alt Hacker NewsThere are a lot of comments to the tune of "why does a CSS library need 1m+ (or any money at all) to survive?". I'm no expert on this kind of thing, but Tailwind 0.1.0 first released on November 2017. Since then, there's been continual improvements up until last month with 4.1.18, totalling 8 years of dev work. A simple CSS library wouldn't have much need to go past 0.1.0, certainly not 1.0.0. Clearly tailwind did, which would imply there's more than meets the eye.
But you can't have it both ways, it can't be just a simple CSS library that doesn't need that much money, but also expect a decade of work+ on it. After all, this originally stems from the fact that a PR attempting to improve something didn't get merged in; a technically finished project would have the same problem, but that would be the rule rather than the exception.
Replies
I had a similar thought. If a project like Vue or Nuxt can stay afloat with consistent development and updates, without suffering financial difficulties, then it's worth asking why Tailwind hasn't been able to do the same. Yes it is a huge project, with incredible support across all browsers, and needs a lot of care. That's for sure. But I think the business decisions taken by the Tailwind team can be put in the spotlight in this case.
I could dig and fill in holes in my backyard for 8 years but that doesn't mean I created value or justified the time spent. The library has been good enough for widespread adoption since like 2020 at the latest - did it really need a team of 9 people working on it the last six years? What is there to show for that?
I'm more of a backend guy but afaik most popular backend frameworks like Django, Rails, Laravel etc have 10+ years of top-level work and run on much smaller annual budgets.
Not saying that it's right, and there's a whole philosophical debate about open source being financially sustainable, but in terms of "You can't expect a decade of work for free" - I think you can and many people do.