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Public story · 2026-08-07 · high
The 224-point Hacker News reaction was about the license swap, not the funding, since Herdr gave no monetization plan.
Why now: The license change landed in the same post that confirmed Herdr's YC acceptance, which is what set off the Hacker News debate.
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.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Both cover Apache, CLIs; overlapping topics (agent, clis, coding); earlier Apache coverage from 2026-02-24.
Shared entities / Shared topic
Both cover Apache, Herdr; overlapping topics (agent, apache 2, direction).
Shared entity: AGPL / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Both cover AGPL; overlapping topics (agent, coding, terminal); earlier AGPL coverage from 2026-05-14.
Shared entity: Apache / Shared topic / Tension
Both cover Apache; overlapping topics (agent, apache 2, background); pushes against this story (but).
Shared entity: SSH / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Both cover SSH; overlapping topics (agent, terminal); earlier SSH coverage from 2026-08-05.
Shared entity: Roughly / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Both cover Roughly; overlapping topics (agent, terminal); earlier Roughly coverage from 2026-07-13.
Shared entity: Apache / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Both cover Apache; overlapping topics (agent, coding); earlier Apache coverage from 2026-06-10.
Shared entity: CLIs / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Both cover CLIs; overlapping topics (agent, clis, coding); earlier CLIs coverage from 2026-07-29.