Ghostty is now non-profit

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Hack Club fiscal sponsorship & infrastructure

  • Commenters are impressed by Hack Club’s huge fiscal sponsorship program (2,500+ projects) and its custom “banking” software that scales this for teen-led orgs.
  • Hack Club’s openness (public finances, open-source code) is praised, though someone notes serious image/asset inefficiencies on the directory site.
  • There’s prior controversy and concern about teens handling PII; others argue issues were overblown and that running thousands of teen projects with only a few incidents is evidence of competence.
  • Some worry about relying heavily on Slack after a prior pricing scare; others say the issue was resolved but suggest having migration fallbacks.

Why make Ghostty non-profit? Governance & OpenAI comparisons

  • Many welcome a non-profit home as an antidote to VC-backed devtools and to reduce rug-pull risk, likening it loosely to Signal.
  • Skeptics note OpenAI’s non-profit/for-profit structure undermined trust in “non-profit guarantees”; others counter that Ghostty doesn’t control a for-profit and is trivially forkable.
  • Several argue that governance and community control matter more than legal form alone; some suggest the Linux Foundation as a potential future home.
  • The thread contrasts 501(c)(3) vs 501(c)(6) foundations and criticizes the Rust Foundation’s trade-association model and corporate influence.

Funding, wealth, and donations

  • There’s debate about donating to a project whose founder is (or was) extremely wealthy; some would rather support projects that financially need it.
  • The founder explains that the goal is to avoid long-term dependence on a single “whale” donor and make it possible for others to fund shared infrastructure, while stressing donations are optional.
  • A side discussion explores why ultra-rich people don’t give away most of their wealth and whether it’s in bad taste to ask.

Licensing, rug pulls, and copyleft

  • Some push for copyleft without a CLA to prevent proprietary forks by large vendors; others prefer permissive licenses to maximize adoption, even if big companies “rip off” the work.
  • Several defend copyleft as essential user protection and note its role in Linux’s success; others share experiences where enforcing copyleft was painful and led them to permissive licensing.

Ghostty’s appeal vs other terminals

  • Supporters highlight: speed under heavy output, strong Unicode correctness, GPU rendering, native-feeling UI (especially on macOS), plain-text config, good defaults, OSC52, shaders, and libghostty as a reusable engine.
  • Critics see it as “just another terminal,” note that basic features like search only recently landed, and report slower startup or higher memory on some Linux/Wayland setups.
  • Comparisons span iTerm2, Terminal.app, WezTerm, Kitty, Alacritty, foot, Konsole, and others; preferences hinge on “native” UI, configurability, ligatures, performance, and licensing.