[didibus]

What's missing from your assessment is how good the project itself is.

Maybe Evan is a liability, but he might also be the reason why VueJS is popular and valued in the first place.

It also seems pretty strange to me to count VSCode and GitLab in there, because those are worked on by companies with teams behind them that get paid and which will have constant churn.

If you took VueJS, and had a team at Microsoft take it over from Evan, it too would live on. So I don't know that your explanation for the "risk" here has anything to do with "very high impact" and more to do with a project being maintained by a community of backers, on people's free time, and a project maintained by a company that hires developers to work on it full time.

[sdesol]

> So I don't know that your explanation for the "risk" here has anything to do with "very high impact"

When talking about risk, I mean immediate as opposed to long term. Obviously, if you pay people to take over vuejs, they can, provided they are qualified that is. But there is still the ramp up period and the risk of losing undocumented knowledge that Evan has, specifically with his understanding of "what doesn't work".

> It also seems pretty strange to me to count VSCode and GitLab in there, because those are worked on by companies with teams behind them that get paid and which will have constant churn.

The vscode and gitlab project are included because they provide good data points for very fast moving projects, that can be used to help understand closed source software development. Also the development pattern behind vuejs certainly exists in the closed source world as well.

[didibus]

I think my criticism is I'm not really seeing where in your data is risk or quality or success of the project quantified and correlated to this "very high impact" conclusion.

It seems you're inferring this "risk" from a qualitative perspective. Like hypothetically, we can imagine VueJS being more at risk of being abandoned because there's only one big maintainer. But VueJS hasn't been abandoned, and is doing well. So does the data support this hypothetical? And I'm also not sure how abandonment relates to productivity. If GitLab the company folds, that project will probably stop being developed and be abandoned, same as if Evan stops working on VueJS. Which one is more likely? No one knows, but companies can abandon an open source product probably just as much as community contributors. So I feel it's more about which one is more likely to be picked up after the current maintainers abandon it.

[sdesol]

> It seems you're inferring this "risk" from a qualitative perspective

Yes this is correct, and I do want to make it clear that a project that is spearheaded by a single person like vuejs can still be a great product. And in no way am I trying to quantify "quality". I'm just saying, if you want to build a commercial/open source solution that uses vuejs vs react, angular, etc. this is the current state of its development/investment.

For some people/companies, this isn't an issue, because they feel the quality is worth the risk of having to take ownership of it themselves.

I guess the way that you should think about my statement is, "would you as a CTO for a company, be okay with having internal projects with development patterns like vuejs or would you try to create development patterns more like gitlab and vscode"