alt Hacker News> just that it would be a lot easier to write a new linter by forking
And I never said about the relative ease, you've moved the goalpost there yourself. $1m required to maintain is much less than $10m required to create, yet when you don't have $1m it doesn't matter - you'll still fail, and reasons are the same as the reasons you couldn't build the original.
Blocks lying around does not a building make, so you haven't addressed that magic either.
it does not take $1M to maintain a linter, these tools can and have been built and maintained by people in their spare time. astral built a better one, for which I am genuinely grateful to them, but it's not like they invented linting or that the open source community was just waiting around for some business to supply their tooling. indeed developer tools are notoriously hard to make money off simply because so many good ones have been developed as either solo or community open source projects, largely by people in their free time.