Ghostty is now non-profit

I wasn't aware of Hack Club before and wow, their fiscal sponsorship program is enormous: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/directory/ - looks like they cover more than 2,500 organizations!

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...

Donating in Chrome didn't work, only in Safari.

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Mitchell Hashimoto is a real programmer in the old vein. It's lovely to see him succeed. Ghostty is fantastic to use.

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.

Really nice to see a solidly valuable project develop a sustainable foundation instead of turning into yet another VC-backed devtools startup that will inevitably die in a few years.

Inspired by this I just posted a resonably niche feature request to the Ghostty discussion forum (copy and paste to support text/rtf)... and found out within half an hour that the equivalent of what I was asking for was already available on their main branch: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/9798

I'm really excited about Ghostty (and Zig mostly because of my exposure via ghostty). Until ghostty I hadn't really considered that a terminal would be a catalyst for innovation and even startups. But, libghostty is REALLY fascinating. And, all the good AI coding tools, IMHO, operate inside a terminal, and my head is spinning with ideas about hammering on the container for these new CLIs.

(UWash CompSci strikes again, not that I'm biased)

Kudos to Mitchell for doing it. Unfortunately the "rug pull" issue has been severely crippled by OpenAI's about face turn on their non profit status, but knowing Mitchell, he's not about the money, power, status, etc so the project is in good hands and you can expect this to stay free.

This is great work and good news, however if you want to guarantee a long-term public benefit, use copyleft without a CLA! A more well-funded company can fork this and make the new work proprietary, meaning you did all that initial development work for them for free.

Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so here. This isn't a theoretical risk.

Cool. I hadn't heard of it before. What advantages does it offer over the Mac's Terminal, for example?

> A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed for commercial gain.

What does he mean, isn't this what OpenAI just did, I'm confused guys

Thanks for doing this Mitchell, if you're on here, and for contributing to open source. Donated.

I'm making an effort to support Open Source projects that I use everyday; much in the way I support creators on YouTube via Patreon with small monthly commitments, so it's a welcome opportunity that GhosTTY has made that easy to accomplish.

I really love Ghostty. Thanks to it, my comeback to (n)vim has been quite smooth. Keybindings with the CMD key works right away without having to send any escape sequence or similar. It just works™

Is there a compelling reason to use ghostty on Linux, over say, gnome-terminal or foot?

The only thing I am missing now from Ghostty is being able to open it in any open Finder folder with a keyboard shortcut(like standard Ubuntu terminal). Ghostty already provides Finder-specific GUI shortcut but you need to use a mouse. Otherwise, stellar work(especially the ease of configuring it) and congrats to everyone involved!

This seems really nice. Wasn't aware of hack club but that just looks like a wonderful construction and organization.

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!

I never realize Ghostty is a project by Mitchell Hashimoto. I am very happy with tmux and never seriously looked at it , now I really curious what is it about and how it is different than say tmux ?

Is anyone opposed or at least of two minds concerning what could be described as the bureaucratization of FOSS?

Or has this always been a thing. But it feels like a common—and celebrated—outcome for a lot of projects.

I love Mitchell’s X post awhile back:

“What the monetization strategy of Ghostty?”

“My monetization strategy is that my bank account has 10 digits in it…” lol, epic.

So the same Hack Club from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913663 is now managing donations. Yeah, I don't think I'm gonna be donating to Ghostty any time soon. Just seems like a deeply unserious organization all around.

Smart decision and makes sense.

Lowers the risk of a rug pull or the project becoming suddenly abandoned.

Reminds me of Signal.

we got hack club sponsorship in HS. Sanil chawla is a great guy

Hey articles like this could get some value with a two liner about what the tool is, tty can mean several things, so clearly stating its function would help gain additional users that aren’t already familiar with your product :)

"A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed for commercial gain. The structure legally binds Ghostty to the public-benefit purpose it was created to serve."

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)

...and another $150k from my family...

Wow.

> I believe infrastructure of this kind should be stewarded by a mission-driven, non-commercial entity that prioritizes public benefit over private profit.

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.

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Monetary independent person announcing his side project which is just a teletypewriter and basically has no infra costs is now non-profit. More news at 10...

Your right! Strange. I thought I commented this to the Seattle thread… bug?