I've sold out

sunaookami

Happy for Mario, Pi is the best harness I've ever tried. But overall disappointed by this decision. "This time everything is different" until it's not.

anilgulecha

Incidentally pi stopped working today - under the Claude subscription ban for other harnesses. Awaiting a plugin that fixes it.

rullelito

At least they didn't call it Open pi.

collabs

> The one thing that differentiated Armin from other internet trolls was the way he conducted himself in these heated discussions. He was never emotional or aggressive. Our discussions would either end in cordial disagreement, or a newfound common understanding. That's extremely rare on the internet. Ah haha so armin is also an Internet troll, right? For example if I said, one thing that sets the "Concorde apart from other commercial airliners, ..." I am saying the Concorde is a commercial airliner.

czottmann

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47688206

shevy-java

> You cannot imagine what people called me on social media and via email, despite me having zero control over the situation Well, perhaps they were right. Naturally when it comes to open source, people don't have any control over what others do with their own time. If they do not contribute financially (or their own time into improvement a project) then even less so. Still, it is a decision that has been made because of prioritising one's own personal goals. This is fine; but to expect that others share the same 1:1 opinion is not logical. > Like me, he thinks open-source and open protocols are a necessity, not just lipstick on a corporate pig. I think the description is also painting lipstick on a pig. I've seen too many who promote open source but then sell out suddenly. Github? And what is the influence Shopify is doing in the ruby ecosystem? But anyway, that is all their own personal thing. To assume any community needs to share those personal success stories ... it makes no sense. > Earendil's products are built on top of pi. Ok, so ... that is lipstick. Aka promo. I don't understand why he critisizes others but then does the same himself. Which is fine; I just don't get the assessment he is doing. > Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech company with fascist tendencies. Here he refers to Palantir clearly. Thiel is abusing Tolkien IMO. Or he sees himself as Sauron or whatever. But he is more a clown Sauron, just like his mad orange king is. > who think software, and specifically AI, should serve humans, not the other way around. Does AI serve humans? Or does it serve those who control it? > Finally, and most importantly to me, almost everyone on the team has kids. So what? I mean, many people who are not so well in the head, had kids. I am not saying that refers to the blog author here, mind you - I refer to the "my criterium is that all have kids". Pity on those fools who don't have kids then? > pi is owned by Earendil, the company. Ultimately people will derive value from it, or not; but it is clearly a private project. Even if open source, we can see that with chrome + Google. Google makes most decisions. Yes, you can build on top of it; I use thorium right now, for instance. But I am not fooled one second who effectively controls a project here. Best luck of success to him.

walthamstow

Why does everything have to be named after Lord of the bloody Rings

swah

I guess Earendil sounds a lot like Anduril - had to check and now I understand they are not defense contractors!

wewewedxfgdf

Such an indirect writing style. I know people hate LLM writing but at least it gets to the point and gives some background context. I have no idea what this guy is talking about. It's an article aimed at people who know him personally, it seems.

xyzsparetimexyz

The ear endil website runs at like 2fps on my phone. Still have no idea what the company does

sva_

> Why would you do that? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-0kcet4aPpQ

xg15

In light of all the stuff about Thiel and friends, I'd really stay away from Tolkien/Middle-Earth themed startup names for now...

_pdp_

I went to Earendil website and github and I still don't know what this is. Someone care to explain?

colesantiago

Mario, You are allowed to sell out. Just take the negative reactions, (if any) as warnings. They have seen it all before like you have: + VC funded + LoTR name (really?) + “We are not evil I promise” And the biggest red flag: > None of the early-stage investors are on my naughty list, quite the opposite. For now.

inatreecrown2

I read most of the post, went to the linked project and still don't have an idea what this is about.

moffers

You didn’t sell out, you bought in! Really excited to follow this journey, Pi has been my favorite piece of software to use in the last six months.

ontouchstart

I found out last night via pi.dev. And the new repo of pi didn’t exist yet. I have been working with pi-mono locally for a few months now. Great code base to study. Much higher quality than CC. (I have posted a gist analysis before.) Will keep an eye on the work of these talented engineers and entrepreneurs. Good luck guys!

moralestapia

>And if you ever feel like we've lost the plot, the fork button on GitHub still works. Always will. Lol, the attitude. 180 degrees from the community that gave him everything he has. Classic.

deaux

This is so disappointing. Finally we had a fantastic, fully OSS, non-profit harness. Very extensible, well-made, minimal, untainted. None of the baggage of OpenCode both in terms of codebase as well as its.. "passionate" leadership, to put it mildly. > Earendil is a public benefit corporation Ah, so like OpenAI then. > But I've also learned what I do not want. I do not want to build my own company around pi. We have a four-year-old kid. I want to watch and help him grow up as best as I can. This is, first and foremost, what I want. Everything else is secondary to that. In the past 2 months, he cried a lot because "daddy isn't here". I never ever want to experience that again. That's completely fair. And above it, you sketch exactly what you could've done instead to solve this: > I mostly handed over the reins to a beautiful team of core contributors in 2016, who to this day keep the project well maintained. I never commercialized libGDX, unless you consider it commercialization to build a proprietary piece of software like Spine on top of it. Sounds like the above worked great, and this would've been the obvious option to do once again. > part of me wants to take this further. That includes building a team. It also includes commercialization to feed the team, done in a way that doesn't repeat the shit I lived through with RoboVM. So this is the only part that really answers the "why" - you want to earn a living from working on Pi, and presumably (?) believe you can't achieve that with OSS. I think you're wrong, and belong to the 0.001% of OSS projects that can earn a very nice living from working on Pi without taking this step. I'm not exaggerating, I would fully agree that the number of OSS projects where this is possible is exceedingly small. But this is one of them. If you don't believe that then fair enough, I guess, though I'm curious why you believe that. Because there clearly exist a good number of OSS projects that make their lead developer a very comfortable living. Which condition do those projects satisfy that Pi doesn't? If that's not it, then the article doesn't really answer the "why" despite lots of text that appears to do so. You obviously owe me, or anyone really, nothing. So far all you've done is contribute for free. But if you're going to write this kind of article to clearly do a little bit of soul searching, assuaging fears and "make things public" to stop them weighing on your mind, then it looks better to go all the way and state things in plain terms.

ramkarthikk

Been following Mario and Armin (much longer), and this is a good move for all parties involved. Would have been bad if Pi went the same direction as RoboVM (mentioned in the post). Earendil, as a company, is not clear for me yet but one of the projects Armin is working on that's part of this is Absurd[0], which is also an interesting project. Absurd, like Pi, is minimal and let's you have full control. [0] - https://github.com/earendil-works/absurd