Pi was already getting pretty big.. So I built another tiny coding-agent again. https://www.npmjs.com/package/ai-agent-test try... :) I'm not famous guy so it'll last as tiny forever.
What a fucking shame, I had just disccovered the tool, and I loved pi.dev and Mario's philosophy with it.
And of course they are already talking about "fair source" and "closed source" features. They are backed by for-profit investors, so for sure they'll follow the path of "it's open source until it isn't anymore really" (see min.io, etc.). There's fucking Revolut backing them, ffs.
Reading the blog post, for clarification, the future components of the source code will be split into 3 tiers:
Core will stay MIT, with the original dev remaining at the helm of decisions.
Value-adding components (aka plugins probably) will be under a commercial Fair Source license but distributed for free for a set period of time and then become open-source automatically after a set delay.
Enterprise-grade features will be closed-source and proprietary, ie, paid features, that will finance the company and allow to work on the other 2 tiers (free and open-source features).
I am not a Pi user yet (did not have the time to try it), but as a fellow open-source developer, if this plan is followed, it seems to me it's a good plan and balanced to try to keep the project alive with enough funding to keep on developing it (and initially I admit I had a bad apriori given the title of this post and the dev's "I sold out" blog post title).
That's fair, and I understand Mario's point of view. I'm very much aligned with hisnoverall life philosophy. My problems starts where the company gets involved. Armin is his clearly his friend, but their backers/investors are VC and will want ROI. If they just setup a company by themselves I'd be more optimistic.
And talking about opensource with premium features, I have multiple examples about how that can go wrong with ragpulls, commercial-only features, etc.
To name a few in different fields: min.io, Plex/Emby, RedHat and the whole CentOS acquisition. Sometimes you can have a successful fork (Singularity/Apptainer, Libreoffice), sometimes you can't.
All in all, I really wanted to invest my time in learning Pi, as I found about it just a couple weeks ago. But now I'm honestly re-evaluating if it will be worth it in the end.
I understand and I agree, there are no guarantees for the community except that it can always be forked at any point in time.
I was also reevaluating whether it was worth testing the Pi agent harness but for similar projects in the past there always was a fork when an opensource app backed by VCs started to stray off, eg OpenOffice was forked to LibreOffice when Sun bought it. So it's not a loss of time, just be ready to fork whenever necessary.
Also another positive example is how Audacity was and still es being overhauled to a cutting edge music editor by the Muse team.
A shame, but good for Mario. Supporting your family with good work-life balance is more important than providing a free coding tool for strangers on the internet.
Wait and see. Mario is deeply rooted in the OSS ecosystem and so is Armin and he cares about keeping the project open source. It is MIT licensed and will stay that way.
Why not just keep using Pi? They clearly state that they will be building on top of it. Yes, at some point they may limit/steer people more over to commercial/enterprise features but things move fast and at that point some other “harness” might be better suited.
sure, it'll be fine for a while, it's not going to break tomorrow. practically, keep using it if you're using it. but in case this is your first open source big name project guy getting hired because it wasn't paying the bills: it will not be long before he gets moved to features that align better with whatever Earendil's funders want.
i don't begrudge the guy for selling out or anything. the entire point of going this hard on open source is hoping someone from the aristocrat class notices and hires you. but the project is walking dead now.
Pi is fantastic and you only need to listen to Mario (who created Pi) or Armin (who he is friends with and is part of their new 'company') to know that they love the true opensource spirit.
The comments in here sound like they sold out to Meta or Openai when in reality its just a handful of them formalizing their effort as a 'company', literally just a couple of devs.
We've all been down this road before. Like yeah, from what they're saying this is better than selling to some megacorp, but talk is cheap. Will anyone truly be surprised if Pi goes to shit in a year or two due to this move?
To be clear I don't fault Mario in the slightest for this. I believe him when he says he's trying to balance commercialization with his family and trying to keep an open source spirit, but there's simply too much money sloshing around in this space. It's unreasonable to ask them to leave all that money on the table, and that money will inevitably turn the product into shit.
