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Hacker News Hacker NewsThis was a solid letter to the fans. I get why it’s disappointing to some, but it sounds like it was the right move for them personally. For people who’ve earned that kind of credibility, I say congrats on the move.
For those that don't know Armin, he's the creator of flask among many things and has some cool projects like around like gondolin.
As for pi, you should absolutely try it out if you've used opencode/continue-dev or even if you've used the less open cloud vendor coding harnesses like Claude/Codex.
I do agree that they write in a way that requires context.
Pi itself is a minimalist coding harness with a tiny 1500 token system message and only read, edit and bash as tools. I only discovered it a few weeks ago and it is surprisingly powerful with a local Qwen3.5-35B - especially as it allows to keep the context low.
Mario's blog posts are not easily digestible (imho) until you have read a few of them but they have plenty of profound thinking. His blog is for me the first one in years where I have spent an hour to read several posts.
Mario is deeply rooted in the OSS system and basically that is what he is talking about here in this post. That said, I have no idea what earendil is doing, except that it is based on pi.
Edit: My personal take - "I've sold out" is very much Austrian style because actually it is the opposite. To quote one thing from the post:
"Then Miguel and Nat approached us. Long story short: we sold RoboVM to Xamarin. A short while later Xamarin closed-sourced our open-source RoboVM core, quickly followed by Xamarin selling to Microsoft. Then Microsoft shut down RoboVM immediately.
While there was some monetary gain, everything about this fucking sucked."
So Mario did a lot of vetting to hopefully avoid this from happening again.
I was prototyping something with pi under the hood for a personal project, going to switch off it now.
Shameless plug, yes, but it's free, so I think it's fair :)
And if they mess it up, it’ll be easy enough to fork.
Apparently it’s possible to give it access to much of your Google account:
I didn’t see a pricing page, but there is this:
> Lefos uses a credit-based billing system. New accounts receive a limited number of starter credits at no cost. Usage of AI features consumes credits.
> When your credits run out, you can subscribe to a paid plan to receive additional credits each billing cycle. Subscriptions are processed through Polar, our billing provider. You can manage or cancel your subscription at any time from your account settings.
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!
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.
May be overthinking this but I'm geniunely curious how that was done practically speaking? Standard git branch and merge or everyone sitting around deciding what prompt to write?
Congrats, and I'm rooting for this to work.
But who am I to judge? If I made a project as popular as pi I'd sell out so fast.
> Over coffee, Armin and I found we had more in common than we thought. Not only politically, but also in the way we think about software, and OSS specifically. In my recollection, we became actual friends that day, even if we didn't meet again for many years in real life.
This is probably the "highest value" part of that whole blog post, as this is something I see so frequently in the real world. People don't give others a chance to just be humans with conflicting views and opinions, and instead try to assign a label to the other part as quickly as possible, then they apply the same "rules of engagement" with that person, as anyone else who deserved to get that label. But once you forgo it, you realize how much you have in common even with your "worst enemies".
It goes both ways too, and the more closed up you are in that regard, others will treat you the same. But you miss out on so many interesting thoughts, ideas and conversations, when you limit yourself to labels and not realizing how diverse and interesting even the most "boring person" could be, given the right questions and the right conversation underlay.
I contribute to open source projects, but none of them to date could support me buying much more than a beer. If one took off such that I could "live" off it, I would be happy to leave my current job and dive all in. Until then, I just keep plodding along.
> 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.
The Lefos site immediately throws up a sign in page.
The Earendil site just talks about values.
However, the worst ones are the ones who preach to others about never selling out whilst telling others that they are there for the long-term publicly, but will privately sell out the minute the offer is greater and exclusive to them.
The point here is not make such promises. People who preach one thing and then are tested to do another are the ones to avoid.
Yet another bait and switch plays out - build clout on the goodwill of open source and execute the plan at the opportune moment.
I may understand the decision but I sure as hell don't respect it - cashing out and prioritizing your family, a very human thing to do, at a glance it almost even seems noble.
Lol, the attitude. 180 degrees from the community that gave him everything he has. Classic.
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.
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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.
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.