[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.