Hopefully I'm wrong and I wish Mario and the team all the best.
I actually used libGDX and it was awesome for what it was back in the day. I think Mario can do whatever she wants. There's nothing that we can say about it.
Having said that this looks like redis, cockroachdb, minio, etc. First there's a "open core", then "less updated core", then "forgotten core", then "we can't afford to maintain it, we're offloading it core"
Just way too many red flags. It seems like a totally fine harness if you don't care about privacy. But for me one of the big advantages of working with local models is the privacy.
I'd like to point out that in your own link there is this post lost in mire of them saying it was already fixed and was like a result of an old "small model fallback logic" that had been left in the code.
I see this a lot here on /r/LocalLlama, people get pissy about something happening with X and then turn into a hive mind about it every time it comes up as if people didn't already know that X was just the single worst project on the Internet. To a certain extent, some projects do actions that genuinely get them negative feedback that they deserve, but mistakes do happen and more importantly, sometimes open source developers want to take breaks, too.
I'm not asking for much, but just consider sometimes that the negativity on every single AI related project isn't warranted and be wary with what you upvote.
I'm not asking for much either, read the post you linked and think about it from the perspective of someone paranoid about privacy. It's someone saying "trust me bro, I work on opencode and all these claims are false." No proof of who they are or any actual links to commits or communications to prove their point. No actual evidence given to dispute any claims. At the very least, can you not agree that opt out telemetry that doesn't stop sending telemetry when you turn it off is bullshit? If it really is "harmless" why was this handled the way it was?
Of course people get pissy about things like this. Bullshit deserves to be called out. The hive mind can take things too far but still be right about the conclusion on what to do. Don't use the project full of privacy red flags if you care about privacy.
you can run it in a sandbox like firejail. for pi it is even more important, because it relies on bash and with default settings it can execute any command.
pi has many features hard baked in opencode available as extensions in the examples section on github. it looks like it's easy to extend it. it can even write extensions for itself (i asked it to write an extension to replace "$\rightarrow$" with a unicode arrow symbol for terminal output, and it worked).
Palantir, Mithril... even Anduril is a perfect name for a a MAGAt arms mfr....
But Earendil? What's the analogy, hm? That, as foretold, your head has ascended just that far UP YOUR OWN ASS that it could serve as eternal inspiration for future generations?
Earendil looks like Woo: The Company. I clearly am in the wrong field if there are people with money who buy bullshit like "In a world hurtling towards AI, we believe humans are the best agents".
My privacy extensions block their fancy HTML5 website graphics, so all that's left is... nothing?
WetSound@reddit
Did people read the blog? Sounds like Pi is in good hands
phovos@reddit
Palantir? I don't think so.
WetSound@reddit
Palantir?
phovos@reddit
Yea I am 69% sure based on the name alone that that is a Palantir affiliated company. It's a LOTR name.
WetSound@reddit
That's how evil disclose themselves
phovos@reddit
its not how a smart person does that's for sure lol
benevbright@reddit
Pi was already getting pretty big.. So I built another tiny coding-agent again. https://www.npmjs.com/package/ai-agent-test try... :) I'm not famous guy so it'll last as tiny forever.
DHasselhoff77@reddit
I don't love these news but I suppose even open source maintainers have to eat. Good for him and I hope the project will continue to be a success.
McGurkalurk@reddit
Jrr Tolkien rolls on his grave.
DHasselhoff77@reddit
iamapizza@reddit (OP)
JRR Token
Ps3Dave@reddit
What a fucking shame, I had just disccovered the tool, and I loved pi.dev and Mario's philosophy with it.
