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...
I was working with Hack Club students on an experimental VPN client (https://github.com/hackclub/burrow) but never got the momentum to finish it. Made some great friends, though! It's a really fantastic organization.
The students have one big global Slack instance. If you're a student and on here, you should also be in there: https://hackclub.com/slack/
The “understanding through building” mentality is something I never got to experience as a group, the obvious answer is open source and the like but I wonder if there’s something more learning oriented.
Are you back on Slack as the primary comms channel after their sudden attempt to upcharge you (followed by the U-turn after the PR backlash)? Do you have some mirroring and other kind of fallback strategy if something like that happens again?
(Context for those who missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887)
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/podcast-episode-hack-f...
Ouch, that is enormous. They forgot to handle images properly, so they’re serving ginormous images in inefficient formats instead of scaled thumbnails in efficient formats—just the first page transfers more than 40MB, and the second page is just as bad, and the third significantly worse. You get things like 11827×13107 “17230 Aluminium Falcons” logo being rendered at 64px high. (I’m surprised that one’s under 9MB.) Across pages 1–3, it’s averaging 1MB per item, which if it continues all the way to page 53 would exceed 2.5GB. Done properly, I’d expect most to be under 10KB, with a few up as high as 50KB, staying well under 1MB per page, and comfortably under 50MB for all 53 pages. It’d load faster and be cheaper to serve too.
(I know this isn’t what you meant, but it loaded so slowly that I looked, and that’s easily big enough to cause problems for some users.)
Hack Club's been a fiscal sponsor for about 7 years now (since 2018), and it's evolved quite a bit since the early days. I run engineering & product for the fiscal sponsorship program there and would be happy to chat/share any tips!
oh, and while it's on my mind, the codebase was open-sourced earlier this year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43519802), and we just launched a mobile app yesterday! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130402
It might have improved since then?
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.
Also, didn't said company piss people off in some way that led to Open Tofu being created?
It had very little to do with self aggrandizing and more to do with the tax authorities need a name and time was limited. The names were used mostly as placeholders and then stuck. Branding is hard.
So thanks, IBM! <3
That's part of what drew lots of us to HashiCorp in the first place - giving back.
Even still, whatever high salaries they do give us just flow right back into the neighborhoods through insane property values and other cost-of-living expenses that negate any gains. So, it’s always just the few of us who can win that lottery and truly break out of the cycle.
You break out of the cycle by selling your HCOL home and moving to LCOL after a few years. That HCOL home will have appreciated fast enough given the original purchase price that the growth alone would easily pay for a comparable home in a LCOL area. This is the story of my village in Texas, where Cali people have been buying literal mansions after moving out of their shitboxes in LA and the Bay Area.
(It'd be nice if it supported other standard macOS UI conventions[1] too)
[0] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/8131
[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues?q=is%3Aissue%2...
Seems I will wait a little longer before search is in the regular build (and not nightly ones)
I said in the linked post that I remain the largest donor, but this helps lay bricks such that we can build a sustainable community that doesn't rely on me financially or technically. There simply wasn't a vehicle before that others could even join in financially. Now there is.
All of the above was mentioned in the post. If you want more details, please read it. I assume you didn't.
I'll begin some donor reach out and donor relationship work eventually. The past few months has been enough work simply coordinating this process, meeting with accountants and lawyers to figure out the right path forward, meeting with other software foundations to determine proper processes etc. I'm going to take a breather, then hop back in. :)
(UWash CompSci strikes again, not that I'm biased)
Ghostty is blazing fast and the attention to detail is fabulous.
The theme picker is next level, for example; so are the typographical controls.
It feels like an app made by a craftsman at the top of his game.
Asking in good faith -- could someone tell me what's special about Ghostty compared to alternatives?
Zero trolling when I say this: Two things also make it (more) popular on HN: (1) Mitchell Hashimoto (a well respected hacker who got rich, then kept on hacking) and (2) Zig. (Only Rust could attract more attention.)
1. Feels 'native' and is built for each platform. This means I can use for example familiar right click context menu's and tabs that I find on every other app. I have the option to use the mouse as well as the keyboard which I appreciate.
2. It has sensible defaults with a "Zero Configuration Philosophy" meaning that many of the things I would usually need to fiddle with are already set.
3. It performs comparably to advanced terminal emulators such as kitty.
The combination of all three (and especially the first) is why I use it.
1. Terminal emulators that feel 'native' are ubiquitous. Sure, there are also a lot that have idiosyncratic UIs, but I'm not generally using those -- my go-to when working within a GUI environment is xfce4-terminal, which is about as native as I can imagine, given that I'm using XFCE as my primary desktop environment.
