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by fragmede 347 days ago
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?
2 comments
harrisi 347 days ago
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.

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fragmede 347 days ago
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.

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harrisi 347 days ago
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.

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owebmaster 347 days ago
> 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.

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