And of course they are already talking about "fair source" and "closed source" features. They are backed by for-profit investors, so for sure they'll follow the path of "it's open source until it isn't anymore really" (see min.io, etc.). There's fucking Revolut backing them, ffs.
lrq3000@reddit
Reading the blog post, for clarification, the future components of the source code will be split into 3 tiers:
I am not a Pi user yet (did not have the time to try it), but as a fellow open-source developer, if this plan is followed, it seems to me it's a good plan and balanced to try to keep the project alive with enough funding to keep on developing it (and initially I admit I had a bad apriori given the title of this post and the dev's "I sold out" blog post title).
Ps3Dave@reddit
That's fair, and I understand Mario's point of view. I'm very much aligned with hisnoverall life philosophy. My problems starts where the company gets involved. Armin is his clearly his friend, but their backers/investors are VC and will want ROI. If they just setup a company by themselves I'd be more optimistic.
And talking about opensource with premium features, I have multiple examples about how that can go wrong with ragpulls, commercial-only features, etc.
To name a few in different fields: min.io, Plex/Emby, RedHat and the whole CentOS acquisition. Sometimes you can have a successful fork (Singularity/Apptainer, Libreoffice), sometimes you can't.
All in all, I really wanted to invest my time in learning Pi, as I found about it just a couple weeks ago. But now I'm honestly re-evaluating if it will be worth it in the end.
lrq3000@reddit
I understand and I agree, there are no guarantees for the community except that it can always be forked at any point in time.
I was also reevaluating whether it was worth testing the Pi agent harness but for similar projects in the past there always was a fork when an opensource app backed by VCs started to stray off, eg OpenOffice was forked to LibreOffice when Sun bought it. So it's not a loss of time, just be ready to fork whenever necessary.
Also another positive example is how Audacity was and still es being overhauled to a cutting edge music editor by the Muse team.
StacDnaStoob@reddit
A shame, but good for Mario. Supporting your family with good work-life balance is more important than providing a free coding tool for strangers on the internet.
wanderer_4004@reddit
Wait and see. Mario is deeply rooted in the OSS ecosystem and so is Armin and he cares about keeping the project open source. It is MIT licensed and will stay that way.
spaceman_@reddit
I had no idea Mario was behind pi.dev - I've been an admirer of his earlier work (libGDX, RoboVM)
HopePupal@reddit
pi's over, now we wait for the thousand vibecoded "community forks" called shit like Pie and Tau
or just keep using OpenCode until they do their own version of this post
orak7ee@reddit
Are you not aware that OpenCode is already in the hands of a VC-backed company ?…
HopePupal@reddit
the joke was that OpenCode is already bad
PayDistinct5329@reddit
Why not just keep using Pi? They clearly state that they will be building on top of it. Yes, at some point they may limit/steer people more over to commercial/enterprise features but things move fast and at that point some other “harness” might be better suited.
HopePupal@reddit
sure, it'll be fine for a while, it's not going to break tomorrow. practically, keep using it if you're using it. but in case this is your first open source big name project guy getting hired because it wasn't paying the bills: it will not be long before he gets moved to features that align better with whatever Earendil's funders want.
i don't begrudge the guy for selling out or anything. the entire point of going this hard on open source is hoping someone from the aristocrat class notices and hires you. but the project is walking dead now.
harrro@reddit
"Earendil's funders" are literally Mario and Armin themselves - both are devs of Pi and main shareholders.
They didn't sell to some billion dollar mega corp. They just put a name on a small group of people that are working on Pi.
Ps3Dave@reddit
They are not. Read the press release where they thank their investors.
harrro@reddit
What's with all the negativity in this thread.
Pi is fantastic and you only need to listen to Mario (who created Pi) or Armin (who he is friends with and is part of their new 'company') to know that they love the true opensource spirit.
The comments in here sound like they sold out to Meta or Openai when in reality its just a handful of them formalizing their effort as a 'company', literally just a couple of devs.
flextrek_whipsnake@reddit
We've all been down this road before. Like yeah, from what they're saying this is better than selling to some megacorp, but talk is cheap. Will anyone truly be surprised if Pi goes to shit in a year or two due to this move?
