@dang, second reply and apologies, now I know what you mean, I edited some part away which you probably meant and which is still in quotes of others' comments. Sorry, I'll try to improve and thanks for the hint!
> In no world would taking VC funding have been easier.
Did I say that? Or that Rich should have taken the easier path? No, everyone should always take the harder path. But this is a deeper discussion.
> I don’t normally mean to sound uncharitable but your original comment is pretty uncharitable to Rich,
But your tone towards me is better?
> That you don’t see this speaks volumes to your understanding of how any of this works.
If you think so, fine, but I'm pretty sure that I've raised more money and more rounds than you but this shouldn't qualify me to be right or wrong. I focus on what you write and what I've written and I think I brought good arguments that a market turned into a monopoly and this is not great. Can we blame Rich, probably not. Can be disappointed and still respecting him? Yes.
Can't follow you, what do you mean/where did I cross into personal attacks? I highly appreciate Rich but the elephant in the room had to be addressed, especially on HN.
I wonder that I am the only one that questions his move and that you also approach me instead of welcoming a healthy debate. Whatever, I guess you just do your job.
Btw, when does HN get proper pagination and a darkmode?
Do I get shadowbanned now for asking too many questions?
Rich, I know where you come from, and I wholeheartedly believe what you say. But this is just the start of a relationship between you and Vercel. And you know that relationships will change over time and so on. And you won't.be.independent. There is just too much money on the table. Nobody will give you orders, there are much smarter ways.
The point is, Vercel did everything right, no blame to them, great CEO, awesome Tim, they are masterminds and their great social media army does their best to celebrate this event in all social networks atm. But you know yourself very well that one player just left the market. We will face less competition and possibly stagnation in some areas. This doesn't hurt Vercel nor you but us.
Ofc you will be dependent, they pay you, you want Vercel to be successful (ESOP). We will see, e.g. that Vercel will be a first-class citizen as deployment option. There are many more fields where Vercel can/will get a special treatment, so subtly that nobody will get it. Business is more sophisticated than many might think.
Or think this the way around, there endless possibilities to drive somebody down, demotivate and degenerate him to a point where he looses all his drive and motivation. Look at yourself today, look how much energy and charisma you have when holding speeches about Svelte. In 2 years, go back to this comment and ask yourself if you are the same energetic Rich, if you are happy and if sold out too early 2 year ago.
> I would be the worst person in the world to try and build a business around Svelte.
No you just underestimate yourself. What are you doing right now? Giving talks, writing, communicating. People, masses follow you not just because Svelte is great, no because you can communicate well and know how to lead people. This is what a CEO is doing 99% of his day. This is building a business, communicating, finding and winning the best people.
You found already the best people, just look in your repos and look which contributors work for Svelte! And you were the leader, had an as good team as Vercel and follow now...
And if I watch you talking there is a strong desire to be more (not that a dev is less!). Whatever, I'd have expected that you at least went shopping with Vercel's offer to CloudFlare. I mean they do real rocket science (Durable Objects) and you opt for Next which started to renovate their stack (esm, swc) just recently after years.
Oh man, I like you too much to be too angry but yeah, not happy.
Yes sure and it's not Vercel's fault that there's no other competitor left out there. I would have hired Rich as well if I were Vercel. But the market will suffer because one (and the better) player just left the market. We can only blame Rich who got weak but yeah, nobody is perfect.
Not sure if this topic is worth our time to debate. There are millions of ways of subtly controlling/influencing entities. And it's much easier if you pay money, ESOP and pay even more money if future goals and exits come alive.
This is the standard narrative when OSS contributors got hired but ok, I'd write the same.
But then just tell us what was the motivation of Vercel's shareholders and CEO to acquire Rich for such a high price (he is the compensation and ESOP you pay absolutely worth) but what's your gain? "Just supporting Rich and helping the project grow" or just buying him out of the market?
Why is this 'awesome news' for us devs, the market and competition if one vendor now controls all modern SSR frameworks plus significant parts of the tool chain (swc)?
Next just bought its biggest upcoming competitor—SvelteKit. Next is the best that React has to offer but it still has flaws. Svelte and SvelteKit are so awesome you cannot believe it before you've built something bigger and so much ahead of the entire React ecosystem.
We migrated a huge/complex React app in a month and the difference is night and day (performance/bundle size/dev productivity). React was great but it's time to move on.
I'm disappointed by Rich. Instead of thinking bigger, raising money (it would have been so easy, Rich, instead of doing proud conference talk after talk why didn't you talk to a VC??)—he just cashed out (sky-high compensation and ESOP). Not a rant and to give you some background, one major reason we went with SvelteKit was not to rely on the Next team. And now, I am again with them...
Now we have a monopoly of rare, modern SSR frameworks.
Agreed. It took me half a day and I came not remotely to the UX and performance of coc.vim. Most incl. the nvim team are not aware that eg. tsserver is the fastest and most responsive code formatter for TS (yes, it goes beyond the LSP spec but that's how it is, also for historical reasons). Prettier does not come close.
Maybe they've never tried or deliberately ignore coc.vim for whatever reason. coc.vim works almost out of the box, has the fastest and most pragmatic maintainer who helps anyone and tsserver makes it as good and as fast as VS Code. Instead of just cloning coc.vim's tsserver implementation—or why do they no contribute to coc.vim??—roll their own inferior solution, years later. It's not that nvim's LSP implementation is at its beginning and we can expect more is coming, no the maintainers just do not know or ignore the status quo. Feels very much like Bram a decade ago.
So many memories. From a time far away. Before I got my first Macbook. When computer were honest. When the underlying OS was ugly and nobody cared if apps used their own style.