[ruffrey]

Healthy skepticism is good. Dev tools are hard.

There are hundreds of open source companies - many making gobs of money. Not all - many fail. This team has name recognition and a few successful projects already - Babel and yarn. I can see it working out.

JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages. Millions of developers. With solid execution, there are monstrous markets here.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> There are hundreds of open source companies - many making gobs of money.

[citation needed]

It seems there may be many open source companies with tons of users, but they seem to struggle with monetization and turning those users into paying users.

Redhat which used to be the epitome of a company making money from open source got acquired by IBM.

A lot of other open source companies are switching to non-open source licenses.

[javamonn]

OSS Capital, which participated in the Rome Tools, Inc round, has compiled a list which includes commercial open source companies, revenue estimates, and how much VC raised: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17nKMpi_Dh5slCqzLSFBo...

[Aken]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/glennsolomon/2020/09/15/monetiz...

[gjhr]

34 billion dollars doesn't count as gobs of money?

[ttul]

Even though a company's software might be open source, the company does own the intellectual property of the open source project. It chooses what license under which the software should be offered and has the freedom to commercially exploit the software in ways that nobody else can.

That being said, a compiler toolchain is not so easily monetized as something like Grafana, which has obvious enterprise features that need filling in and which can be hosted as a cloud service, generating revenue that way.

I imagine the team has ideas for monetization, otherwise they would not have raised $4.5M from some top shelf venture capitalists. I would like to know what those ideas are.

[throwaway91_82]

this team also has had at least one example of unilateral non-open source decisionmaking https://www.vice.com/en/article/pawnwv/open-source-devs-reve...

[vosper]

Is it a given that because the software is open-source, the decision-making will be, too? Almost seems there should be a separate set of claims for what the decision-making process will be (like how there are various software licenses).

[ipsum2]

From the article:

> Eric Raymond, the founder of the Open Source Initiative and one of the authors of the standard-bearing Open Source Definition, said Kyle’s decision violated the fifth clause of the definition, which prohibits discrimination against people or groups.

[spenczar5]

Okay, so the issue wasn't decision-making, then, and you agree with the parent comment that open source need not have open decision-making?

[sebastianmck]

The Rome license will stay MIT.

[threatofrain]

Linus is probably a tie-breaker, and thus a unilateral decision maker for Linux when necessary too. What's the problem?

[m463]

> Dev tools are hard.

That's true. The market is small and price-sensitive.