Ghostty Is Now Non-Profit
143 points by rudis
143 points by rudis
We're up to almost 200 paid developer hours at the time of posting this. I can't thank folks enough for getting this going. Almost everyone who has given today is an individual. Individuals make a big difference and I do have some goals and reward tiers planned for individual donors in the future. Today is about announcing the non-profit with the minimal infrastructure laid out; things are going to get a lot more buttoned up and professional over the next year or two!
Beyond individuals, I do plan on doing donor outreach and relationship management with companies I know that are adopting libghostty particularly in their for-profit products. It's a hard sell to get an organization to support a graphical terminal emulator (Ghostty GUI) but I suspect a much less harder sell to get them to support a library (libghostty) that is in the runtime path of their revenue-generating product (speaking from experience in other domains). libghostty was always going to be the actual "big thing" the Ghostty project does in general and I fully expect it to be the "big thing" that motivates corporate donors, too.
I didn't explicitly call it out in my blog post, but I'm also initially funding the non-profit with a $50K personal donation as well (on top of the $150K I already announced in the linked post that I'm giving directly to Hack Club -- not Ghostty). My donation is in banking hell and probably won't be wired until next week, but it is coming!
So with my donation and just the donations from today we should have around 1000 developer hours available for 2026 if we just stopped there. That's roughly equivalent to someone working 20 hours a week on Ghostty, which even I don't do regularly (note: I obviously won't be compensating myself, as I'm already explicit about in this post). But hopefully we can do more!
Also, I was careful to be very clear about this in both this post and the page on the Ghostty website, but I'll repeat it here: I recognize that I'm both the largest donor and a donor that is able to sustain for a long time. However, my ultimate goal with this initiative is to free Ghostty from its dependence on me, not just financially but eventually also as project lead and BDFL. I can understand the hesitance to support a project that already has a major backer, but I think single-majority-donor projects are fairly unhealthy long term and one of the major points of all of this is to lay the bricks for the future where the project fully stands on its own. I'm extremely thankful to everyone who is already helping with this from day 1.
200 paid developers working on a terminal emulator and surrounding development and miscellaneous needs is so awesome. I never would have guessed! Are these mostly part-time or contract folks? What's the breakdown if you don't mind my asking?
EDIT: I can't read. It was 200 paid developer hours. Not 200 paid developers!
I'll see myself out. 🤣 still...
It's awesome to see open source particularly thriving in instances such as this and that the ol' hacker spirit is very much alive and well.
Thanks to you and the many folks who make a lovely tool I use every day!
I have been enjoying hitting refresh on https://hcb.hackclub.com/ghostty/transactions throughout today and watching the number grow - it's nice to see a clear example of people donating to a new non-profit open source project.
It's up to $2,000 now which would fund 33 hours of contributor time based on Ghostty's announced $60/hour standard award.
This is great news! I highly respect Hack Club and their mission, and I daily-drive Ghostty as my terminal of choice.
How difficult was it to get fiscally sponsored by Hack Club, as compared to making a new non-profit? From my understanding, becoming a designated 501(c)(3) public charity is a very involved business that can take a year at the least.
I usually don't post in this tone but... Who cares? It's just a terminal and the terminal is the pet project of a billionaire. Financial stability was as far as I'm concerned, never going to be a problem. The fact that it's a nonprofit also doesn't matter that much, cause it's one of the 92334324 terminals out there, if it died tomorrow people could just move to the next thing without much problems.
Oh. There's a lot to unpack here. I should probably just let this bounce off me like I do everything else, but I really like Lobsters and I think there are a lot of good people here so I think engaging in this case might be worth it.
Who cares?
No problem with this. There are a million (literally more than that in the USA, around 1.8 million) non-profit causes and people decide this every day about many of them, or more realistically, just ignore almost all of them. The diversity of "public benefit" causes out there and our ability as individuals to choose what does and doesn't matter to us is a beautiful thing.
I have no problem with this opinion.
It's just a terminal
In addition to disagreeing, I'm also not a fan of belittling a project.
Terminals are important to me. Terminals might be important to others (and seem to me).
I wasn't able to find a terminal that checked all the boxes Ghostty does, which is why I built it. But the terminal itself is boring, the real impact of Ghostty is going to be in libghostty and making all of this completely available for many use cases.
Terminals are an invisible technology to most that are hyper present in the everyday life of many in the tech industry. My hope is that through building a broadly adopted shared underlayer of terminals around the industry we can do some really interesting things. I would argue most other terminals are focused on their terminal apps (which is fine), but that makes us different.
You may disagree, that's my opinion and why I started this.
From a non-profit side, if I can use libghostty as a vehicle to convince corporations that terminals do matter and are worth supporting and are in fact critical infrastructure, then not only can we make something that doesn't depend on the whims of my goodwill as an individual, but we can hopefully build something that is able to help support upstreams too (a noted goal in my post). It grows beyond "just a terminal."
