[embedding-shape]

Investors are finicky creatures, if you've been relying on VC-funding since before, it's hard to stop until you are really successful, and if everyone starts to only look at shiny AI stuff and you still need investors, you end up with not much choice.

I wish there was less of it, we'd have better software then, but :/

[esafak]

Would we? You can look at places with less funding and see how many software companies get off the ground.

[embedding-shape]

> You can look at places with less funding

Yeah, like FOSS which is drastically underfunded since birth, yet continues to put out software that the entire world ends up relying on, instead of relying on whatever VC-pumped companies are putting out.

I'm not talking "better software" as in "made a lot of money", I meant "better" as in "had a better impact on the world".

[esafak]

FOSS software is written by people working at companies that likely owe their existence to VC.

[weiliddat]

That sounds like more sign of recent times.

FOSS software that many rely on that has been around for a while were non-VC: VCS, Linux / GNU / BSD, web browsers, various programming languages, various databases...

[jedberg]

Many of your examples came from people who were funded by Universities in the 80s, which was basically the VC of the time. And in the 90s, a lot of the core committers of those projects were already working at VC funded companies.

Back then it was very normal to get VC funding and then hire the core committers of your most important open source software and pay them to keep working on it. I worked at Sendmail in the 90s and we had Sendmail committers (obviously) but also BSD core devs and linux core devs on staff. We also had IETF members on staff.

And we weren't unique, this happened a lot.

[weiliddat]

Thanks for the insight and history. Glad to be corrected.

Was it in a different nature to current VC funded FOSS though? It sounds like their contributions to FOSS was tangential and not the sold product?

Maybe a bit more like Google and Chrome?

[hodgesrm]

> FOSS software that many rely on that has been around for a while were non-VC: VCS, Linux / GNU / BSD, web browsers, various programming languages, various databases...

It's honestly hard to pick a pattern out for older open source project contributions. PostgreSQL started at UC Berkeley but people contributed to it from all over. Key engineers like Tom Lane worked a number of companies in the database field, some dependent on VC funding, some not. He's currently at Snowflake. [0] A lot of recent innovation around PostgreSQL today (Neon, Supabase, etc.) is VC funded.

That pattern changed with projects like Hadoop, which was about the time that VC funds recognized a standard playbook around monetizing open source. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lane_(computer_scientist)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudera

[rhplus]

Sure, those projects were un(der)funded in the 80s and 90s but the reason we talk about them today is because of the huge amount of investment - both direct and in kind - that VC backed companies have managed to give to many of them.

I think it’s easy to forget how long ago it was when FOSS truly was the outsider and wouldn’t be touched by most companies.

Mozilla/Firefox started in 1998 and then started taking ad revenue from Google in 2005, which pays for a large chunk of its development. It’s been part of the Silicon Valley money machine for 20 years, most of its existence.

[hrimfaxi]

What gave you that idea?

[esafak]

Because Silicon Valley, which contributes the majority of the code, is venture backed. For example, 84% of the Linux kernel's development is corporate: https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-foundation-growth-...

I don't know why people are so upset here.

[TheTaytay]

I don’t know why you are being downvoted. I mean, I guess I do, but sheesh, they are really shooting the messenger here. Maybe they are looking for more nuance: a lot of software is/was written by people working at…

I don’t think everything VCs touch is gold, but it’s also not the case that they are pure evil either. It’s almost as if you can’t claim they are all good or all bad.

[CodingJeebus]

I sometimes wonder if the VC ecosystem creates its own confirmation bias by making it easy to see and aggregate companies it incubates. Whenever I look for jobs, I'm always surprised to find companies that have taken no VC funding and don't try particularly hard to market to the industry as a whole, preferring instead to stay relatively under the radar.

They tend to have more grounded financials (read: paths to profitability) and while the pay packages aren't quite aligned with the top end of the market, they also tend to manage headcount more responsibly than FAANG. I work with a fairly niche stack and I'm constantly finding new companies that I've never heard of and don't raise VC rounds.

Long way of saying that just because they're not easy to find doesn't mean they don't exist.

[shimman]

What but? If this is the "best" that VC can do with the money, the US government should simply tax it away from them. Absolutely worse way to allocate resources and develop a robust forward looking tech industry, you're just chasing the shiny while fucking over the commons.

[embedding-shape]

Maybe my point wasn't clear, I agree with you. It's a bad way of allocating resources, and we'd had better software had we been without it.