[gkoberger]

I didn’t like the tone of this. Building a company is hard. Building an VC-backed open source product is really, really hard.

I know on HN we don’t always love CEOs, and that’s okay… the ethos of startups has changed over the past 10 years, and tech has shifted away from tinkerers and more toward Wall Street. But Ryan Dahl isn’t doing that; he’s a tinkerer and a builder.

I dunno, I just don’t like this vibe of “what have you done for me recently” in this post, especially given he skipped over the company and is calling out Ryan directly for some reason. Ryan is responsible for many of our careers; Node is the first language I really felt at home with.

Comparing him to Nero is gross.

[evbogue]

Agreed about the article tone. I'm a Deno lifer over here, and will definitely not try to cover up the mistakes they've made along the way or the trouble their deploy product has had over the past few months. Ryan Dahl is obviously polarizing as a personality for many people, always has been since he decided to "hate almost all software" or even before that when he created Node.js.

I don't use Fresh. Serverless is kind of a weird offering that forces developers to do a lot of work to adjust their programs to running all over the place. I even wish Deno had never supported NPM because that ruined their differentiator.

I'm going to keep using Deno and I hope they use this opportunity to refocus on their core product offering so that I can move back to using it from this VPS that is hosting all of my Deno servers right now.

[KyleJune]

I'm planning on using Deno long term too and have also made some contributions to their standard library. But I completely disagree with you on NPM support. I think that gap early on contributed to bun's success. I almost quit using it because of how difficult it was to use react with Deno. Now it's pretty easy to use react and other npm packages with Deno. Before that, a lot of the most popular packages were just forks of npm packages adapted for Deno, but not as well maintained since less people were using them. Then deduping dependencies was just harder when they were all urls. If your package had a dependency using a different version url, you'd need an import map just to remap them all to using the same version. I'm pretty happy with the current deno.json with jsr and npm compatibility.

[afavour]

As someone who has mostly just tinkered with this stuff (while using Node extensively at work) I see two truths:

- Deno initially seemed like something a number of us were clamouring for: a restart of the server JS ecosystem. ES modules from the start, more sensibly thought out and browser compatible APIs, etc etc

- that restart is incompatible with the business goals of a VC funded startup. They needed NPM compatibility but that destroyed the chances of a restart happening.

I’m just sticking with Node. I know Deno and Bun are faster and have a few good features (though Node has been cribbing from them extensively as time has gone on). I just don’t trust a VC backed runtime to keep velocity in the long term.

[josephg]

Personally I've moved to bun. Its basically identical to node out of the box - almost all nodejs projects just work. But its usually faster. And it can run typescript files directly. And it has a JS bundler & minifier built in. And it can --watch for changes.

I hope nodejs copies these features. They're great.

[pas]

node has watch now too

bun is not bad, but for me consistently slower than pnpm for dependency management, and unfortunately I hit a very strange async runtime bug with it, so ended up just going with node

[ameliaquining]

Would something else that wasn't a VC-funded startup really work better? The technical problem seems fundamental.

[afavour]

Yes, the technical problem is fundamental. But if Deno managed to be a truly great runtime that solved a lot of people’s gripes with Node and made ES modules etc the price of admission for using it there would have been momentum to create a new module ecosystem.

But once you add that NPM compatibility layer the incentives shift, it just isn’t worth anyone’s while to create new, modern modules when the old ones work well enough.

It all feels similar to the Python 2 vs 3 dilemma. They went the other way and hey, it was a years long quagmire. But the ecosystem came out of it in a much better place in the end.

[KyleJune]

It wasn't worth recreating packages everytime you needed something that Deno had. If you ended up needing something and there was already something on npm for it, it was easier to just switch back to using node than to adapt/maintain a fork or alternative to an npm package. I think the lack of npm compatibility earlier on led to a lot of churn. Deno would probably be dead if they never improved the npm compatibility, especially considering the rise of bun promising performance improvements like Deno, but with better node compatibility at the time.

[pjmlp]

The big difference is that Python 3 was still CPython going forward, there was no one left to fork CPython 2 into an incompatible direction.