Just. What a word.
pet project of a billionaire
I've already addressed the belittling of the project I really find useful and care about. So let's just move on to the financial class.
Regardless of my financial ability to support this project, any project that financially survives (for or non-profit) at the whims of a single donor is an unhealthy project. I like to think I'm fairly level headed and fair, but if one day I decided to say "wow **** Ghostty" and disappear, Ghostty would suffer today. It sounds like you don't care regardless of my financial status since you don't care about the project category at large, but apply this to anything you do care about.
I'd like Ghostty to survive beyond me and not be vulnerable to the decisions of a single person. That is the goal of this, long term. Today, we are just announcing the financial piece of that, but the infrastructure is laid such that this can eventually permeate into all aspects of the project. This is all noted both in my blog post and the official page on the Ghostty website.
I think my personal wealth is irrelevant to this in that regard, except as a really good way to highlight how unhealthy single-donor projects are!
(As a point of minutia: I paid a 9-figure tax bill and also donated over 5% of my other stuff to charity this year and both of those together dropped a comma for me so I'm not longer in the "B" class. I don't think it matters to you, but I'll point it out.)
(I like your response overall. I think you did a good job unpacking the things to which you can constructively reply, and the content of those replies was generally good.)
I think my personal wealth is irrelevant to this in that regard, except as a really good way to highlight how unhealthy single-donor projects are!
I'll quibble with this part, but only because you've cited your personal wealth in the past to allay concerns surrounding the health/sustainability of the ghostty project:
This response was very tongue in cheek (most of my replies on social media are jokes).
But, even if you take it seriously, the context was about "revenue" in a for-profit context. I get asked all the time (due to my history running a VC company) about "how is this going to make money?!" and so I'm very tongue in cheek because I had/have zero intentions to make Ghostty for-profit (now solidified in this non-profit structure).
It wasn't about the health/sustainability in the same vein that donating it to a non-profit is.
That's quite fair. I read it as (sustainability, really, more than health) because that's often the context in which monetization questions are asked.
I don't care about the rest of the roadmap. Features for Apple and Microsoft users are not interesting. Support from corporations is not desirable. This is obviously a vanity project. There's nothing wrong with vanity in the abstract, but it's not a good reason to set up a pile of money.
You seem to be making a distinction between "vanity project" and "open source software project". Can you elaborate on what the difference is, and why that difference is applicable here? Neither are obvious to me.
Separately, I'm really surprised by this take. Here we have an exceptional example of paying open source software maintainers directly for their efforts. How is that not a good reason for setting up a non-profit?
Such a rhetoric-heavy reply demands that we briefly let ourselves be caught in the horrible grip of perspective. We value Free Software because it tears down the control of old corporations, not because it enables new corporations under new ownership. There is nothing wrong with producing Free Software out of vanity, but it does not justify a new corporation. I appreciate that you personally benefit from the rising tide of corporations which endorse and use Zig, and I can't ask you to tear down your own buildings merely to spite the neighboring skyscrapers, even if you helped build those same towers.
On one hand, it is better to be compensated than uncompensated, and I can acknowledge that the situation at this time is — while not a good one — not so unblessed. However, on the other hand, consider that the author has the financial power to enable any person to retire and withdraw from the capitalist rat race at any time, and instead has spent (by back of napkin) roughly 8% of one person's retirement on a personal project which will entice paid laborers to work for their personal goal indefinitely. I could be even more cynical; the author openly admits that this project is supposed to be adopted by corporations and "the tech industry" under an MIT license, undermining the solidarity implicit in Free Software.
It really is just a terminal. I've tried at least half a dozen terminals seriously over the years. My current terminal is licensed GPLv3. I don't care about "some really interesting things" that we can do "around the industry".
I think I kind of get what you're going for, but you've made many implications without really committing to a concrete thesis statement.
As for the first paragraph, I interpret that as calling out my own bias since I obviously want to see Zig projects succeed. That's fair, I'll acknowledge that bias.
Addressing the rest of your rhetoric, what is it that you think Mitchell should have done, rather than setting up a non-profit for compensating Ghostty contributors and making a maintainer succession plan, which would leave him morally pure in your eyes? If that framing is an unfair characterization of your comment, please clarify.
Also to clarify for anyone else who is reading this, I don't personally frame these things in terms of moral purity. I base my interpretation around practical outcomes (e.g. "non-profits are more stable and reliable for us as consumers than startups, especially in tech" is not a moral judgement but an observation intended to help myself and others avoid annoyance and save money).
The ideological purity required to find fault in this non-profit announcement is an example of what I don’t like about the Free Software movement. I don’t think you’re winning anyone over to your side by dismissing a popular and well-loved piece of software as a vanity project and implying the author made a binary choice to do it instead of selecting random winners to withdraw from the rat race.
He has won me, for one. The point of it being a vanity project is clear to me given that the copyright line lists mr Hashimoto instead of the hack club. From my experience, these things tend to get sorted out earlier in community projects.
on a personal project which will entice paid laborers to work for their personal goal indefinitely
Could you elaborate a bit? I did not understand this part.
