It's good, but it's important to read this as "they're offering some money" and not "Tailwind CSS now doesn't have financial issues because they have a major sponsor." This could just be a 1-5% change in Tailwind's budget. We don't know.
And that's not to take away from their sponsorship, but on the heels of the discussion yesterday it's important to note that Tailwind was already being sponsored by many companies and still struggling. This is a good thing, but it's hard to know if this moves the needle a bunch on Tailwind's problems. Maybe it'll be the start of more companies offering Tailwind money and that'd be great.
$1M / year is a lot of runway when it's just you. It's a lot less runway once you're paying other people's livelihoods too.
[1]: https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
That said 3 motivated developers and a designer should be more than sufficient to build a css library, but you could 100% have a team of 20 and they would find stuff to do.
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/compare/main%40%...
That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.
A (side) business is created to support the oss project, to make it commercially sustainable /profitable, and then it becomes the commercial offer the liability sunk-in the money, using the fame of the oss to feed the beast. Puting the oss project at risk in the end.
Whereas people would happily give money or pay for supporting the oss project, they are kind of forced to feed the commercial project that might not really wanted to keep the beast alive.
As other I don't really have the details, but I think that in most of the world, 1 million of recurring revenue should be quite enough to support a sane evolution of what the project is doing.
Tailwind CSS is alive -> New / existing projects keep using Tailwind CSS -> more code for Gemini to train upon -> better and fancier UIs being created through Gemini -> popularity and usage of Gemini doesn't go down
Of course this applies to any other LLM provider too but I guess Google saw this opportunity first.
The supposed difficulty of tracking from elements to classes to rulesets is something that AIs can easily handle, and being able to change a ruleset once and have the update apply to all use sites is really good for AI-driven changes.
Plus, humans and AIs won't have to wait for Tailwind to adopt new CSS features as they are added. If the AI can read MDN, it can use the feature.
* Likely gets preferential access to new features and changes in tailwind, keeping it cutting edge
* Keeps a framework alive that Gemini is already good at
If a new framework becomes popular then the amount of training material / material already trained into the model essentially starts from 0.
The mature Frameworks that had plenty of openly available data to train on before everything became locked away are the ones we'll be running with for the next few years. It makes sense to keep it alive.
Edit
Looking at the tailwind.css repo[1] they are a Partner. Not sure why they are at the end of the sponsor list in that case. Though now I look at the bottom of the sponsors page I see they repeat the Sponsors again at the bottom and directly indicate each companies support tier.
1. https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/commit/7a98b...
As part of FAANG, they should be donating like 10x that amount at least.
Disclosure: I am relying on your word, and do not know if there are more tiers above partner or not.
Remaining:
- Adam (cofounder/owner/original author of tailwind)
- Jonathan (cofounder/owner/product/engineering/early co-author of tailwind)
- Steve (owner/design lead)
- Peter [part time] (partnerships/ops/support)
- Robin (engineer)
There were 3 other engineers who worked with Robin to make up the 4 person engineering team before being laid off. The ones laid off were claimed to be given a good severance. It did not seem to clarify if the 3 owners are collecting a full salary or not. Importantly, that there is only 1 person remaining on the engineering team doesn't mean they only have 1 person who can fill the role of an engineer on the product.
No guarantees this is 100% accurate or exhaustive (or names spelled correctly - apologies in advance!), but hopefully it should be a lot better a reference than guessing what the company structure looks like based on the percentage laid off alone.
[0] https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
This is why enterprise software is "call for pricing".
Overall, this has been a win for Adam and Tailwind.
Tailwind is not under financial difficulty, like, at all.
With layoffs they can meet costs but that might be true if the revenue decline trend keeps going for 18 months or so.
How much money do you really need to maintain a CSS library? I understand everyone wants a really fancy office in an expensive city, lots of employees with very high salaries and generous perks, and so on. But all that is not needed to maintain a CSS library (that is kind of feature complete already).
