GitButler Blog

https://blog.gitbutler.com/series-a likely has a large part to play in it.

By which I mean, what do we imagine a16z thinks of the [L]GPL?

My brief experience in a startup exposed to them is that a16z seems willing to fund "infrastructure" projects more than most, but they did seem to have a ready set of answers on what "open source" means in that context.

(If someone can find me an a16z funded team that published copylefted code, I'll take this back.)

EDIT: Ok, i'll eat my hat, Gemini found me some counterexamples

Element (Matrix): The company behind the decentralized Matrix communication protocol is on a16z's investment list. In late 2023, Element relicensed its core software (including the Synapse server and its clients) to AGPLv3.

Uniswap Labs: A massive cornerstone of the a16z Crypto portfolio. They published the Uniswap V2 smart contracts under GPL-3.0 (though they later shifted to a Business Source License for V3 and V4).

a16z Themselves: In an ironic twist, a16z's own crypto engineering team maintains a public GitHub repository (a16z/a16z-contracts — a library for Solidity contracts) that is literally licensed under AGPL-3.0.

> In Retcon, if a commit move results in a conflict, that doesn't matter; you can keep making changes to your history anyway, and then resolve any remaining conflicts when you're ready.

I didn't realize Retcon could do this from the website, nice!

I wonder how similar your approach is to [jj's approach to conflicts]; whether you reinvented the same way of modelling conflicts in the repo or use a different one. (See also the link to the technical docs from that page)

https://gitbutler.com/ also [borrowed this idea] from jj.

[jj's approach to conflicts]: https://martinvonz.github.io/jj/latest/conflicts/

[borrowed this idea]: https://blog.gitbutler.com/fearless-rebasing/

So, there are several tools exploring these ideas, but there are interesting differences in (for example) how close to Git each of these approaches stays.

I've been getting my family members to start vibe coding. In my experience, claude works very well but the biggest issue is actually installing all the necessary tools. So I created a little setup script that MacOS users can use to get up-and-running quickly.

It basically sets them up with a development environment similar to the one I use personally. It uses the git settings from https://blog.gitbutler.com/how-git-core-devs-configure-git , helps them set up their username/email, downloads Ghostty, VSCode, fnm and pnpm, etc.