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Comment by yawnxyz | Hacker News Reader

Well, I was going to work on a couple of langchain document loaders and an agent this weekend, but now after this raise? nah.

After reading about countless other awesome open source projects get tainted by VC cash, what makes it so different this time?

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Check out my agent implementation here which is just for fun and to get a better understanding. Maybe you want to contribute?

https://github.com/mpaepper/llm_agents

What will you use instead? Fixie?

Fixie got a 17M seed so I guess not LOL

I see. So is the idea to avoid companies that are getting resources to improve their product and grow faster?

I think the idea is to avoid contributing to money-horny companies using FOSS as marketing plans. Growing faster is not end-all-be-all, sometimes it's best to go at a reasonable speed.

It just seems like an emotional reaction rather than practical advice.

I find spending time working for a company without getting paid is impractical, but that might just be me.

Realistically, just steal the prompts and implement my own agents. The framework around it isn't terribly complex and you need to "turn everything off" so to speak when you want it to do your own stuff anyway.

Will you do that right away, or wait for LangChain's fall from grace?

> isn’t terribly complex

It’s trivial. The upside from langchain is so minimal that I wonder what experience with software development the people who love this thing really have.

What do you suspect could go wrong? Not attacking, just curious.

Personally I try to stay away from FOSS projects who raise VC funding, it signals to me they are using FOSS as a way to do marketing, not developing a community-based project.

Plenty of FOSS who tried to make it in a for-profit, VC funded world eventually disappears when VCs can't extract any money back and they never become profitable, and then the creators/maintainers lose interest as there is no longer any money to be made.

Lastly, I generally don't work for for-profit companies for free. If they are non-profit, then it'd be fine. But you make money from my work? Hm, call me a socialist, but at least I should get a part of the profits then.

But that is where OSS licenses come in. If it’s not something like agpl or some self invented thing, then you can just make a fork right? You are only helping the community in that case.

I agree with you by the way, but for MIT or Apache licenses, I think even if the company goes full commercial or terminates at some point, they gave us enough in the first place to warrant some trust and help. For the ‘we are open but clearly using that fact for marketing’ licenses, I indeed refuse to use that software and definitely cannot contribute to it (but no one will anyway that doesn’t work there) as you cannot make a meaningful fork anyway in case it goes bad.

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