The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Cursor wants to write all the world's code (News)
Tue, 03 Sep 2024
The Cursor AI code editor raises $60 million, RedMonk's Rachel Stephens tries to determine if rug pulls are worth it, Caleb Porzio details how he made $1 million on GitHub Sponsors, Elastic founder Shay Banon announces that Elasticsearch is open source (again) & Tomas Stropus writes about the art of finishing.
What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, September 2nd, 2024, but delivered to you on Tuesday. We are off by one again as the powers that be in the U.S. of A insist on Monday holidays.
If I'm elected president, I will tackle the issues that really affect the lives of all Americans, like canceling daylight savings once and for all, and moving all federal holidays to Friday, as God intended. Okay, enough dreaming. Let's get into the news. Cursor wants to write all of the world's code.
The team behind Cursor, an AI code editor, made a splash this week announcing their $60 million Series A funding. People are excited about what the editor can do today, which is better than GitHub Copilot, according to some, and what it might be able to do in the future. Quote, already in cursor, hours of hunting for the right primitives are being replaced by instant answers.
mechanical refactors are being reduced to single tabs, terse directives are getting expanded into working source, and thousand line changes are rippling to life in seconds. Going forward, we hope Cursor will let you orchestrate intelligent background workers, view and modify systems in pseudocode, instantly scan your creations for any trace of a bug, and much more. End quote.
One big differentiating factor for Cursor is that it's an entire editor. versus something that you use with existing editors. This could be brilliant, because it lets the team control the entire environment, or it could be foolish, because most devs love our editors, and switching to something else is like changing our identity.
I have Cursor downloaded on my machine, haven't actually played with it yet, but I will probably report back on an upcoming episode of Changelog and Friends. Rugpoles aren't cool, but are they worth it?
Red Monk's Rachel Stevens decided to examine if changing an underlying open source project's license from an OSI-approved license to a proprietary license has a measurable impact on financial outcomes for the commercial entity backing the project. That's not an easy question to answer, but that didn't stop her.
Rachel looked at MongoDB, Elastic, more on them soon, HashiCorp, and Confluence Revenue, MarketCap, and NetIncome over time. Follow the link in your chapter data and the newsletter for the charts for the conclusion, Rachel says. Quote, while in our sample we see revenue grow post-license change... we don't see a notable change in the rate of growth.
We also see very mixed results in company valuation, and there does not seem to be a clear link between moving from an open source to proprietary license and increasing the company's value. Caleb Porzio made $1 million on GitHub sponsors. I remember interviewing Caleb when he had just crossed $100,000 four years ago. Link in the newsletter. Time flies.
Here's his breakdown of where that milli came from. 5,000, goodness of their hearts, buy me coffee sponsors. 5,000, sold a bunch of stickers once, lol. 20,000, early access to a side project called Sushi. the dawn of sponsorware. $25,000 hourly consulting. $20,000 Alpine conference, but I made $0 from this. $200,000 companies paying me to put their logos on my websites and such.
And $725,000 Livewire premium screencasts. Lesson learned. When it comes to open source, there's always money in educational resources. And a quick reminder, Caleb makes this stuff look easy. It is not easy. Steph Curry makes 30-foot jumpers look easy, too. It's now time for Sponsored News. a password manager for the command line.
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We use 1Password here at Changelog, and we think you and your team should too. And just for Changelog listeners, they are doubling their free trial to 28 days versus 14 days normally. Head to 1Password.com slash ChangelogPod to get that deal, or head to developer.1Password.com to learn all about their developer tooling. And thank you to our friends at 1Password for sponsoring Changelog News.
Elasticsearch is open source again. Here's Elastic founder and CTO Shea Bannon. Quote, Elasticsearch and Kibana can be called open source again. It is hard to express how happy this statement makes me. Literally jumping up and down with excitement here. All of us at Elastic are. Open source is in my DNA. It is in Elastic DNA. Being able to call Elasticsearch open source again is pure joy.
End quote. They chose the OSI-approved AGPL as an additional license to the current offerings, which are ELV2 and SSPL. I honestly did not see this one coming, but I'm happy about it. Read the post for more details, plus some unexplained Kendrick Lamar references strewn throughout.
It even includes a portion where Shay pre-answers the trolls who might say changing the license was a mistake, and Elastic now backtracks from it. His answer? We removed a lot of market confusion when we changed our license three years ago. And because of our actions, a lot has changed. It's an entirely different landscape now. We aren't living in the past.
We want to build a better future for our users. It's because we took action then that we are in a position to take action now. The art of finishing. Tomas Stropas writes, It's a quiet Saturday afternoon. I've carved out a few precious hours for coding, armed with a steaming cup of coffee and the familiar urge to dive into a project.
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Embrace MVPs. 3. Three, timebox my projects. Four, practice finishing small things. Five, separate ideation from implementation. Six, celebrate completions. And seven, embrace accountability. I've long said that starting something new is easy. People do it all the time, but finishing, that's the accomplishment.
This is why I believe arbitrary deadlines are actually awesome, which I wrote about, link in the newsletter, because you have to ship by any means necessary. Remember, good artists borrow and great artists steal, but real artists ship.
That is the news for now, but also scan this week's changelog newsletter for even more stories worth your attention, including Hillel Wayne on why state is time and time is state, a rad new font from Helena Zhang called Departure Mono, Amazon S3 now supports conditional rights, WordPress is eating Tumblr's backend, and and a collection of free public APIs that are tested daily.
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