"OpenWarp is a community fork of Warp's open-source code. It is not affiliated with Warp Inc. and follows the upstream AGPL / MIT dual license."
It is rude, and possibly a trademark violation, to fork a project and use the same name. And, how can there be a "community fork" when there is no community? It's just been Open Sourced 24 hours ago.
Historically, it means a community of developers have decided to break with the old project for some reason. Jenkins is a community fork. Mariadb is a community fork. Joomla is a community fork. Illumos was a community fork. Rocky Linux is a community fork. Valkey is a community fork.
This is a personal project by someone with no connection to the project or its code. It is misleading to claim to represent the Warp "community". Maybe there will be a community around Warp someday, and maybe there will be a reason for community members to fork it, but for now, it is a newly open sourced project, and this is a person trying to build their own reputation on someone else's work.
Forks are a good and natural part of the Open Source and Free Software world. But, a good fork doesn't look anything like this. It involves stakeholders, it respects the work others have put into the project in the past, and it doesn't confuse users with a misleadingly similar name.
At the very least, you change the name when you fork something, if you have any decency or respect for Open Source and its historical mores. I wouldn't have said a word about it, if they'd changed the name, I would have ignored it (as I assume most people would have, if it didn't share a name with something people are already talking about). But, since they're coming out of the gate being an entitled jerk about software that folks have chosen to Open Source, I'm inclined to point out that they're not behaving ethically on multiple fronts.
You probably can't name a project OpenWarp for the same reason you can't name a search engine OpenGoogle, even though it's a different name to the original. In this case, it's particularly confusing because the original warp project _is_ now open source.
One can claim a trademark without registering it (the difference between ™ and ®). But, if one wanted to sue, you'd probably register it first. But, a claimed trademark that is suitably unique for your product is defensible if you can prove consistent usage pre-dating the new user of that mark.
I'd be pissed if someone took one of my open source projects, forked it, and also stole the name (and put "Open" in front, despite the fact that the thing they forked is Open Source), misleading users and diluting the brand with software I have no control over.
I don't even know what Warp is, but I'm mad as hell about it. As an Open Source developer of 30 years, I expect people to operate with something like honor and decency and respect for other people. Taking someone's open project and launching a competing fork with the same name is hugely disrespectful and dishonorable behavior.
They are the same class (Class 009, software and electronic goods) but apparently the trademark examiner determined that a terminal app and VPN/security software are distinct enough not to cause a confusion.
I don't use Warp, but it seems to me they did something cool (terminal app), pivoted that attention into a profitable AI play, but a lot of people just wanted the terminal app.
Now nobody knows what Warp is anymore, because they want to be an Agentic IDE and that's not what the users want.
Do I have that right?
I don't see what the point of this OpenWarp fork is though, other than adding more provider support. Couldn't that just be upstreamed?
Yeah that's pretty much my opinion on warp. I really liked some of the ideas used for the actual terminal side of it. The IDE-like prompt and completions, file tree, vertical tabs, etc. I mostly just wanted a terminal that was trying something new UI/UX wise.
Nowadays it just tries to do so much and seems overwhelming. I'll probably still give it a try once it supports Nushell, but I'll need to spend some time disabling a ton of the extra features.
Yeah, pretty much. I used it, but one day I opened Warp and it looked like a half-baked Cursor.
I liked it for the ability to type "git one-liner logs with date and author, no messages" and get the output without having to remember or look for actual formatting parameters.
I also get that's too niche of an use case, and not sustainable as a business. But still.
FWIW, an open-source clone of that earlier version of Warp called Wave is out there. It seems to be actively maintained and works quite well, in my experience.
What was the terminal app though and what was special about it that Ghostty didn't already provide?
edit: Found this one article (via google) that talks about the terminal. I guess it was a terminal that you could "prompt" to do things and it would figure out the shell commands.
If I recall correctly, warp is older than ghostty. Warp became popular because it was one of the well maintained rust-based terminals, and it had some simple AI features like completions and natural language command recognition. That’s why I started using it at least and I liked the dark theme better than that of any other terminal. I barely used the AI features initially but my company pays for it if I want to use it so I started using it occasionally.
