[harrisi]

As someone that's been saying Vercel should be avoided for years now, it's nice to finally start seeing more hesitation from others.

They now, to varying degrees, directly employ core maintainers for Svelte, SvelteKit, React, Next, and now Nuxt. This is a very clear systematic overtaking of the web ecosystem. They're a private business, so these moves must be in the interest of increasing profits. It's not just out of the goodness of their hearts.

It's somewhat unfortunate that technical and business-savvy people would both, in my experience, disregard a study saying tobacco is good if it's funded by RJR, and be excited about a giant tech company employing core maintainers for the majority of new web-related software projects. Yes, they're open source projects that you can fork. But if Vercel has influence in the direction of these projects (and of course they do) it should give people much more hesitation to use them than it seems to.

At this point, using any of the technologies that Vercel has its hands in tells me that whatever uses it - a business, project, whatever - doesn't plan to function in five years.

[fragmede]

Given that Vercel was founded 10 years ago, and they sell services for money, and then take that money and use that to pay people to work on various technologies; why would that make it less likely to be around in 5 years vs a person who isn't getting paid and is doing an open source project with no visual means of support? How do their bills get paid?

[harrisi]

I'm not saying Vercel won't exist, they almost certainly will.

What I mean is that the goal seems likely to be to influence how software development is done in every way possible, from deployment to client code. Vendor locking, with even more control. I'd pitch Vercel as "Heroku's growth plan but more control of everything." Maybe with a bit of EEE thrown in, but who knows.

[fragmede]

Where's the "even more control" though? A proprietary closed source version of the same would be the other way to do it, but then it would be closed source.

If we want open source to be viable we have to support actually having businesses around it. Vercel making it easy to deploy to their servers seems like a fairly decent business model compared to some of the other options.

[harrisi]

I would love if Vercel paid all the people in the teams I mentioned earlier, told them to do whatever they want, and checked in only to make sure they had enough snacks. But that's probably not the case. Vercel employs these people. To some degree, simplistically, the employees are there to further the goals of the company.

I don't claim to know their plans. I've never been in charge of a multibillion dollar company. I just think I have a vague idea of what their general strategy is, and I don't love it.

I'll also say that I definitely want open source projects to succeed. I don't know how they can in a great way in a capitalist system. So maybe this is, from my standpoint, the best of a bad situation. I still think it's worth pointing out and paying attention to from a free software and business position.

Also just want to say thanks for what seems to be a genuine discussion in good faith.

[owebmaster]

> How do their bills get paid?

With Vercel hiring all framework creators, we will never know. Maybe that is what it will take to get hired by tech companies next: create a world-famous open source framework.