This looks nice, but I am very, very, very wary of adopting a tool like this without understanding the business model. There are two possible ways I've seen this go:
1) Build out a userbase. Once it's sufficient, monetize by screwing the userbase over in some way.
2) Take a bunch of VC money to build something awesome and open-source. Implode when there is no business model.
I'm glad this is open-source -- that's prerequisite -- but half of open-source is about transparency. The web site should clearly explain who built this, why, and how they plan to pay the bills.
This could be sleazy and evil or good. If it's good, explaining that generally provides business value, so most good players will do it proactively. A missing explanation is a yellow flag pointing towards "sleazy and evil."
I understand this is version 0, so please take this as constructive feedback and not an attack. This is my perception as a potential customer, and I hope it provides some value.
My concern with all attempts these days to reinvent the terminal is that they will phone home. This is a security and privacy nightmare considering what terminals are used to do, especially for devops working on production.
Any terminal app that has telemetry is a hard absolute no.
1) The telemetry here can be disabled, which is an upside, but it's default-on.
2) I'm not sure this will be an option forever. Tools like co-pilot MUST phone home, and WILL be increasingly critical to being competitive. Free market forces will likely eventually force universal telemetry (even if not phrased as such).
With ML, we're heading back to the mainframe era, where a central computer center has petaflops of computing power and terabytes of models loaded into memory. I'm not quite sure the answer there, if any.
founder/creator here. unfortunately this got posted without us being able to provide the proper HN background information, but i'll try to respond here.
we are committed to open-source. we are committed to providing a free terminal (both free as in speech and free as in beer) to individual users. it doesn't cost us anything to have you run Wave locally, so we don't need to charge. plus if we did charge, open-source lets you fork it, remove the monetization code, and just run it anyway!
but, yes, we do plan on making money at some point. we plan on building out (completely optional, opt-in) team and enterprise features, like collaboration, sharing workspaces/tabs, sharing playbooks, shared history, multi-machine sync, and AI features. these would be paid upgrades. for us there is a clear line -- if you need an account and it touches the cloud, it is a paid. if it runs locally on your machine, using your own resources, it is free.
we plan to add this information to the project and the website!
Most HN posts are early-stage, where things are unfinished and mistakes happen, and are posted by the founder / creator for feedback (in part to catch those; we all have a blind spot with our own products!), so I wouldn't worry about it. At least with my community, such posts don't impact your reputation at all. General mantra is to share early precisely to catch those things, and it's important before adopting a tool, but unless things are secretive, it's best to share version 0.1 for feedback rather than to wait for something finished and polished.
My advice is to take what you wrote above, write it in enforceable legal language, and post it on your web site. It will go a long ways to driving adoption.
Once you add team and enterprise features, post similarly strong language about privacy and security. If I am managing regulated data in my day job (which I am), there had better be darned tight guarantees that FERPA/HIPPA/attorney-client/classified/etc. data doesn't end up sold to the highest bidder when your business goes under, gets bought by IBM, repackaged and sold to Oath, and finally resold to the Russian mafia.
Footnote: I would likely pay for the right enterprise features, especially around collaboration. On the other hand, with progress in LLMs, AI features can very much run locally on a $350 Arc 770 16GB GPU. The newer 7B models are very competitive with ChatGPT!
1) Build out a userbase. Once it's sufficient, monetize by screwing the userbase over in some way.
2) Take a bunch of VC money to build something awesome and open-source. Implode when there is no business model.
I'm glad this is open-source -- that's prerequisite -- but half of open-source is about transparency. The web site should clearly explain who built this, why, and how they plan to pay the bills.
This could be sleazy and evil or good. If it's good, explaining that generally provides business value, so most good players will do it proactively. A missing explanation is a yellow flag pointing towards "sleazy and evil."
I understand this is version 0, so please take this as constructive feedback and not an attack. This is my perception as a potential customer, and I hope it provides some value.