I much rather would use Warp now because I am looking for an agentic IDE, not looking to replace my terminal which I use daily. I don't want to use Cursor or VSCode because it's Electron and can be slow, while Warp has their own custom Rust-based GUI based off an early version of Zed's GPUI so it should similarly be much faster.
I really like Warp, because it looks and behaves the way I want a terminal emulator to. I disable all the AI features though because I don’t find them useful.
If this community fork were to, for example remove all of the AI features, it would be valuable to me.
A terminal with AI focused on doing terminal-ish stuff is actually kind of useful.
I just never did enough of it to keep going.
If they expanded this to be highly optimized for devops aka really well attuned to AWS CLI all the various linux commands, bash scripting and just had all of that baked right in - and - was super fact and didn't have to think to much - I can see that.
The reason being, your doing 'specific tasks at a meta level' - not designing complex things, or doing research.
More like Claude Code but not for code, for DevOps and or that kind of things.
I think 'Meta Prompting' should be a thing for many disciplines.
That said, the 'bitter pill' lesson is that the Tier 1 models just really get good at everything and often supersede custom solutions - which was the case for myself and Warp, I just 'did stuff in Claude' and it was good enough.
Claude Code is very capable of making a terminal emulator with exactly (and only) the features you want. I did that for myself and it's now my daily driver. Has a few goodies I care about but nothing much else, and I have no intention of adding features for other people: https://github.com/cartermp/term
I've looked at Warp before and seen that it has some potentially useful features for a command line terminal program, like having each command be its own little history window which you can scroll independently and collapse. (I might have imagined/inferred those from the screenshots of it working though). So an alternative implementation does sound interesting, but I would want it just to be a terminal, not with any AI or agent stuff in it.
A word of warning: I just installed OpenWarp from source, but it looks like it will not let me use my own provider without signing up for an $20/month account -- just like the original Warp
I very much wish the OpenWarp folks would have made this clear on their README.md file.
I hope they bring back the former UI that allowed you to explicitly toggle "AI / Agent" mode on/off in a terminal session, and gets rid of the Oz / Cloud Agent stuff.
I don't want this auto-detect agent request. The explicit toggle was perfect.
The AI stuff is layered on in a way where it doesn't get in the way. Very useful for command completion and stuff like that, without having to open claude.
What even is Warp now? I remember it as the electron terminal and totally dismissing it. Then I think I read it got the RIIR treatment, but there was already Ghostty and Alacritty by then. Now it looks like it’s another AI thing?
Warp was always an AI thing, as I recall - the seem much heavier on AI bandwagon nowadays, but their whole thing was a terminal for teams where you could share knowledge and command palettes and generate stuff.
Gotcha, I must have encountered them later on then - thanks for posting the receipts!
I was a happy user for a while, but eventually some bugs drove me back to iTerm2 (in my case, hanging forever after certain terraform commands finished). Ghostty has filled my need for a better terminal since then.
I don't think this should be dismissed as a cheap and rude ripoff. I'm no expert in trademarks or the naming convention part of the story, but for the rest: warp is not a great company taking far too long to roll back its weird account requirement, tracking users, enshittifying the core terminal experience with often unwanted AI and other crap features and dismissing annoyances that are brought up by 100eds of users. We need to show companies they need to behave or will be crushed by the community.
It is rude, and possibly a trademark violation, to fork a project and use the same name. And, how can there be a "community fork" when there is no community? It's just been Open Sourced 24 hours ago.
This is a personal project by someone with no connection to the project or its code. It is misleading to claim to represent the Warp "community". Maybe there will be a community around Warp someday, and maybe there will be a reason for community members to fork it, but for now, it is a newly open sourced project, and this is a person trying to build their own reputation on someone else's work.
Forks are a good and natural part of the Open Source and Free Software world. But, a good fork doesn't look anything like this. It involves stakeholders, it respects the work others have put into the project in the past, and it doesn't confuse users with a misleadingly similar name.
At the very least, you change the name when you fork something, if you have any decency or respect for Open Source and its historical mores. I wouldn't have said a word about it, if they'd changed the name, I would have ignored it (as I assume most people would have, if it didn't share a name with something people are already talking about). But, since they're coming out of the gate being an entitled jerk about software that folks have chosen to Open Source, I'm inclined to point out that they're not behaving ethically on multiple fronts.
