I guess I'm not a fan of seeing investors money expand it's control over the open source ecosystem. I like open source because it empower the little guys. But I don't expect others to share my values and perspective and perhaps Rich Harris turns out to be a robinhood. Why not doing something like the creator of Vue? With that said I look forward to see what comes out of their shop. Good luck :)
People downvoting...I've bootstrapped my own business so I can speak my mind freely and don't mind being disliked, as long as my customers like my work.
Now for today's topic:
1) life 101: nobody gives you money for nothing
2) If they give you 5% they will act as if they have given you 90%, it will happen gradually
3) Vercel is seeking monopoly over front-end deployment using investors money and buying open source contributors, of all the major frameworks, they would have done the same with ReactJS and Vue if they could and they will try doing it with any framework that gains momentum. It is a fine strategy, not my cup of tea.
4) I'd rather support bootstrapped business and solo developers
5) I personally wonder how someone with the portfolio of Rich Harris couldn't manage to get sufficient sponsorship to go full-time given how much value he has generated to the community, I think this is something open source community need to tackle, perhaps crypto can help contributors make money earning easier? How about 1 token for each download, fork or install something like that that would help open source contributors generate money just by creating value...something is really broken here and I think there is a room to innovate with micropayments, I mean we know the likes, forks, issues, we have the entire repo content, we have the history of the contributors, given all the fuss about crypto, I wonder why haven't we seen anything in that direction yet, am I missing something? I think monetization of open source should be built within the platform (Github or some modern alternative), with different options on how contributors can run their content creation business. They can choose to give it free, free up to a point, or charge from day one, it is still open source, etc. Lots of room for innovation.
6) Many people share my mindset, but afraid to speak out, so here it, is plain and simple.
I guess I'm not a fan of seeing investors money expand it's control over the open source ecosystem. I like open source because it empower the little guys. But I don't expect others to share my values and perspective and perhaps Rich Harris turns out to be a robinhood. Why not doing something like the creator of Vue? With that said I look forward to see what comes out of their shop. Good luck :)