---
title: "Public Goods Need Room to Grow"
date: 2026-07-22
canonical: https://solmaz.io/x/2079994048631476506/
x_url: https://x.com/onusoz/status/2079994048631476506
license: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
---

There is an inherent unfairness in this industry

If you are Anthropic, Cursor or another billion dollar company, you can do growth hacks and guerrilla marketing techniques like putting your brand into every commit of a user, and get away with it

But if a tool like pi, opencode or even say vim or emacs tried to do that, they would be boo'ed

Like, it happened to @herdrdev recently

There was a feature where it asked if it could star the repo for you at startup, with exponential backoff if you said no. I thought it was a pretty smart and balanced thing to do

Then apparently someone complained it was a dark pattern, and it got removed

So WHAT if it is a dark pattern?

You know what is the darkest? A public good losing out.

If monopolists can do growth hacks, creators of public goods should be allowed to do it as well!

In fact, I would say that if you benefit from those public goods, you are morally obliged not to criticize this stance

Of course, we cannot expect e.g. @pidotdev or @openclaw to make this a default feature

Therefore, I created the packages pi-must-win and openclaw-must-win

Install them with:

pi install npm:pi-must-win
openclaw plugins install npm:openclaw-must-win

They will add noreply@pi.dev and noreply@openclaw.ai as co-committers to code developed through these projects

Overall, I propose the "X-must-win" naming scheme for plugins that independently add guerilla marketing into open source projects

This absolves the creators of any "sin" and gives the community a way to support the growth of a project

Open source must win!

Repos are in the links below.

*Part 1/2 of a thread; root: https://solmaz.io/x/2079994048631476506/*