To be clear I don't fault Mario in the slightest for this. I believe him when he says he's trying to balance commercialization with his family and trying to keep an open source spirit, but there's simply too much money sloshing around in this space. It's unreasonable to ask them to leave all that money on the table, and that money will inevitably turn the product into shit.
Hopefully I'm wrong and I wish Mario and the team all the best.
llitz@reddit
Goes to shit... It is MIT license, right? Just fork, do whatever you want.
Mr_International@reddit
Good for Mario. I'm glad it worked out well for him. And from what I read in the post, it seems like a good situation.
rebelSun25@reddit
I actually used libGDX and it was awesome for what it was back in the day. I think Mario can do whatever she wants. There's nothing that we can say about it.
Having said that this looks like redis, cockroachdb, minio, etc. First there's a "open core", then "less updated core", then "forgotten core", then "we can't afford to maintain it, we're offloading it core"
jikilan_@reddit
Hmmm, I just learned about pi and openclaw…
RuckYouFeddit@reddit
Super sad. The only decent harness that isn't sketchy af will now be enshittified.
Theio666@reddit
In what way opencode is sketchy or isn't decent? Not an attack, but I actually wonder why would you say "the only" here...
RuckYouFeddit@reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rv690j/opencode_concerns_not_truely_local/
Just way too many red flags. It seems like a totally fine harness if you don't care about privacy. But for me one of the big advantages of working with local models is the privacy.
Yorn2@reddit
I'd like to point out that in your own link there is this post lost in mire of them saying it was already fixed and was like a result of an old "small model fallback logic" that had been left in the code.
I see this a lot here on /r/LocalLlama, people get pissy about something happening with X and then turn into a hive mind about it every time it comes up as if people didn't already know that X was just the single worst project on the Internet. To a certain extent, some projects do actions that genuinely get them negative feedback that they deserve, but mistakes do happen and more importantly, sometimes open source developers want to take breaks, too.
I'm not asking for much, but just consider sometimes that the negativity on every single AI related project isn't warranted and be wary with what you upvote.
RuckYouFeddit@reddit
I'm not asking for much either, read the post you linked and think about it from the perspective of someone paranoid about privacy. It's someone saying "trust me bro, I work on opencode and all these claims are false." No proof of who they are or any actual links to commits or communications to prove their point. No actual evidence given to dispute any claims. At the very least, can you not agree that opt out telemetry that doesn't stop sending telemetry when you turn it off is bullshit? If it really is "harmless" why was this handled the way it was?
Of course people get pissy about things like this. Bullshit deserves to be called out. The hive mind can take things too far but still be right about the conclusion on what to do. Don't use the project full of privacy red flags if you care about privacy.
fdrch@reddit
you can run it in a sandbox like firejail. for pi it is even more important, because it relies on bash and with default settings it can execute any command.
Theio666@reddit
Oh, I see, I don't care about privacy so was wondering what's wrong with OpenCode :D
fdrch@reddit
pi has many features hard baked in opencode available as extensions in the examples section on github. it looks like it's easy to extend it. it can even write extensions for itself (i asked it to write an extension to replace "$\rightarrow$" with a unicode arrow symbol for terminal output, and it worked).
jedisct1@reddit
Check out Swival: https://swival.dev
EffectiveCeilingFan@reddit
NOOOOO
YRUTROLLINGURSELF@reddit
Palantir, Mithril... even Anduril is a perfect name for a a MAGAt arms mfr....
But Earendil? What's the analogy, hm? That, as foretold, your head has ascended just that far UP YOUR OWN ASS that it could serve as eternal inspiration for future generations?
fdrch@reddit
i've been using opencode for some time, found out about pi just yesterday, liked it, and here we go...
jwpbe@reddit
Earendil looks like Woo: The Company. I clearly am in the wrong field if there are people with money who buy bullshit like "In a world hurtling towards AI, we believe humans are the best agents".
My privacy extensions block their fancy HTML5 website graphics, so all that's left is... nothing?