Top all-time · #1883
Cra.mr
Personal blog · cra.mr · on HN as zeegstartupsprogrammingai
Cra.mr is a personal blog at cra.mr about startups, programming and ai. Since 2018, 39 different Hacker News readers have linked it 60 times, most often “Open Source is not a Business Model”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters cite Cra's posts on whether open source is a business model, OpenTelemetry's complexity, the BUSL factor in fair-source licensing, and MCP versus CLI for agent context, usually as supporting links.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I write about software, building companies, and whatever else I'm obsessed with.
Most-linked posts?
- Open Source is not a Business Model3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-08-15
- Enterprise Is Dead3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-03-07
- MCP, Skills, and Agents3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-01-21
- /the-busl-factor2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-08-06
- Rethinking Tools in MCP2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-11
- You Suck at Marketing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-01-25
- Sentry: From the Beginning2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-11-01
- Product Market Fit2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-04
- Subagents with MCP2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-29
- Optimizing for Taste2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-09-27
What Hacker News says?
Neat! I checked out your source code, and if there's one comment I have, it's the way you query for comments. Currently, response times are around 300-400 ms for just 79 bytes of data. That's likely because you recursively fetch nested comments from a serverless function, which potentially has to make multiple network request to talk to the database. Coincidentally, a past Disqus employee has a great write up on the…
Comment linking /2010/05/30/scaling-threaded-comments-on-django-at-disqus/
on “Show HN: I'm working on a open-source, self-hosted alternative to Disqus”Submitted An Honest Review of Gatsby as a story · 181 points
HN discussionYou have nailed their issues - packaging and their revenue model. If you align this well with your target audience the license would have not been a problem for them. Wrote about this a bit here: https://cra.mr/open-source-is-not-a-business-model/
Comment linking /open-source-is-not-a-business-model/
on “CockroachDB license change”Submitted The problem with OpenTelemetry as a story · 168 points
HN discussionCramer wants to get traces out of OTel. Which is ironic because he's one of the creators of OpenTracing. https://cra.mr/the-problem-with-otel/
Comment linking /the-problem-with-otel/
on “I got OpenTelemetry to work. But why was it so complicated?”Submitted Open Source is not a Business Model as a story · 47 points
HN discussionThis is a good reminder to folks that Open Source isn't a business model [0] -- it's a distribution model. You have to figure out your business model if you want to survive. Good to see Briefer figuring this out early on. The decision to offer Cloud + Open Core is a great, well-traveled path. [0]: https://cra.mr/open-source-is-not-a-business-model/
Comment linking /open-source-is-not-a-business-model/
on “Going open-source as a VC-Backed company”Submitted Sentry: From the Beginning as a story · 40 points
HN discussionThe challenge with making statements like this is you're making them against not only the person who made the decisions, but also the person who holds 100% of the facts, and will openly share them. So lets talk about the facts, because the paint a pretty clear narrative, rather tha one that people would prefer to believe. 1. I built most of Sentry (back then), and while we had a few contributions here and there, it…
Comment linking /open-source-and-a-healthy-dose-of-capitalism
on “Pydantic Logfire”Submitted MCP Is Not Good, Yet as a story · 17 points
HN discussionLooks awesome! I went down the homelab-ish rabbit hole recently myself and it was probably the most fun I've had in a long time on a project. My goals were more about hosting a bunch of IoT stuff internally (sensors, cameras, etc), but I wrote up a bit about at least the rack/equipment here: http://cra.mr/my-journey-into-home-automation/ At some point, I'm hoping to dive a bit deeper on the software side, which was…
Comment linking /my-journey-into-home-automation/
on “Self-Hosted Homelab Website”Submitted Enterprise Is Dead as a story · 17 points
HN discussionNot sure if I still agree with what I wrote here, but related article from many years back: http://cra.mr/2011/03/08/building-cursors-for-the-disqus-api There's also an implementation in Sentry, that is probably too complex, awful code, and hard to read, but is open source if anyones curious: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/blob/master/src/sentry/u...
Comment linking /2011/03/08/building-cursors-for-the-disqus-api
on “The interesting ideas in Datasette”Submitted Enterprise Is Dead as a story · 8 points
HN discussion> No cloud provider even offers a hosted version of Sentry, so it's not like that's an issue for their business. https://cra.mr/the-busl-factor
Comment linking /the-busl-factor
on “GitButler is now fair source”Submitted Subagents with MCP as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI'm not talking about RedHat, I'm talking about the perspective that "FSL / BUSL aren't effective enough". They solve the problem. O'saasy is just freeware at the end of the day, FSL creates more open source, and BUSL often has (though unfortunately the license doesnt require it). The idea that FSL ~= Closed Source is entirely wrong and misunderstands the value that an open distribution gives. We have 10s of thousan…
Comment linking /the-busl-factor
on “O'saasy License Agreement”Submitted MCP Is Not Good, Yet as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI have written quite a lot on my personal blog about our decisions and been very transparent. In particular, the decision on switching to BUSL orgininally I talk about here: https://cra.mr/the-busl-factor Its worth remembering that licenses are just part of the packaging of a product - part of the distribution model. Sentry is successful because we quickly found product market fit, continued to iterate, and made an…
Comment linking /the-busl-factor
on “Sentry is now Fair Source”Submitted Open Source is not a Business Model as a story · 4 points
HN discussionCLI vs MCP debate misses the protocol's actual value prop: steering the agent: https://cra.mr/context-management-and-mcp
Comment linking /context-management-and-mcp
on “MCP is dead. Long live the CLI”Submitted You're Not a CEO as a story · 4 points
HN discussionDefinitely there exist customers one must fire, but the flip side is, some of them might have genuine complaints. ... an extremely popular marketing tool ... sending an equally excessive amount of data above what they were paying for. They were far less adamant about the product, and on some days I didn't even want them as a customer. If there was a minor blip in the service, they were the first to complain. Reminde…
Comment linking /a-seven-dollar-subscription
on “Anthropic Made a Big Mistake”Submitted Building an Intern as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Optimizing Content for Agents as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Built with Borrowed Hands as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted wtb: Progressive Spas as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted You're Not a CEO as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Work Life Balance as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Introducing Zeus as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
