[royletron]

Is it me or is Remix sort of a weird, and slightly sketchy flip of the OSS money making pipe? I understand that people can take open source projects and turn a business around them by providing hosting (Vercel/Next for example), but having people 'invest' in an open source framework just seems fundamentally wrong. What is the payout for those investors, what have Shopify actually given (and to whom) for what it has 'aquired' here? Also what of the $3m Remix 'raised' last October, where has that gone, what did those people get in return? I just fail to see where the return is on all of this...

[lewisflude]

The remix team own the name, and npm package distribution rights. The money is used to fund development. I think you've got some good points here around the weirdness that happens when someone builds a business around something that is fundamentally open. In theory, someone could hard fork remix, rename it and do their own thing.

The moat they've built is around the specific team working on remix, the remix community, the remix name, npm distribution rights etc.

The "return" for investors will probably come in the form of selling highly integrated services (like vercel). But right now it seems to be mostly about growing remix to a critical mass. As a user, I've really enjoyed building projects with remix and I think they've built a solid community.

Good article you might find interesting: https://robertcooper.me/post/reflecting-on-remix-open-source...

[royletron]

This is great, thanks for the link. I suppose I just find it strange that they haven't yet suggested what the revenue generation is for them as a whole. I only say this anecdotally, but I am pretty certain Next/Vercel/Zeit, Deno, Gatsby and Apollo all fired off their funding based on the revenue generation from their companion commercial offerings - and funding was for the revenue generating parts not specifically the OSS.

As for Remix as a whole, I'd be interested in hearing more opinion on what makes it successful? Right now I am totally invested/obsessed in Next, tRPC & Prisma as our stack of choice!