Warp made heavy use of open source itself, and then realized that even more open was the only good way to make this work.
They should be grateful. This is the entire point of free and open source software. (even if this isn't 'free' licensed, it's still a good thing)
Also calling a fork "Open" is disingenious. They wouldn't be able to fork it if the original wasn't "open".
What part of it isn't "free"?
Does anyone keep a DB somewhere of open source project names?
I think it would be better to give the code fork a different name.... And maybe move it off Github!!
Is Warp trademarked?
Only a trademark violation if a trademark has been registered. IANAL.
I'd be pissed if someone took one of my open source projects, forked it, and also stole the name (and put "Open" in front, despite the fact that the thing they forked is Open Source), misleading users and diluting the brand with software I have no control over.
I don't even know what Warp is, but I'm mad as hell about it. As an Open Source developer of 30 years, I expect people to operate with something like honor and decency and respect for other people. Taking someone's open project and launching a competing fork with the same name is hugely disrespectful and dishonorable behavior.
> WARP® trademark registration is intended to cover the categories of [...] Downloadable computer terminal emulator program [...]
They are the same class (Class 009, software and electronic goods) but apparently the trademark examiner determined that a terminal app and VPN/security software are distinct enough not to cause a confusion.
It is not only rude but also misleading and frankly, stupid.
Now nobody knows what Warp is anymore, because they want to be an Agentic IDE and that's not what the users want.
Do I have that right?
I don't see what the point of this OpenWarp fork is though, other than adding more provider support. Couldn't that just be upstreamed?
Nowadays it just tries to do so much and seems overwhelming. I'll probably still give it a try once it supports Nushell, but I'll need to spend some time disabling a ton of the extra features.
I liked it for the ability to type "git one-liner logs with date and author, no messages" and get the output without having to remember or look for actual formatting parameters.
I also get that's too niche of an use case, and not sustainable as a business. But still.
edit: Found this one article (via google) that talks about the terminal. I guess it was a terminal that you could "prompt" to do things and it would figure out the shell commands.
https://thenewstack.io/developer-review-of-warp-for-windows-...
If this community fork were to, for example remove all of the AI features, it would be valuable to me.
Note that we are going to add bring-your-own-model directly into Warp. Would love interested folks to weigh in on the discussion here: https://github.com/warpdotdev/warp/discussions/9619
I can run Claude Code there or whatever. But I personally don't need the AI in the terminal itself.
I just never did enough of it to keep going.
If they expanded this to be highly optimized for devops aka really well attuned to AWS CLI all the various linux commands, bash scripting and just had all of that baked right in - and - was super fact and didn't have to think to much - I can see that.
The reason being, your doing 'specific tasks at a meta level' - not designing complex things, or doing research.
More like Claude Code but not for code, for DevOps and or that kind of things.
I think 'Meta Prompting' should be a thing for many disciplines.
That said, the 'bitter pill' lesson is that the Tier 1 models just really get good at everything and often supersede custom solutions - which was the case for myself and Warp, I just 'did stuff in Claude' and it was good enough.
How exactly does it help with "terminal-based AI work"?
So alas this doesn't appear to be it.
I very much wish the OpenWarp folks would have made this clear on their README.md file.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936719
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47940669
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941398
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941581
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941712
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941782
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941974
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47942198
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943175
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947007
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47948005
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47952979
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47970965
I don't want this auto-detect agent request. The explicit toggle was perfect.
So not a terminal?
The AI stuff is layered on in a way where it doesn't get in the way. Very useful for command completion and stuff like that, without having to open claude.
Here I was hoping that somehow IBM had decided to open source it. That would have been fun. But I don't think that will ever happen.
Warp is now open-source
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936264
What the heck is warp???
I was pretty interested in it when it was just trying to be a modernized terminal. I still think some of the UI ideas are cool.
I was a happy user for a while, but eventually some bugs drove me back to iTerm2 (in my case, hanging forever after certain terraform commands finished). Ghostty has filled my need for a better terminal since then.