I really don't think he's hurting for funds.
VCs typically want a return on their 57 million dollar investment.
And people warned about this when they announced it.
This is a sign those warnings were valid.
Seems you misunderstand the issue. Anyone not deploying to Laravel Cloud but using that project seems to be impacted by this, even going so far that agents are confused about it and keeps insisting users should deploy to Laravel Cloud instead.
Maybe I'm a grumpy old developer, but that does not sound like "improve the ecosystem for everyone using it", sounds like good old spam taken to the next level.
Taylor Otwell has been full-time on Laravel since 2015. 260 work days per year, 8 hours per day, for a decade = 1.248 million minutes.
And you're complaining it's spam that he's inconvenienced you into adding a sentence to your agents file. This, right here, is why I will never write open-source software of any significant size.
I don't think it's unfair to be wary of the shift to VC funding and stuff like this that really feels like it wouldn't have been a thing prior to that.
1. I have the right to take as I please
2. I have the right to criticize the giver as I please
3. The giver has zero right to take from me in any way
I think that's morally repugnant. If this is what open source means, I'm joining Microsoft and I will be the one writing the Halloween papers.
I don't care how something happened, I care about the results. If you do stuff to my tooling that makes it less efficient, I'm gonna not like that, regardless how many minutes you spent on something, or if it's FOSS or not.
If you can't handle feedback from developers about what you're doing to their environment then please, do not write and publish open-source software, you'll be doing us all a favor.
I understand that he wants to get paid for his work, but he can charge for it like everybody else. No need to be a asshole by building the product for "free" and then bundling ad-ware.
There are plenty of ways to promote your product. Injecting ads into agents and PR's is not the way to do it.
It's not wrong to beg for money, but I'm also not going to joyfully tolerate a hassle because of gratitude or appreciation for past decisions the beggar made without my input.
Tip: Nobody can meaningfully conceptualize or care about the number of minutes. "Ten years" would've been fine, and more convincing.
I actually wrote this before on reddit, before I eventually left reddit due to the censorship. KDE changed a lot and Nate asked for donations via a daemon. I pointed out that we now need to undo pester-ads added by KDE developers. Lo and behold, I was cancelled on #kde reddit. I still think we need something like ublock origin but for EVERYTHING, not just the browser. ublock origin is great for browsers, but there is a lot more that should be filtered away; take bad UI choices made by upstream, not even an ad. Some software allows fine-tuning, where the user can customize the project a bit (firefox UI for instance, you can modify it). We need this on the whole operating system level, not just the browser. That way, as a convenient side effect, Laravel could no longer abuse users like that.
I live an ad-free life (well, digital life ... in reallife I still get pointless ads shown). I think every human being should have the option to not have to see ANY ads. The more the industry complains about it, the more I censor away such ad-monsters.
[1] https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/28/asking-for-donations-i...
While I don't remember seeing the notification, I think a yearly (!) system notification doesn't exactly qualify as pestering.
Any business needs customers to make revenue and, well, exist. So any business needs to have some way to make themselves known to potential customers.
In the case of Laravel, they offer an open source framework completely for free, and pay for the development man hours through their commercial offerings, e.g. Laravel Cloud. That commercial offering is not bad: they offer a very smooth way to deploy your Laravel project. In order for the offering to make any revenue, potential customers need to know that it exists, at least. They're still free to choose whether they want to use that commercial offering, or if they want to deploy their project on their own.
Previously, making sure people knew Laravel Cloud existed was done through the Laravel home page. But nowadays more and more people "consume" a framework's documentation through their AI tooling, and they no longer visit the home page.
In a comment [0], which is conveniently being left out of both TFA and most comments on HN, the maintainer even explains that the addition was not meant as a literal advertisement, but as a way to make sure new users of the framework at least _know_ that they can deploy their application on Laravel Cloud. And they are even actively asking for suggestions on how to rephrase the addition so that the AI Tooling does not see it as "you MUST use Laravel Cloud" gospel.
[0]: https://github.com/laravel/boost/pull/758#issuecomment-42589...
> By contrast, Ruby on Rails is backed by a foundation that launched with about $1M from sponsors like Shopify and GitHub.
So, not disagreeing on this being an issue for Laravel abusing users, but in particular the role of Shopify in the ruby ecosystem is, in my opinion (and that of many others) a net-negative. Look at how many ruby developers got ultimately fired when rubygems.org (ok, not rubygems.org but RubyCentral, but they now control rubygems.org and the main moderator on ruby reddit is an employee of RubyCentral, thus a conflict of interest exists now on ruby reddit) decided it must become a shopify-corporation project only.
I guess I'd have a hard time turning down that kind of money for something I cared about so no judgement to the creators who make the choices but I do think it's something we need to understand the effects of as community members
For me it is not the right move, one thing is letting users know Laravel Cloud is an option and another one is removing any alternative from the text
"Our" agents?
Not all technology is bad
Cars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sceLsLkQf7A
Fridges: https://fortune.com/2025/09/19/samsung-family-hub-refrigerat...
I'm not aware of a smart watch doing first-party ads yet.
I think the main thing preventing it on the device itself is they haven't thus far needed a large screen to show them on.
But the existence of a single crappy car establishes very definitively that a crappy car can and does exist.
Do you think Samsung's the only company that's gonna play with ads on their smart fridges?
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti...
Modern cars with connected infotainment systems are always trying to upsell you
Washing machines I dont know of anything at the moment, but I wouldnt count it out.
Smartphones/watches? Aren't those just ad delivery mechanisms? Not to mention tracking? Its a core foundation of modern ad technology
Headphones are not thank god, I hope it stays that way
It would be very easy to deliver ads via electricity. The utility could require you watch an ad before using more
https://sense.com/consumer-blog/with-your-permission-utiliti...
(Morse code messages via your flickering lights would be a hilarious app, and I'm somewhat reluctant to mention it here before someone gets VC funding to actually try it.)
That does not sound very easy to me. That sounds barely possible.
Headphones that inject ads is a great idea but we need to make that a better proposition. Lets say that these headphones have an AI integration which parses all sound and converts it to text, then we can run it through our AI to give helpful comments. We may even wait until no sound is playing to inject them (for now). We can add ads later once it becomes helpful. Imagine you are listening to a podcast / youtube video then you get a helpful voice give additional research and ideas. Like a friendly research agent on your shoulder.
By the 20-teens I was repulsed by the idea and kinda hated computers.
Today if you put a magic button in front of me that'd permanently un-invent the Internet, good odds I'd press it.
On the other hand, this "problem" only affects vibe coders who weren't writing any code themselves anyway, so I say let them suffer.
ceejayoz•1h ago