2. Sensible defaults may be good for new users, but I already have my terminal emulators configured exactly as I like them, and my benchmark for switching from one tool to another within the same category isn't how welcoming it is to novice users out of the box, it's how easily I can adjust its configuration to match my long-established preferences. The "zero configuration" philosophy is actually a detriment here, as it leads to configurability being obscured to some extent.
3. When I tested it, its performance was worse than xfce4-terminal, both objectively and subjectively. Its memory consumption was higher and it felt laggier in responding to input.
I find it a bit messy to build but I'm not exactly a compile binaries kind of person anymore so it's probably a good sign that I still manage to figure it out. If stuff like Zig is your thing you'll probably enjoy this part.
My main terminal emulator is the bog slow but reliable Terminator, though in a while I'll probably flip the i3 commands and move over entirely to Ghostty.
BTW, I recently discovered shaders and cursor_blaze is absolutely awesome.
I use a company managed/provided machine that runs windows, I do not have to bother maintaining it. All I use is basically Firefox and a MinGW to have a bash
I also like the “ghostty +list-themes” command and the splash page animation on their site.
Yes, it's just another terminal emulator, but a pretty solid one that just works.
Yeah, OpenAI has shown us that this is more negotiable than we might have believed. Fortunately nobody will ever think terminal emulation is a trillion dollar industry, so I think we’re ok.
The situations aren't comparable.
OpenAI was a non-profit foundation that held a controlling share in a for-profit organisation. It's model is based around controlling access to their data (which was never open), and controlling access to their models (which are also not open).
If Ghostty does sets up a for-profit org with the NFP as the majority holder then we can have the conversation, but even at that fork + move on (like OpenTofu, Valkey, CentOS, MariaDB, Jenkins) is an option.
Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so here. This isn't a theoretical risk.
I'd honestly rather Apple and Microsoft ripped off my work if it meant that my work provided more utility to a larger number of people.
That "friction" is by design. It prevents someone else from screwing over the users.
The people that oppose copyleft are those it was specifically design to protect against.
I suspect that those who express concern over your work being ripped off are just showing that they are extremely happy with how you run things. Rather than being under the control of another entity, the actual value is in your personal involvement. That's just my two cents, I hope I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth.
EDIT: I realize that you aren't the creator of Ghostty, but my original statement seemed like I was stating this.
You should watch his talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g
(He used to be a maintainer of busybox, a GNU clone for embedded devices. He then ended up writing toybox, a similar project under the more free MIT license.)
And in some of those cases GPL wasn't enough to prevent it. Niche end user utilities, where original is available for free have little room for monetization. And in many cases existing users are already choosing the open source option despite the existence of commercial solutions, or where it's too niche for commercial solutions to exist.
Only thing that comes to my mind is VScode with all the AI craze. But that doesn't quite fit the pattern neither is the Microsoft underdog, nor it's clear that any of AI based editors derived from VScode will survive by themselves long term.
There are also occasional grifters trying to sell open source software with little long term impact.
VSCode is a proprietary fork of code-oss, the product located at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode. It might not be an example that you're looking for though.
The Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) and not a 501(c)(3). The Rust Foundation would do better for the community if they were a 501(c)(3) and more transparent about finances. Follow this example for the greater good.
This was exactly my issue with the Rust Foundation back in 2021 when it was formed, 501(c)(6) are for trade organisations. To this day, individuals still CANNOT donate to the Rust Foundation which means it is not community led.
> Note: At this time, the Rust Foundation [still] does not offer individual memberships.
https://rustfoundation.org/get-involved/#donations
The main issue of the Rust Foundation is that makes it easy for companies to buy influence in the project by buying a board seat as a benefit.
I agree that the Rust Foundation should change their governance structure to a 501(c)(3) instead of a 501(c)(6).
The very same page you link contradicts this claim:
> The Rust Foundation gratefully accepts donations from individuals and non-member organizations alike!
The difference is that the Rust Foundation accepts individual donations but does not (currently) accept individual memberships.
Please fund projects that actually need it, and don't voluntarily gift money to a literal billionaire.
> I get asked the same about terminals all the time. “How will you turn this into a business? What’s the monetization strategy?” The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate.
Original post: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964785527741427940
That all being said, everyone should give where they want, and if you don't want to give to a terminal emulator non-profit project, then don't! Don't let anyone bully you (me, the person I'm responding to, or anyone else) into what you should and shouldn't charitably support. Enjoy.
(Also, I don't want to repeat this everywhere but I paid taxes and I lost a comma, so no need to worry about that anymore! Everyone please pull out your most microscopic violins! )
The entire point of this post is that the money is not going to him.
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Sorry about that! I've just pushed a fix for one of those errors. Although I wasn't able to reproduce this donation behavior on Chrome, I will continue investigating.
I appreciate you reporting this!
“What the monetization strategy of Ghostty?”
“My monetization strategy is that my bank account has 10 digits in it…” lol, epic.