I care. A lot of people care.
It’s a great oss project with a lot of momentum and goodwill and active contributors. What project stewards do with that goodwill matters, whether they have fu money or are just making a decent salary at a no-name tech job.
It sets a good precedent that is human focused instead of profit focused, and we need a lot more of that from all parts of the tech community, regardless of wealth or privilege or status.
I submitted it because I think we need to start planning for multi-generational free software -- a generation of creators and original maintainers will resign and pass away, and this announcement shows a possible way towards a sustainable maintenance model for parts of our infrastructure, even if you think the concrete piece of software isn't worth the attention.
(Also: I can't help but notice that it's kind of impolite to talk about someone in the third person who is right here with us, and has always been kind and responsive on this site.)
I can't help but notice that it's kind of impolite to talk about someone in the third person who is right here with us, and has always been kind and responsive on this site.
My comment was not an attack on Hashimoto or on his project. It was just a comment on this post in particular being front-page worthy. If it came off as too abrasive, I do apologize, but I don't really know any other way of expressing this opinion which wouldn't come off as such to some.
"Who cares" unfortunately doesn't mean the sum of its individual words — it translates to something closer to "I don't care, I don't want to care, no sensible person would either; so why do you expect anyone to be bothered by this?"
I think "Why is everyone so excited about this?" would've been closer to what you were trying to say. (And just to be clear, I had the same reaction.)
Serious question: do you really think that it's useful to ask "Who cares?" on a site like Lobsters? You know how the site works. Threads get the votes they get. If something is more popular than you think it should be, then—well—who cares? You can mute tags easily if a certain type of thing is consistently popular and you don't want to see it. You can also easily just not open any thread that you don't care about. Honestly, just let it go. In my experience, people don't enjoy justifying their interests to other people. Don't ask them to. (Assuming that, as here, we're not talking about anything actively harmful.)
Serious question: do you really think that it's useful to ask "Who cares?" on a site like Lobsters?
I think they are saying "Who cares?" in the context of "Why should I care?" (which would have a better tone) and not in the literal sense.
I hope you are right, but that's not how it came across to me. (I appreciate your being more charitable than I was.)
I'm not crazy about the tone of the original "who cares?" comment, but I have to admit it did lead to some interesting (and civilized) discussion (and meta discussion).
I do apologize, but I don't really know any other way of expressing this opinion which wouldn't come off as such to some.
"I can see this project has a lot of enthusiasm behind it. As a terminal user that has been fine from simple terminals from xterm to foot, can someone help me understand what people are seeing in ghostty. I see libghostty is mentioned a lot, but I'm not sure what sorts of usecases people are seeing from a terminal library."
I guess that's what I've wanted to understand, but never got around to because wording it to avoid sounding rude/dismissive is tricky.
(Gemini suggests the usecases for terminal libraries are IDEs/CI/terminal multiplexers, and people being excited for a Zig project to take the role of what a C library would typically have done in the past. Native UI integration is nice too. This all makes sense.)
After using xterm for over 20 years, I recently got annoyed by it not being able to reflow lines after resizing. I remember hearing that it doesn't have to be this way (supposedly rxvt can do it, but I was unable to reproduce that feature in an acceptable amount of time), I decided to look for alternatives that can do that. For now, I ended up with sakura as a "lightweight" terminal. It uses the VTE library from the GNOME project (which does not require any GNOME libs, IIUC - it's just a library that offers a GTK terminal widget).
Before this, I also would've had the same reaction: "who cares?". But it turns out there are things terminals can improve on the venerable xterm. I also kind of like the copy/paste right click menu offered by Sakura, which is better than just selecting and hoping for the best with X11's shitty clipboard behaviour.
Unfortunately your comment is kind of out of touch. Technologically, Ghostty is interesting because of being developed using Zig, was built completely from the ground up, does its best to be native in all major platforms, and exports libghostty. It's not just another terminal.
I would have supported you more if you actually mentioned that this is off topic because (from the title) there's nothing related to programming. Bun, the JS runtime, was acquired recently and there's drama there to talk about.
I can see where the take comes from, but terminals are kind of like desktop environments, there's UI / UX functionalities and habits bound to it that are different from user to user, even if you can boil them all down to the core as "just" a terminal emulator.
I ironically enough tried to switch from Konsole to Ghostty, and got a few paper cuts to the point that I just went back to Konsole, switching can definitely hurt :^)
I ironically enough tried to switch from Konsole to Ghostty
iTerm2 to Ghostty and the poor macOS support from Ghostty bounced me right off. Hopefully these developer hours will allow them to get through some of the issues (command-number switching as a priority, please, thanks!)
I bounced off Ghostty on Linux because of a combination of issues related to Mesa drivers for old Intel GPUs, and probably some sort of incompatibility with GTK on those GPUs. I have very weak attachment to any terminal, though, since I don't really care much about "modern" terminal features except for good-enough Unicode support.