Heartbreaking update from #tailwindcss. They had to lay off 75% of their staff yesterday due to #AI driven losses.
I really don't see how the #OpenSource industry survives this. The days of making your source and your docs open to the public is quickly disappearing.
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#issuecomment-3717222957
And it's possible for an open-source project to be 'done'. A few of the projects I maintain get a couple of commits a year, when someone spots a bug or if I decide to poke at them. Two of those have been deployed on over 100M devices, and at least one probably still is right now.
And that's fine. They had requirements, they met those requirements, done. Other things can incorporate them and build new functionality around them if they want to.
Sometimes the requirements change and there's new work to do. And then you've got an opportunity for funding: the requirements must come from somewhere and the people who care about them are free to fund changes that meet those new requirements.
A lot of the discourse about #Tailwind has been "How did they even expect to scale anyway?"
l know our industry doesn't understand this, but not everything has to "scale". Keeping a small team comfortably employed, working on something they enjoy with people they like _is_ a success story.
A business isn't a failure if it isn't growing.
@syntaxseed @fabio The industrialist was horrified to find the fisherman lying beside his boat, smoking a pipe.
“Why aren’t you fishing?” asked the industrialist.
“Because I have caught enough fish for the day.”
“Why don’t you catch some more?”
“What would I do with them?”
“Earn more money. Then you could have a motor fixed to your boat and go into deeper waters and catch more fish. That would bring you money to buy nylon nets, so more fish, more money. Soon you would have enough to buy two boats, even a fleet of boats. Then you could be rich like me.”
“What would I do then?”
“Then you could sit back and enjoy life.”
“What do you think I’m doing now?”
― John Lane, Timeless Simplicity
@davidculley @syntaxseed @fabio
The original is from Henrich Böll. From the short story Anecdote for Lowering Work Morale (Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral) in 1963.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbeitsmoral
https://wordandsorcery.com/anecdote-for-lowering-work-morale-heinrich-boll/
My company, Avinus, has had 1 employee (me) for 15+ years. Sometimes it was a side-hustle. Now it fills as many hours of enjoyable work as I want. I do projects I'm interested in, for cool customers doing awesome things.
It gives my family the extra income we need with the flexibility that lets me be the kind of parent I want to be.
It's a (my) success story.
Stop acting like a company that isn't growing rapidly is already in the grave.
