It's super important to me. I use Herdr every day and I maintain a whole stack of changes. From minor comfort tweaks that are just preference, to several larger changes like add jj workspace support and a WIP web based view (powered by xterm.js).

This is not the only project like this too. Many of my devtools are piling up changes. I try to upstream changes where it makes sense, but many times they are either very bespoke, or I can't be bothered to do them "right" (for example for the jj workspace change, I just ripped out git support, so I didn't have to futz with syncing the symantics up between the two and config and whatnot).

LLMs have made making personal changes to devtools so effortless that I am now extremely hesitant to use any non source available software at all.

I have been thinking about a possibly expanded market for source available software. I don't really care what the license of the software is, I'm not sharing it at all or using it commercially, so it's kinda a moot point. If someone made some amazing software and sold the source I'd definitely consider it. I know there are all sorts of practical business problems with that, but that aside I'm curious if others feel the same?

In the case of my WIP Agent IDE, OSS is mandatory because the tool needs to be able to read its own source to improve itself.

In practice, I suspect the entire category will be folded into Claude Code and Codex (Anthropic is already trying with Claude Agents), and that will do 80% of the job at 0% of the cost and configuration effort.

External programs will still be useful for the tiny minority who wants different harnesses for different projects, but yeah, tiny minority.

I avoid closed source software because it’s often a pain to use on Linux.

Indeed and once the funding comes in with more chefs in the kitchen the startups start losing touch and focus on funneling users to a platform instead of just improving the core product.

There exist also competitors not funded by YC, like me. I won't be on any of the lists because I'm not courting agents, I'm courting humans.

For me OSS is a weapon to be wielded. By making perfect software that cannot be improved upon, and making known my ownership of it, I'm am defending "embrace extend extinguish" attacks that would otherwise be damaging to me. Those attacks rely on being able to undercut a product's position in the market with a similarly positioned product that can be just slightly better and/or cheaper.

frankly with the level of complexity of IDEs, I just need a working product. In my mind it is closer to "photoshop" now than vim. I would probably pay for VSCode. I can't believe its free.

The copyleft licenses are toxic for adoption. Companies default away from them because there are a lot of murky unknowns (e.g. if you run a copyleft service and connect to it via API, is that extending it? Does that service’s source have to be shared?) that simply aren’t worth the hassle.

If you want your library to get traction with many real world use cases, you need to have a permissive license. If you want to stick to the principles, you’re going to sacrifice adoption.

Not saying one is better than the other, but there’s a tradeoff.

Can't make money if people use your tool and are required to share their source code

No money from investors

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Any potential customers that matter have already been advised by their lawyers to not touch AGPL with a 10 meter pole. This includes Google:

https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...

This extends way beyond the superficial toxic license stuff. There is a lot of legal ambiguity around copyleft licenses and most companies just don't want to deal with it unless it's absolutely unavoidable.

Yeah I was using cmux but it was Mac only and now I run herdr on my wsl and tunnel in from Mac and it’s awesome that it just mirrors everything. I like it and congrats to the founder

I just wouldn't bet against Mitchell. He doesn't need the money. He does it for the love of it.

I started noticing problems with MCP auth state failing inside herdr, but working in a normal terminal session or with tmux, so I switched back to using tmux and it's been flawless. I also noticed that herdr was causing errors/warnings in ordinary terminal sessions so it's more trouble than it's worth at the moment (at least for me). It's a shame though, since I otherwise think it's a good tool.

Try https://zmx.sh for a more minimalist tool

Over the last year I ended up duct taping a lot of functionality onto tmux to get what these new age multiplexers set out to do (session launch, live agent status, etc). And it works, but it definitely feels like duct tape.

I'm not sure the tmux project wants to evolve to support this natively so for now herdr seems like one of the best open and forkable options available. Considering how little I've had to really touch my tmux setup after getting it going I don't think it's necessarily the worst thing in the world if the FOSS community maintains a deshittified fork of herdr, should it come to that.

Give it a whirl with Workmux! I moved from Herdr to Workmux + Tmux about a month ago and am enjoying it. Significantly more flexibility.

I built hive that’s similar to herdr but sits beside tmux instead. It provides a nice status UI on top of tmux instead of building the multiplexer. It also has a bunch of other utilities for working with agents like a message bus and task management framework.

https://github.com/colonyops/hive

I am going to be PRing herdr to stagex as it is my daily driver. This will give it a totally independent release process with multiple parties bootstrapping, reproducing, and signing deterministic binaries for it alongside our tmux releases.

We (the stagex team) will naturally patch out any corpo tracking bullshit that may or may not happen in the future, and follow the dominant community fork should it be needed, as we did with terraform -> opentofu.

As long as herdr does not enshittify though, we will be happy to provide very high supply chain integrity releases for it as-is starting with probably next months stagex release.

Absolutely no problem with FOSS developers finding revenue streams to give themselves more resources to make their projects better.

My own company is 100% FOSS with nothing held back and will stay that way, even though we are in the current YC batch with more customers signing every week. Admittedly this is atypical, but it can be done.

Moshi has an integration with Herdr; you can connect to your herdr sessions over mosh, your touches register as mouse clicks in the UI (which is minimally rendered above the shell), and there’s a shortcut bar which can issue herdr-keymapped commands.

It’s not open source, and costs a few bucks, but it works well and has live Claude/Codex/etc notifications if you are willing to install a hook daemon on your hosts with homebrew. I was looking for batteries-included “code from my iPhone” after trying a bunch of self-hosted stuff, now I connect to my Macs over Tailscale and get dropped right into multiplexer sessions with rich status notifications.

https://getmoshi.app/

i just ssh to my machine (from phone etc) and run `herdr` to resume.

Like the articles, hate the influence of VC on open source. Even if it stays open it still gets ruined. See Bun for an example.

90% certain A2A is dead....

> I am a big YC fan in general

Genuine question - why?

It’s literally the VC playbook, the whole point of the funding is to undermine competitors with subsidized/free products and then raise prices/enshittify. Anyone who thinks it’ll be different this time is fooling themselves.

> Here's hoping this one's different...

It won't be.

> YC means VC means commercialization means enshitification

It doesn't have to be that way. YC partners are supportive if you just want to take the YC funding and nothing more, keeping the team small and just focusing on making the product better for customers. Indeed YC advises against taking VC if you don't need it.

Yeah, it’s great but with this, it’s probably the time to find an alternative, I probably can see where this will be in a year or so.

What does stays open mean

the secret sauce is traction

I don't love this framing among software developers. This framing is very transactional, when many of the authors are explicitly trying to make their work free. The best thing a software dev can do is donate some of their time to do more open source development, and in that way we all benefit from having more and better open source tools. If someone wants to exchange code for money there are plenty of avenues to do that. Starting an open source project and using it to attract VC funding is one path.

When I moved to herdr I specifically looked for a donate / purchase button on their website and it wasn't anywhere to be found (at least in a prominent location).

I gladly donate / pay subscriptions to software I use regularly... but the company has a responsibility to make it obvious on how to do so

I actually donate to a bunch of tools I use.

Are you lamenting the death of proprietary UNIX and paid compilers, too? This status quo is fine.

Yep. It's funny how much open source maximalists harm their own cause. Everything must be "free", ergo everything must be VC or big tech backed because free doesn't put bread on the table, so in the end devs just put more power in the hands of corporations and less power in the hands of themselves and other independent devs/small businesses, and then have the gall to complain when everything gets enshittified.