Or like Wayland and X.Org Server.

Quite different than an alternative that comes out of nowhere, expecting users to migrate.

[evbogue]

As an early Deno purist I must invoke the 10 Mistakes talk that Ryan gave when he launched Deno: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA&t=11s&pp=ygUScnlhb...

[rewgs]

Holy shit, a wild Everett Bogue sighting. I read your blog way back. Hope you’re doing well!

[evbogue]

lol, email me! I'm still an active user. [e-mail] or 773-510-8601

[phpnode]

Agreed. It is very easy to criticise if you've never been in the hot seat, and if you've never had to make tough decisions like this. As far as I can tell this person has never run a business with actual employees.

If Dahl had posted the typical layoff announcement people would be criticising that too.

[simonw]

Yeah, the tone felt off to me too. It felt a bit too much like a celebration of "look how right I was" concerning their earlier posts.

[Aldipower]

True! Love to Ryan from my heart. He came around the corner with Node just in the right moment when ActionScript3 started to die and I seamlessly could continue my career and building things. Still to today.. Things with Deno are very ambitious and hard to establish in this space. The blog post is embarrassing.

[pjmlp]

JavaScript on the server goes all the way back to Netscape days with LiveWire.

[Aldipower]

Yes, I have a SGI Indigo2 with NetScape FastTrack with server-side JavaScript running in my basement! But it is not the same as Node though. ;-)

I am selling it btw! Look at the CRT-screenshots. :-) https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/sgi-indigo-2-mit-nets...

[pjmlp]

Oh man, it is really cool, hope it gets a nice new owner.

[GTP]

> Comparing him to Nero is gross.

Just an historic curiosity: Nero setting Rome on fire is just a legend. At the time, there was a fire every other day due to wooden houses and poor to nonexistent safety. I even heard somewhere that Nero actively tried to help some people escaping from the fire by opening his residence's doors. So the comparison with Nero could still be correct, but for another reason: someone being wrongly blamed.

[nine_k]

Is there a good example of an Open Source project that was born out of VC money? Not a failed attempt of hockey-stick growth that open-sources its code upon shutting down commercial operation, but a genuinely healthy FOSS project that started as a VC-funded company, and still is going strong?

In my opinion, FOSS and VC have opposite goals and attitudes: openness, organic growth, staying free vs moat, meteoric growth fueled by marketing, turning a huge profit. I don't see how they could be compatible in the long term, unless the FOSS project is a gateway drug into a proprietary ecosystem.

[hardwaregeek]

Agreed. I was skeptical of Deno and I think their package management story was a mistake. But the people were still trying to make JavaScript better and doing so out of genuine love for the language. I especially feel for the employees who put in several years of their life, with the resulting opportunity cost.

[verdverm]

> calling out Ryan directly for some reason

Accountability starts and stops at the top. Many CEOs (CxOs) get called out. Personally, I want to write something similar about Bluesky leadership, who have fumbled hard multiple times since peaking, and have now "raised funding" from Bain Capital (private equity).

[ixtli]

its so strange to see so many people who will never be handed 5 million dollars to write a vm jumping in front of criticism for one guy that did. sorry but when you become a public figure in this way you should expect to be subjected to a different sort of public scrutiny than, say, a rank and file employee who they pay.

i will begin to care about a CEOs feelings when they put the wellbeing of their employees before their own. not saying that the Deno CEO has done anything on the order of the raw aggression we see from other CEOs in our industry but, as they say, if you cant take the heat stay out of the kitchen.

[phpnode]

These things are easy to say but just because someone has the title CEO doesn't mean they're automatically void of human feelings. I'm sure you understand there's a big gap between a Ryan Dahl and a Satya Nadella, despite them sharing the same job title.

[atherton94027]

Well the people who get laid off also have feelings, not sure why we should care more about the ceo's feelings so much that we shouldn't criticize them

[phpnode]

I'm not saying that we should care more for the CEO, but that we should have empathy for someone who is, ultimately, an engineer who built something and gave it away for free, watched everyone else around him get rich off the back of his hard work, and then tried to do something worthwhile again and still chose to give it away for free. There's a lot of immoral CEOs out there, I'm yet to see evidence that Dahl is one of them.