I think Tailwind was making a lot of money (surely over a million), expanded and got bloated unnecessarily just because they had all that money, and now that their income dropped to what still is a lot of money for a CSS library, they're angry that they have to cut expenses to a more reasonable level.
I guess it worked out for them because now they have even more sponsoring.
And they used the AI bad get out of jail free card when a lot of their drop in sales probably comes from shadcn/ui and others which offer something similar for free.
If you want to continue to develop new versions, you need enough to pay as many engineers as you need to do that. If you're not developing new versions then the money from sponsors will eventually stop.
And they used the AI bad get out of jail free card when a lot of their drop in sales probably comes from shadcn/ui and others which offer something similar for free.
shadcn is built on top of Tailwind. If Tailwind dies, so does shadcn.
They can fork tailwind into openwind and keep using the stable version for a looong time with minor fixes.
And that would probably benefit shadcn somewhat since they would have more control.
I hope they have better reasons to release new versions? Not releasing new versions also has its charm: less churn.
Seems to me like Tailwind is a relatively complex beast covering a lot of ground, not to mention that web browsers are living/evergreen projects that are costantly moving forward, and so the lib needs frequent updates. I don't think you can avoid this (just by the nature of the project). You also need to be a css expert who follows the browser and feature development closely on top of having an excellent grasp of js/ts and the build (lightining css, vite...) ecosystem. I mean ... A few excellent engineers and a designer is probably just the bare minimum to keep Tailwind maintained.
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.
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.
You can't. People can give a decade of work away for free and thats a very nice thing to do, but its not an obligation and never should be. You are right, people are now expecting it, and that's why the push against that expectation is so important.
I mean, I'm not a Tailwind user so I don't either. But it's incredibly easy to take open source value for granted. That's why so many maintainers burn out.
Now? Well, AI solves the entire issue of time taken typing. Classnames always looked cleaner too. Additionally CSS doesn't lag behind Browser features and comes with the full power of the language.
Why bother with Tailwind anymore whatsoever?
They were extremely lucky that AI picked up tailwind to keep it relevant, they should be keeping up with the times if they want to stay relevant. Instead their actions are those of someone that is cowering in fear, making sure that they can put the last of the revenue into the coffer. (reject PR because they don't want AI to do better with tailwind while firing engineers, not to mention the big tantrum).
Lets go back to actual CSS, it is easier to read anyway, it's now a modern tool with variables and all that, there's no longer a need to dumb it down.
Besides, if I wanted to pay for pre-made components, I would go with DaisyUI which is agnostic to the frontend framework, unlike the paid components from tailwindLabs, which strictly require you use one of the javascript frameworks.
I don't think that'll change with AI. They just needed to be reminded about the financials of Tailwind and I'm sure it was an easy conversation internally.
And Google has profited untold hundreds of billions of open source over the last couple of decades. They just need to be reminded of it.
Edit: Haha, getting downvoted! Never underestimate the power of tens of thousands of Googlers on HN... Look, I use Gmail, Google maps, Chrome and Android and occasionally Google search but without Linux, Java and webkit it wouldn't exist.
Makes you wonder how much ossification is going to happen because AI models are entrenched in 2023's tooling du jour.
With LLMs, almost nobody visits their docs anymore just like folks barely visit Stackoverflow anymore (SOs traffic is down +80%). Fewer people see things they may want to buy from team Tailwind so they make less money so they implode. Plus LLMs just directly compete with their support offering.
They made money off selling preset components and documentation etc, but as others have said, AI has pretty much ripped this off.
One of those things trying to monetise out of nothing because it became popular.
To be specific, they had 4 staff engineers and had to fire 3 of them[1].
[1]https://socket.dev/blog/tailwind-css-announces-layoffs#:~:te...
> they wouldn't have been able to keep developing Tailwind up to this level of sophistication.
Source: https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
They've just added 26 sponsor companies in the last two days, 7 of them partners!
