to these "we'll buy your home fast" shops, but I have to be honest that had I needed to make that move, it would have been a very real possibility.
> but it's still a huge commitment, especially given how hard it is to assess potential problems with a living space before you've actually lived there.
Now imagine trying to asses the potential problems with a living space before committing the next 30 years of those payments, plus locking yourself into that single living space and taking on the single and sole responsibility for repairing or addressing all of those problems yourself.
Look, I really like owning my own home, but when I signed a rental agreement, for the duration of the agreement that was the most money I would ever spend on my housing. And I never once worried about replacing a roof, or replacing an HVAC unit, or replacing a water main. I've owned my own home now for over a decade and my monthly housing expenditure is nearly 2x what it was when I started between tax increases, insurance increases and loans to pay for the various major repairs, and that's with a fixed rate primary mortgage. And that's my cost increases AFTER the insurance payouts. The townhome I first rented when I moved to the area currently rents for about $100 LESS than I pay each month. Granted when I bought the place, it was renting for about $200 more per month than I was paying but that basically means renting vs buying was a wash as far as costs go. Yes, to a degree I got unlucky, but that's also the point, I couldn't know if I was going to be unlucky or not before agreeing to the mortgage. As a renter I could get reviews and recommendations or warnings from prior tenants and at least have a chance of knowing what I was getting into.
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