> I get asked the same about terminals all the time. “How will you turn this into a business? What’s the monetization strategy?” The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate.
chad
Another thing - when it went public it was valued at 13B and Hashimoto owned 8.5% of it according to the filing.
So, depending on when he sold or converted his shares it is pretty plausible that he got a billion.
The biggest question I have right now is: why does it matter that a terminal is a non-profit? I think I am missing some pieces of the puzzle right now.
Given features it's more comparable to Kitty than foot IMO.
- It uses plain text configuration that is easy to modify and version control.
Edit: - At least on Linux, foot's support for windows and tabs is limited to starting an entirely new process.
Foot is way more my speed. Fast, extremely stable, and (most importantly) barely noticed. When it comes to terminals, the slightest flicker -- the merest bug -- and I'm gone. And that happened to me with both ghostty and alacritty.
But I'm using KDE anywa, and I don't care about kitty graphic protocol, I have better suited apps to watch images.
It's not hype. Here's a comprehensive review of a lot of terminals and Ghostty did very well--"State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions" [1]
[1]: https://www.jeffquast.com/post/state-of-terminal-emulation-2...
> cat ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/Ghostty
#!/usr/bin/env bash
ghostty --working-directory=$(pwd)
> cat ~/.config/nautilus/scripts-accels
<Ctrl><Shift>F4 Ghostty
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’d be proud if someone says that about me one day. Hope Mitchell will share the sentiment.
I like Ghostty, don't get a chance to use it enough but everyone I know loves it, this is so cool to hear.
> Being non-profit clearly demonstrates our commitment to keeping Ghostty free and open source for everyone
I do hope the creators and maintainers get something good though. Open source work seems majority ignored to me at least, and admittedly by me too most of the time.
Alas, Bun is a VC-backed startup. Having $7m in funding is great, but it does come with some strings attached.
But maybe now Bun founders can start a nonprofit project of their own!
- easy to customise using a simple, easy to understand config
- supports non-native full screen so I don’t need to wait for the virtual desktop transition animation on Mac to finish…
- has a friendly community
- it’s a good model for building sustainable products/tools
and, with all of the above: it doesn’t feel like a compromise
Yet, I use WezTerm, won't be switching soon.
i didnt even consider that having to configure everything with a config file allows apps like this https://github.com/zerebos/ghostty-config to exist. neat
Certain CLI tools complain about unknown $TERM env vars. For example, I could not open vim when SSHing into my Hetzner VPS in Ghostty. The fix is to set TERM to some well-known alternative before running your tool, like so: TERM=xterm vim
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/unscroll/ <- this for example makes such a difference when using multiple splits and some TUI style history search or whatever to unscroll.
Lowers the risk of a rug pull or the project becoming suddenly abandoned.
Reminds me of Signal.
None of the parenthesised provide any strong guarantees against these to alleviate such fears, are there not enough non-profits that misuse funds, say, on too high of an executive compensation instead of product development?
HCB staff also do not take kindly to missing receipts or fraudulent behavior.
> We are teen hackers from around the world who code together
(besides, "many projects" is more likely a downside here as it spreads the oversight resources)
when you support literally thousands of teenagers over the internet (the delightfully overconfident, inexperienced, famous-for-trolling humans that they are) and literally only a handful have beef with you, you are running a really solid ship
What does he mean, isn't this what OpenAI just did, I'm confused guys
All of the fuss seems to be entirely driven by Mitchell's clout, and maybe some interest in Zig. Given that's the real reason everyone is talking about Ghostty (which I'm happy to be wrong about, let me know), It raises the question: Is crowding out other projects in a space, so that a billionaire can have a side project, really something we should be excited about? Unless the software is actually good, it seems like this is just an attention suck away from better software that could use it.
Dunno if that makes Ghostty "better" than other terminals, probably not. It just ticks the boxes of ligatures, fast, integration with wayland, simple amount of configuration to work how I want. It also seemed to have a focus on "correctness" which I appreciate. I don't use any of the tab/ssh/whatever features. I know ligatures are the new vi-vs-emacs religious war. Without that single feature-request, I'd probably just use foot. Swapping terminal also isn't that hard, it'd easily swap to something else if it gave me a reason.
I do think its reasonable to question focus on a millionaires toy with a large social presence vs other projects, helped by the somewhat --if not intentional, at least side-effecting -- hype-focused release style of Ghostty. Would it be nearly as successful if it were released anonymously at a 1.0? Probably not? Maybe? It does score highly in sort of arbitrary feature & performance benchmarks so it would probably still have a number of users without the name attached.
Nope, that's not it.
It's mostly because he noticed the majority of terminal applications were okay but not great. So he decides to address this by creating a cross-platform terminal app that's faster and more compatible than pretty much every existing terminal app. And has a native macOS UI written in Swift without compromising its cross-platform features.