[verdverm]

> There's a lot of immoral CEOs out there, I'm yet to see evidence that Dahl is one of them.

I don't see any such claim in the post. The criticism is about Ryan the CEO, not Ryan the person.

Besides the title, from the end of the post:

> I’m not trying to hate on Dahl but c’mon bro you’re the CEO. What’s next for Deno? Give ~me~ ~users~ anyone a reason to care.

Perhaps you know Ryan and read too much into the criticism?

[verdverm]

> void of human feelings

What if we reframe this about how the CEO treats their users and employees? Why does Ryan deserve to be free from criticism?

[phpnode]

Do you have any special insight here or are you speculating? I'm not saying that he should be free from criticism, but that we should try and have some empathy for people who try things even if they fail, particularly when they've offered their services to the community for free for the last 5+ years (much longer when considering node.js)

[verdverm]

> Do you have any special insight here or are you speculating?

I'm trying to understand why you carve an exception for this one individual.

When I worked in restaurants, the owner and I had a very interesting conversation after hours, and with beers, about his thoughts and feelings being responsible for the well being and livelihood of everyone that worked there. It was a positive moment, I thought I had a great boss, I work my ass off for him.

A year later I found he was trimming hours off of my paycheck. I quit on the spot. Months later I heard he did the same to the waitstaff tips and it wasn't much longer before it all fell apart.

People can appear very different publicly than privately, and they can change over time.

[abnercoimbre]

The reverse is true: asshole bosses who do right by workers quietly. Sometimes they're public assholes and privately terrible though. But sometimes (perhaps very rarely) they're openly caring AND do the right thing behind curtains.

I'm not saying anything groundbreaking here. Humanity is complex and varied.

[colesantiago]

Some businesses don't need to be VC backed though.

That is the problem.

[gkoberger]

Agreed. But building something new takes capital, and it’s really hard to find it for an open source tool.

FWIW, it worked for Bun (at least for the VCs and employees), so there is a model there that works.

[the_gipsy]

Deno started as a clean slate, no npm. Three years in, they decided to scrap it because they thought they wouldn't get enough users the promised way.

So what does Deno offer now, exactly? The free parts just sound like a pretext to pull you into some paid solutions.

It can be hard to run a company, even harder to make a buck, but at the same time we can still be allowed to say how much they suck at it.

[dangoodmanUT]

Yeah, on top of that bringing in social media politics into it is weird, makes it hard to take this as pure/useful criticism

[echelon]

Fuck this blog post.

I'll say it.

This author is being an asshole and punching good people when they're down.

We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us). Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country they do business in...

How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort?

I don't even like JavaScript, but I applaud what these folks are trying to do.

At least they're trying.

Can't even get a decent round of applause.

[gkoberger]

Yeah, I was being nice, but this writer upset me. He sees Ryan Dahl as Nero, but he’s a lot closer to Robin Hood.

[wahnfrieden]

If Robin Hood was CEO presiding over a hierarchy of wage workers, with VC backing to shoot for unicorn status

[gkoberger]

He may have the same title, but he’s way closer to an engineer than Elon/Bezos/etc.

My analogy was taking VC money and using it to build an open source tool.

[saghm]

> We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us). Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country they do business in...

> How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort?

According to the article, Deno raised over $25 million from venture capital. Unless you're disputing that, it seems a bit disingenuous to criticize corporations but call this an "open source effort"

[echelon]

I'm sick of open source "purism" too.

It's almost all caused by the OSI.

The OSI is owned and operated by the hyperscalers, who benefit from this in-fighting and license purity bullshit.

Is the only open source free labor? Some people think so.

Are open core and fair source licenses invalid? Yeah - let's make everything BSD/MIT so managed versions can go live inside AWS and GCP and make those companies billions, while the original authors see limited or no upside.

