There has been some drama recently about Tailwind losing a lot of revenue and the responses have been kind of everybody just repeating the obvious and the same thing that had already been stated by Adam, the Tailwind founder, himself, i.e. that LLMs make the Tailwind website and the Tailwind Plus services increasingly unnecessary.
Even though I agree with the obvious above, I have a different take: Unfortunately I don't see how Tailwind can be a business.
The fact that Tailwind managed to exist as a business for a while was an anomaly. It's not a bad thing, I'm happy it was able to exist as a business for a while, but most business end up not existing forever, in that sense they're all anomalies. But Tailwind is one that I wouldn’t have expected to exist even for a month.
Tailwind is an idea. An amazing idea. But ideas aren't businesses. Tailwind is an open-source project, and as such anyone can use it for free, so it can’t make money anyway. The revenue-generating parts of the Tailwind company must be at least a little bit unrelated to this library/idea thing that is Tailwind, and they are: Tailwind Plus is mostly a separate thing from Tailwind, but selling UI components is a not necessarily a highly profitable market to be in anyway.
The problem is not with the nature of open-source even and the eternal discussion related to open-source and revenue, because if Tailwind was closed source it would be relatively easy for someone to make a clone anyway.
Looking from another angle we may take HTMX, for example, another recently hyped library (in fact both are very related in a way). Why isn't anyone sad because HTMX is not making money? Because it has never tried to be a business in the first place. How are the HTMX developers feeding their families? I don’t know. What about all the other HTMX variants and competitor libraries? The creators of HTMX don’t seem to be bothered by the fact that they’re stealing visits to their documentation website.
Another thing we can think about is how are all the other companies that sell similar UI components doing. Are they making enough money? More than Tailwind? Why aren’t we worried by the fact that LLMs are also making them unnecessary?
Just to be clear: I have no intention to shit on Tailwind, I like Tailwind and Adam looks like a very good person. I am talking in abstract here, this is applicable to many other projects (and it has in fact happened to many other projects in the past, but we haven’t noticed because they didn’t become as successful as Tailwind or perhaps they were successful but never managed to generate enough revenue to notice it shrink), because I feel like the discussion has been forgetting some basic points.
My suggestion for Adam at the end of this? I think he will have to launch another revenue-generating business. Luckily it won’t be too hard for him given the fact that he has become very well-known due to Tailwind — and that, not revenue, is actually the best thing that having a successful open-source project (or an idea) can bring to a person.