Easier said than done obviously, and probably would become more expensive than it's worth, but imagine if the output was demonstrably better and exclusive deals were in place ("Claude Code has the expert Tailwind agent that's trained and maintained by Tailwind, Codex doesn't") -- it would create certain kinds of paying-subscriber mini-moats for specific LLMs.
I dunno. By the time I was done typing that I started to become skeptical of the idea but gonna hit "add comment" anyways lol
Curious how we would solve this class of wealth distribution problem in the future. All these critical libraries supply chain hit the bottom line of tech companies directly, but to extrapolate, all knowledge / work creators who used to live a comfortable living now have all their hard work scrapped by aggregators. Yeah I understand the genie is out of the bottle, all that and there will be (is?) systemic change to viable businesses. But people still have to live during the transition. It's also in the best interest of these aggregators, who's there to feed them new free works if it's no longer viable?
Ultimately it was Radix/Shadcn (which uses tailwind for styling of course) that killed the need to buy Tailwind’s UI kits by offering all these primitives with good default styling for free.
Also, the tailwind UI stuff feels pretty dated at this point in comparison to what’s offered in other free UI libraries these days.
For example, I now routinely use AI to create UI components and my prompt usually includes "use ShadCN like component here" and even give them specific shadcn component names. The result is usually 90% good enough to start with.
There's a reason companies like Adobe/Microsoft switched away from one-time purchase software, and that reason is that it is exhausting and eventually impossible to sustain a business where you have to hunt for brand new customers every single month just to keep the lights on.
You can't compare it with software licensing subscriptions.
I was reading a writeup on this history of Tailwind[1] made by Adam Wathan (who created Tailwind).
It seems like he was working on a variety of different business ideas including "Reddit meets Pinterest meets Twitter" and "a developer-focused, webhook-driven checkout platform". He created the basis of Tailwind just to help him build these projects, but it kept getting attention when he would post about his progress building them online.
Here's an important quote from the doc:
"Now at this point I had zero intention of maintaining any sort of open-source CSS framework. It didn’t even occur to me that what I had been building would even be interesting to anyone. But stream after stream, people were always asking about the CSS"
It seems like Adam's main goal was to start a software business, and Tailwind just happened to get popular and became what he pivoted his efforts into. There's obviously nothing wrong with wanting to start a business, but trying to take an open-source CSS framework and turn it into a multi-million dollar business feels unnatural and very difficult to maintain long-term.
To his credit, he did pull it off. He built a seemingly quite successful business and hired a sizable team, and apparently made a decent amount of revenue along the way.
But now, for AI reasons or otherwise, that business is struggling and failing to sustain the scale it was before. To me, it seems like the business is more or less completely separate from the open-source Tailwind project itself. It's, as far as I can understand, a business that sells templates and components built with Tailwind, and it uses Tailwind's popularity to bootstrap customers and sales.
If it were me who ended up building Tailwind, there's no way I would have pursued turning it into a big business. Maybe I would have tried some kind of consulting style, where I'd offer my time to companies evaluating or integrating Tailwind.
Now that Tailwind is getting hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars a year in sponsorships, it feels weird to have this for-profit business on the side at the same time.
Maybe it's just my own sensibilities and worldview, but I feel like Tailwind should just be what it is: an extremely popular and successful open-source CSS framework.
[1] https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...
It wasn’t venture scale and never intended to be venture scale. By any metric you have, it’s a very successful business and has made its creators independent and wealthy as you pointed out.
I agree this is your worldview warping your perception. But I’d argue we need far more tailwinds and far less whatever else is going on. It captured millions in value - but it generated tens, or hundreds of millions, or more. And essentially gave it away for free.
I think a better conclusion is that it’s a flawed business model. In which case, I’d agree - this didn’t come out of nowhere. The product created (TailwindUI) was divorced from the value created (tailwindcss). Perhaps there was a better way to align the two. But they should be celebrated for not squeezing the ecosystem, not vilified. Our society has somewhat perverse incentives.
It would be nice for Adam to figure things out and find ways to make things happen.
unless there's companies like google actively going out of their way supporting open source projects, this is just optics.