Kind of out of nowhere, Ghostty is in the conversation of being the best terminal app available. "Best" doesn't mean the most features; but it nails speed and compatibility. (I’d love to see iTerm switch to using libghostty in the near future. That would be a killer combination!)
From "State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions": [1]
Before presenting the latest results, Ghostty warrants particular attention, not only because it scored the highest among all terminals tested, but that it was publicly released only this year by Mitchell Hashimoto. It is a significant advancement. Developed from scratch in Zig, the Unicode support implementation is thoroughly correct
In 2023, Mitchell published Grapheme Clusters and Terminal Emulators, demonstrating a commitment to understanding and implementing the fundamentals. His recent announcement of libghostty provides a welcome alternative to libvte, potentially enabling a new generation of terminals on a foundation of strong Unicode support.
[1]: https://www.jeffquast.com/post/state-of-terminal-emulation-2...
Wezterm fits the vim/emacs bill of “make it whatever you want”. I want something in between - iTerm2 for 2025. Stuff like secure input on macOS is something that is just nice - it behaves like a real platform app and not jsut the lowest common denominator loosely ported.
They say in the docs it’s not the best at anything, but it’s competitive in performance, features, and extensibility and that combo is a winner for me (personally)
It does. And the barebones complaint is literally funny (I'm mentally giggling) because Ghostty didn't have modern features like... search, literally 4 days ago https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/9756
That's why I'm staying on Alacritty on my company mac.
If it's true that Alacritty and Ghostty are both great, Alacritty must be some different kind of great because it has a large number of users due only to its own merits, and not due to the online following of the author.
You can run tmux inside Ghostty.
Newer terminal apps like WezTerm have a multiplexer built-in.
I'm using it on macOS, and I encounter a lot of issues with Ghostty with Oh My Zsh. It's often very slow, the shell crashes, and there's often a lot of display issues. I don't know if this is Ghostty or Oh My Zsh or what, so I'm just looking for a good setup that is as close to the stock Ghostty as possible.
For years people didn't care that much about specific terminal emulators or opinionated dotfiles. Now projects like Ghostty and Omarchy get tons of attention.
I get that it's probably not the projects themselves, but rather authors behind them. I'm also not saying that these projects are bad — they could be good. I don't use them, so I wouldn't know. It's just discouraging, seeing that other similar projects don't and probably won't get that traction.
It's a completely fucked situation when it happens to fairly unique/obscure software like say Terraform or Packer or Vagrant.
But if it happened to some software that's so common it's literally competing against built in apps on every desktop OS, I just don't know what I'd ever do
/s for anyone who needs it.
Or has this always been a thing. But it feels like a common—and celebrated—outcome for a lot of projects.
st corporation when
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)
Wow.
A millionaire donating the relative equivalent would be $150.
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.
Personally -- for context, not to be confused with an argument-from-authority -- I've worked in the not-for-profit sector (3+ orgs) as well as studying how to make it work better. There are people with immensely more knowledge than I, and I have learned from them, and I respect the lessons they try to convey.
In case it puts people at ease, yes, I want Ghostty to succeed. I tend to agree that a not-for-profit home is likely be a good choice, especially relative to an alternative where it might be mostly reliant on one person and/or beholden to corporate interests.
So what I am saying, at core? More or less: this is probably a good start but only a start. I am suggesting more awareness of:
1. There is a psychological tendency for people to _believe_ others who express more confidence. Being aware of this helps us notice it and prefer evidence over statements of belief.
2. What does evidence show about making OSS project succeed? Giving it a not-for-profit home seems like a good start, but how important is this relative to other choices? What does the evidence show?
To mention one place to start, here is a open-access article from the ACM that I skimmed: "Open Source Software Sustainability: Combining Institutional Analysis and Socio-Technical Networks" [2] However, I didn't find it particularly useful in answering my #2 question above. Also the paper seemed mostly to promote a method of analysis but didn't drive towards actionable nor causal recommendations.
[1]: Maybe the misunderstanding comes from one or more of the following?
(a) halo effect (e.g. "Michael is a good guy, your words imply an indirect criticism of him");
(b) tribalism (e.g. "you are either with us or against us");
(c) timing-oriented (e.g. "this is not the time to be critical; this is a time to be jolly.");
(d) past success implies future results (e.g. "Hack Club has done well so far, trust them");
(e) tone-policing (e.g. "You seem grumpy, dude");
(f) feeling lectured-at (e.g. "You seem to act like you know things we don't.")
All of these possibilities would involve a some degree of presumption about what is appropriate and some level of disengagement with the substance of what I'm writing. Remember, we have a big tent here with room for many different points of view.
I mean, yeah, you can argue that he knew it would happen, but this way:
- he has $6B he can spend on other projects
- we have OpenTofu under LF governance, backed by virtually everybody who was using Terraform before
Win-win?
