You're shifting your argument, first you said it's not a business. Any business can be good/bad depends on climate and over time. It was a business and many busienss in the current era of AI will face such challenges. All business just need to constatly adapt over time aka innovate.
You're misunderstanding what I'm saying, I was not talking about Tailwind Labs not being a business, I am saying that in general, products are not businesses by default. In that case, my argument is the same as it has been, agreeing with your last 3 sentences.
Exactly the business model wasn't strong enough, just upselling templates for hundreds of dollars which AI can churn in few tokens was easy to disrupt.
The business model is strong. AI is stealing traffic/money from creators. That's not a problem with the business model, it's a problem with AI. AI hyperscalers shamelessly monetize other people's work without compensation. Truly an awful dystopia.
The output of AIs that is "churned out" wouldn't exist without templates like this being used as an input to the training. But that isn't "Copyright Infringement", according to the AI companies.
You and I would not get away with this no matter how much lawyering we buy.
This has nothing to do with the actual facts or arguments of the case. Our "Justice" system has openly and capriciously emphasized corporate rights over individual rights for at least 50 years now.
I disagree. The bare minimum they could have done in all these years was build a proper high quality, tightly coupled component library instead of riding this "copy paste your way to a result" trend.
Not stuff like shadcn and Tailwind Catalyst, but a proper versioned, tightly coupled UI library with rich theming capabilities made for the 99% of users who aren't skilled enough at design to be cobbling together their own design systems or editing a Button component directly.
Instead they rode the wave (despite being best positioned to redirect the wave) and they're paying the price.
If it wasn't AI it'd be the first version of MUI that moves on from Material Design 2 as a default. Or Hero UI v3. Or literally anyone who brings sanity back to the space of component libraries and leaves "copy and paste code snippets" behind
There are more knobs to turn when you have an actual library, and you become a lot less fungible than a random collection of TW classes.
HeroUI faces the same problem, and now their React Native library includes an optional (paid) conpiler solution that makes it faster.
MUI has the same problem but besides templates they have their MUI X data components which aren't limited in complexity to what can be ergonomically copy and pasted to a clipboard.
If a business model can't withstand being disrupted, it is no longer viable. It's like Uber putting cabs out of business with something better. Selling templates is now no longer viable, and blaming AI will not do anything. As Darwin would say, adapt or die.
Just like piracy isn't theft, so too isn't AI scraping. Personally I think copyright should be abolished and I think it's wild to see people on HN turn from hackers to copyright hawks literally supporting massive corporations which are the primary beneficiaries of long copyright laws, like Disney and their Mickey Mouse laws.
Now is not the time to take a principal stance on copyright. The harsh reality is that trillion dollar companies are taking the word of individual creators like Tailwind for free and monetizing it without any form of compensation. That feels incredibly unjust and needs to be fixed. I don't care what the fix is called.
I'm not a fan of copyright either but big corporations have abused them for so long, either enforce them to punish these companies or abolish them so these companies die, either one is fine with me. But don't just selectively enforce them to the benefit of these corpos but ignore them when they punish them, that's the worst of both worlds.
I think the era of buying templates is over, when you can get a tool that listens to you patiently, iterates again and again till you're satisfied for pennies, why would you pay hundred's for a template that is there for anyone else to buy as well.
The selling feature is that it's more polished (and has good accessibility etc), they're still intended to be customised, which you could use AI for. Why use Tailwind itself when you could generate one with AI? Because it's solidly tested and polished, similarly.
But the broader, more important point: an open source project previously could be funded by using attention to sell other services or add-ons. But that model might be gone if users no longer visit or know the creators.
The irony is I belive the JavaScript creator wtnted to latch to Java's popularity to called it JavaScript and now both Java and JavaScript are owned by Oracle and they want the name but not want to change is to ECMAScript, it's real official name.
If you read the original JavaScript press release ( https://web.archive.org/web/20020808041248/http://wp.netscap... ), it's mainly intended as a language to write glue code so Java applets (where the real application logic would go) can interact with a webpage:
> With JavaScript, an HTML page might contain an intelligent form that performs loan payment or currency exchange calculations right on the client in response to user input. A multimedia weather forecast applet written in Java can be scripted by JavaScript to display appropriate images and sounds based on the current weather readings in a region. A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly. A page might contain JavaScript scripts that run on both the client and the server. On the server, the scripts might dynamically compose and format HTML content based on user preferences stored in a relational database, and on the client, the scripts would glue together an assortment of Java applets and HTML form elements into a live interactive user interface for specifying a net-wide search for information.
> "Programmers have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about Java because it was designed from the ground up for the Internet. JavaScript is a natural fit, since it's also designed for the Internet and Unicode-based worldwide use," said Bill Joy, co-founder and vice president of research at Sun. "JavaScript will be the most effective method to connect HTML-based content to Java applets."
This was all actually implemented. JavaScript functions could call Java applet methods and vice versa (see https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/deplo... ). Of course over time everyone abandoned applets because of all the security problems, and JavaScript became a good enough language to write application logic directly in it. Still, there's more meaning behind the name than it just being a cynical marketing move.
Is groovy actually really "adopted" much of anywhere? I feel like for 99% of normal people, their only real exposure to it is as the DSL of gradle and jenkins.
I can't imagine writing anything of substance primarily in groovy.
Rundeck uses it for its plugins. It might be like how people use lua for their main program's dynamic scripting except they know Java so they use groovy.
Have to agree with the previous person. Never saw a relevant project made from Groovy. Even with Beanshell I've included it a few times in other projects for basic scripting/customization within the app but groovy? Never in 15 years to now.
