[WJW]

Just off the top of my head:

- Could be "just" goodwill, paying this out of the marketing budget to strengthen brand recognition amongst developers.

- Goodwill amongst developers is not just a feelgood benefit btw. Being known for supporting open source projects might help with the hiring pipeline for example. Making current employees feel better about Shopify would presumably also reduce employees turnover rate, leading to lower recruiting costs.

- Shopify as a company is extremely dependent on "the web" for its business, and would benefit from it being built on open standards. Supporting a variety of browsers leads to more competition in the browser space, which would support Shopify in the long run (see also the classic "commoditize your complement" article: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ )

[marginalia_nu]

It's also a way of effectively funding a non-committal proxy war on big tech.

I think almost everyone can see that the status quo creates a bad business environment, the big G can dictate terms far too unilaterally and is dire need of competition. Funding this sort of development can be a long term strategy to upset the status quo without risking the entire business by going on some kamikaze pivot that puts you in direct competition with Google or Apple. That would be investor relations suicide.

It's a very safe bet. It doesn't work out, and they lose $100k and can write it off as marketing and get some goodwill out of it. If it works out, and they sabotage Google for $100k.

One may say this is unlikely to succeed, that they are too entrenched, if it wasn't for the fact that this exact move succeeded already with Microsoft and Linux in the '90s.

Linus had nothing to his name but a janky Minix knockoff, and the entire userspace was filled with Richard Stallman's bizarre menagerie of hippie software. Does that seem like plausible competition for Microsoft, who at the time was by far the wealthiest software company in the world?

Well, as it turns out, yeah, Linux became one hell of a fly in the ointment for them.

[davnicwil]

I'd say the amount donated (100k) suggests it can only really be marketing budget (possibly folding recruitment into this).

For an organisation of Shopify's size it's way too low an amount to invest if they expect significant strategic advantage from actually using the software.

[WJW]

Investment size does suggest that, but I don't think it is as clear-cut as you say.

First, Ladybird is basically a one-man project and I don't think they are really looking to become a company as such. This means there is a practical maximum you can invest even if it was a very important project. The effect of investing 500k would be basically the same as investing 100k (ie, de dev behind can now work on the project full-time) and if you invest too much that might make it a shopify-exclusive project. If the goal is to sponsor a new widely used open source browser it makes sense not to monopolize it too much, because then people wouldn't see the project as "open" anymore. Now there can still be other sponsors.

Second, a project like this probably has a fairly low chance of actually succeeding in gaining market share from one of the big browsers. If shopify actually has some type of Strategic Investment Budget for commoditizing complements and the like, it would probably make sense to split it VC-style over many small projects rather than making big bets on only a few projects. If one of the small projects gains traction, you can always support it more when needed.

[davnicwil]

You make good points, and yeah of course there may be a behind-the-scenes understanding that further funding will be made available as needed / when specific goals are hit, that's true!