Herdr drops AGPL for Apache-2.0 on its way into YC

Herdr switched its license from AGPL to Apache-2.0 while joining Y Combinator, per the company's blog post. The tool runs as a background server that owns coding agents' terminal sessions, so work with Claude Code or another CLI agent keeps running through a closed laptop lid, a dropped SSH connection, or any other disconnect, then shows up in a queue marked working, blocked, or done.

It's picked up roughly 25,000 GitHub stars, 349,668 installs, and 510 community plugins, with native detection built for 19 different agent CLIs. Herdr wraps none of the agents it tracks. It just holds their terminals open.

The 224-point Hacker News thread that followed wasn't about the funding. Commenters zeroed in on the license move, since AGPL is usually the license startups add right before taking venture money, not the one they drop. It forces anyone running a modified version as a network service to release their source. Herdr gave that up for the permissive Apache-2.0 the same week it took on investors, and the founder's post didn't lay out how the company plans to make money.