The fact is - open source needs salients to attack the hyperscalers. It needs to pay its engineers. It needs to expand and grow. One of the ways to do that is building a business around it. Another way is building an open core plus services that drive revenue to sustain and grow the business.

Having VC money doesn't invalidate what's being done. It helps the experiment evolve faster.

Nobody's here complaining about Google and Microsoft and Amazon, yet that's where 99.9% of our ire should be directed. And yet we're pouring venom on this small and valiant effort.

We dump on Redis and Elastic while they're being torn to shreds and eaten by trillion dollar giants.

This entire conversation has become perverted to the point we're no longer talking about what matters: freedom to operate independently of the giants that control the world.

Instead we're complaining about people taking a risk, trying to actually do something impactful that matters.

[Imustaskforhelp]

I will agree with the sentiment that a lot of these companies even pivot from open source because its quite hard to make money from open source in general, and yes the point of hyperscalers taking the same code and selling it as their own service at cheaper rates/ more integratability with other suite of products is also another point.

[vatotemking]

I get what you mean mate. Could have said the same but you said it better.

[saghm]

I'm pretty confused about what your point is at this point. No one can throw rocks at an open source effort, except for ones that cross a certain threshold of capital? I don't buy the argument that it's impossible for any company smaller than Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. to be a bad actor who deserves to be called out. I don't know enough about Deno to make my own judgment on whether they're a bad actor or not, but I don't find your arguments here to be particularly compelling that trying to criticize them is unfair.

[CrimsonRain]

OSI is a plague and many people here swear by it blindly. They hate the big hyperscalers but play right into their arms.

[pjmlp]

To the point with exception of Emacs, GCC and the Linux kernel, we can assert the GPL is dead for most practical purposes.

[prmoustache]

sorry but your post makes no sense.

Open source is a kind of licenses. Hyperscalers are a kind of service providers.

You cannot oppose these 2, these are completely unrelated concepts.

[patmorgan23]

The hyper scalers are built on running and offering managed versions of open source software (Linux, reddis, postgres, elastic, java, python, JavaScript/node, docker, kubernetes,etc)

[echelon]

That's cute to think that they're unrelated, but open source is fundamentally about freedom.

The walls around us are constantly being built up and caving in. Hyperscalers are trying to own more and more of the commons.

The web is becoming atrophied, search is a sales funnel, communication is taxed, we're about to be asked to use ID to use the Internet, ... everything is being stolen from us.

The two could not possibly be more related.

[prmoustache]

Hyperscalers are well defined entities.

Open source is just a family of licenses. Nobody is "open source". There is no single entity nor there is a single unified community with shared values behind it. There are just many many projects/applications developped by entitites completely different in nature from the single hobbyist developer to the giant hyperscalers you mention with pretty much everything inbetween with vastly different goals, sizes, profesionalism, funding. And there are many different reasons to choose an open source license, some do it to attract contributions, others for the freedom it offers to the users and developpers, some want to force the license to stay the same, others do not mind if forks are proprietary, some companies will just do that for the optics/marketing and have more featureful version of their product sold under a proprietary license, etc, etc. You can't just put them all under a single "open source" banner and pretend "they" (whoever they are) need to fight against anyone else.

[bombcar]

I'm just annoyed that decimation would be a 10% layoff; standard if even weak-sauce these days. Too many people use "kill one in ten" to mean "kill them all, let God sort it out."

[Leszek]

Be careful to check whether you're in a glass house before throwing stones - "layoff" used to mean a temporary release from employment for seasonal labour before it meant a permanent one (https://www.etymonline.com/word/layoff). "Standard" as an adjective also used to mean "being held to a standard of excellence" rather than "normal" or "average". It's ok for words to change meaning over time.

[piva00]

Semantic drift has always happened and will always happen in languages.

Decimation has been commonly used as a synonym for absolute destruction for a long time, being annoyed by it is wasted energy, better to let it go and accept the new meaning.

[ajkjk]

at a practical level that word hasn't meant "one in ten" for like, decades. probably just need to get used to it.

[fuzzy_biscuit]

Etymology is not usage though. I get where you're coming from, but fighting vernacular is all but useless outside of academia.