user-38 minutes ago
Congrats to Can! I am using Herdr and i think its a great tool. A modern solo dev success story , very inspirational.
I see some negative comments here that I could understand why funding scares them when it comes to their open source tool but like.. atleast congratulate the guy.
Johnny_Bonk36 minutes ago
Yeah I was using cmux but it was Mac only and now I run herdr on my wsl and tunnel in from Mac and it’s awesome that it just mirrors everything. I like it and congrats to the founder
ValentineC2 hours 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.
tyrean hour 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.
guywithahatan hour 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.
inigyou42 minutes ago
They're right, but they're presenting it in a way as if the toxicity of AGPL is the actual truth, and not just the opinion of greedy corporations.
Being toxic to greedy corporations but beneficial to everyone else is the point of the GPL licenses.
icantevenhold14 minutes ago
But it’s not only toxic to the greedy corporations but all the others as well, hence
a2ff6eeb06 minutes ago
Why is it toxic for me to need to push my code to a git repo if I start using it in my services, if I'm not trying to act as a for-profit corporation?
inigyou11 minutes ago
How so? You might be thinking of SSPL.
toomuchtodoan hour ago
Seems like the path is to use LLMs to launder code from VC funded efforts and their public codebases into codebases with a copyleft license. Otherwise you have to wait for the rug pull before taking action (Terraform and Vault->OpenTofu and OpenBao). It is fair use to train and create derivative works after all, as courts have ruled so far.
inigyou41 minutes ago
You can just take someone else's permissively licensed code and relicense it AGPL, or even proprietary if you want to. Corporations want it proprietary but the same trick works for copyleft.
For bonus points make sure your fork has better SEO than the original, so when someone who heard it's permissive embeds it in a proprietary product, you can sue them.
toomuchtodo38 minutes ago
Was assuming worse case scenario from a licensing compatibility and copyright perspective.
rajangdavis2 hours ago
Can't make money if people use your tool and are required to share their source code
spudlyoan hour ago
Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas. Enshitification is sure to follow in one guise or another.
rajangdavisan hour 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.
spudlyoan hour ago
In my cynical view, herder now seems to be an attempt to commercialize tmux by adding superficial polish. I am wary of VC backed developer tools that seek to innovate in well established open source niches. Herdr by default is mouse focused, has very friendly UI interactions, and has some niche UI support for agents running in panes. Great. Now it also has a profit motive and ROI pressures. I don't see this ending well.
inigyou40 minutes ago
If he wants to make money he needs to sell licenses, not give them away for free. To that end, making the free version AGPL is generally a good move. It ensures people can get hooked on your product and when they start working at corporations they have to pay to keep using it.
inigyou42 minutes ago
Greedy corporations, such as those founded by Y Combinator, want to take without giving.
gilthelander34 minutes ago
That's a bold accusation. Can you cite actual examples of this alleged malfeasance?
Do YC CEO's dress in all white like Boss Hogg?
gilthelander41 minutes ago
Any potential customers that matter have already been advised by their lawyers to not touch AGPL with a 10 meter pole. This includes Google:
https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
This extends way beyond the superficial toxic license stuff. There is a lot of legal ambiguity around copyleft licenses and most companies just don't want to deal with it unless it's absolutely unavoidable.
koiueoan hour ago
No money from investors
asadman hour ago
I am guessing this now directly competes with mitchellh's multiplexer / Superlogical.
humblepie2 hours ago
Okay, back to tmux it is then.
dgunay3 minutes ago
Over the last year I ended up duct taping a lot of functionality onto tmux to get what these new age multiplexers set out to do (session launch, live agent status, etc). And it works, but it definitely feels like duct tape.
I'm not sure the tmux project wants to evolve to support this natively so for now herdr seems like one of the best open and forkable options available. Considering how little I've had to really touch my tmux setup after getting it going I don't think it's necessarily the worst thing in the world if the FOSS community maintains a deshittified fork of herdr, should it come to that.
lrvickan hour 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.
[deleted]an hour agocollapsed
hx8an hour 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.
kar1181an hour ago
Oh man - herdr is great. This will not be net good. Sigh.
dominotw2 hours ago
wtf is "runtime"
albertgoeswoofan hour ago
What does stays open mean
fwipan hour ago
It means the headline was vomited out by an LLM.
inigyou38 minutes ago
It's a tool for managing 20 LLM agents at the same time isn't it? They know their audience loves this slop.
nlh2 hours 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.)
scubbo15 minutes ago
> I am a big YC fan in general
Genuine question - why?
an0malousan hour 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.
tamimio2 hours 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.
pecheny2 hours ago
why “find” an alternative? if you’re a herdr user you’re perfectly capable of maintaining a fork just for yourself :)
sarky-litsoan hour 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
inigyou38 minutes ago
It's a management tool for multiple superintelligent agents, right? Just tell one of them to fork herdr so VC can't make it worse on purpose.
tyleoan hour 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.
EGreg2 hours 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.
Would something like this qualify:
barapaan hour ago
[flagged]
rvz2 hours 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.
hx8an hour 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.
rovr138an hour ago
I actually donate to a bunch of tools I use.
bigyabaian hour ago
Are you lamenting the death of proprietary UNIX and paid compilers, too? This status quo is fine.
applfanboysbgonan hour 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.