I think embedding and testing/plugins/DSLs really is the main use-case. It's a terrible fit for a CLI tool if you've got to wait for a JVM to boot up, especially in a world where people are now used to those kinds of things being instantaneous rust or go binaries.
I had a flash ad take 100% of my cpu back around 2005 or so. It wasn’t even trying to be malicious, just a poorly made ad. That was the day I stopped allowing any site exceptions in my ad blocker.
Of course 100% of that cpu is probably 1/10 of one core on any of my modern machines, so an ordinary and not-broken ad laden page routinely eats several times as many cycles now. Progress!
The story is somewhat more complicated than that and not amenable to a simple summary, because there are multiple entities with multiple motivations involved. Keeping it simple, the reason why the press release babbles about that is that that is corporate Netscape talking at the height of the Java throat-forcing era. Those of you who were not around for it have no equivalent experience for how Java was being marketed back then because no language since then has been backed by such a marketing budget, but Java was being crammed down our throats whether you like it or not. Not entirely unlike AI is today, only programmers were being even more targeted and could have been seeing more inflation-adjusted-dollar-per-person spend since the set of people being targeted is so much smaller than AI's "everyone in the world" target.
This cramming did not have any regard for whether Java was a good solution for a given problem, or indeed whether the Java of that era could solve the problem at all. It did not matter. Java was Good. Good was Java. Java was the Future. Java was the Entire Future. Get on board or get left behind. It was made all the more infuriating for the fact that the Java of this time period was not very good at all; terrible startup, terrible performance, absolutely shitty support for anything we take for granted nowadays like GUIs or basic data structure libraries, garbage APIs shoved out the door as quickly as possible so they could check the bullet point that "yes, java did that" as quickly as possible, like Java's copy-of-a-copy of the C++ streaming (which are themselves widely considered a terrible idea and an antipattern today!).
I'm not even saying this because I'm emotional or angry about it or hate Java today. Java today is only syntactically similar to Java in the 90s. It hardly resembles it in any other way. Despite the emotional tone of some of what I'm saying, I mean this as descriptive. Things really were getting shoveled out the door with a minimum of design and no real-world testing so that the Java that they were spending so much marketing money on could be said that yes! It connected to this database! Yes! It speaks XML! Yes! It has a cross-platform GUI! These things all barely work as long as you don't subject them to a stiff breeze, but the bullet point is checked!
The original plan was for Java to simply be the browser language, because that's what the suits wanted, because probably that's what the suits were being paid to want. Anyone can look around today and see that that is not a great match for a browser language, and a scripting language was a better idea especially for the browser in the beginning. However, the suits did not care.
The engineers did, and they were able to sneak a scripting language into the browser by virtue of putting "Java" in the name, which was enough to fool the suits. If my previous emotional text still has not impressed upon you the nature of this time, consider what this indicates from a post-modern analysis perspective. Look at Java. Look at Javascript. Observe their differences. Observe how one strains to even draw any similarities between them beyond the basics you get from being a computer language. Yet simply slapping the word "Java" on the language was enough to get the suits to not ask any more questions until much, much later. That's how crazy the Java push was at the time... you could slip an entirely different scripting language in under the cover of the incredible propaganda for Java.
So while the press release will say that it was intended to glue Java applets, because that's what the suits needed to hear at that point, it really wasn't the case and frankly it was never even all that great at it. Turns out bridging the world between Java and Javascript is actually pretty difficult; in 2025 we pay the requisite memory and CPU costs without so much as blinking but in an era of 32 or 64 MEGAbyte RAM profiles it was nowhere near as casual. The reality is that what Javascript was intended to be by the actual people who created it and essentially snuck it in under the noses of the suits is exactly what it is today: The browser scripting language. I think you also had some problems like we still have today with WASM trying to move larger things back and forth between the environments, only much, much more so.
We all wish it had more than a week to cook before being shoved out the door itself, but it was still immensely more successful than Java ever could have been.
(Finally, despite my repeated use of the term "suits", I'm not a radical anti-business hippie hacker type. I understand where my paycheck comes from. I'm not intrinsically against "business people". I use the term perjoratively even so. The dotcom era was full of bullshit and they earned that perjorative fair and square.)
"Now" makes it sound like this is a recent acquisition of the JavaScript trademark. Oracle obtained it in 2009 as a result of the Sun purchase and if I remember correctly, Sun initially was issued the trademark back in the 90s sometimes.
> "Now" makes it sound like this is a recent acquisition of the JavaScript trademark. Oracle obtained it in 2009 as a result of the Sun purchase and if I remember correctly, Sun initially was issued the trademark back in the 90s sometimes.
They explained that in detail in the article. You don't need to remember correctly, you need to read the article. People who comment like you without doing the bare minimum, i.e. read what they're commenting on, should stop and think, what do you think you're contributing by doing that??
Music might be nice - but I'd prioritize comfy noise cancelling headphones and sleep masks, so the poor patients can get some sleep amid the hospital's beeping gadgets, hard surfaces, and blinkenlights.
I recently attended someone in the hospital. The constant beeping and alarms round the clock prevented any deep sleep for days, and seemed to hinder recovery.
This is a strange feature of hospitals that seems very much like we should know better, yet it’s pervasive. Hospital-acquired delirium is very common and awful, and is associated with bad outcomes after leaving the hospital—higher risk of death, and ongoing dementia-like problems.
We know sleep is so critically important to health, yet everything about most hospitals seems basically incompatible with proper sleep: beeping, lights, middle-of-the-night blood draws, shared rooms, no sense of day or night. Not dissimilar to how how we know that people make terrible decisions when they’re sleep deprived, but continue to have resident doctors work unreasonable hours, this is a status quo bias that harms people.
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