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How do investors feel about this? Being a dev myself and knowing how the sausage is made and how FOSS is the casing that holds it all together, this investment

How do investors feel about this? Being a dev myself and knowing how the sausage is made and how FOSS is the casing that holds it all together, this investment makes perfect sense. But I can also see how investment types would complain, it doesn't exactly look like an investment in the books.

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vlunkr 4y ago
Hopefully by this point investors know that Shopify both relies on and contributes to lots of FOSS.
mstipetic 4y ago
Shopify has more than 5 billion usd in revenue. I don’t think investors care much
jeromegv 4y ago
Shopify is built with Ruby. The whole tech stack depends on it. Paying for that software is one way or another is a normal business expense.
- Tabular-Iceberg 4y ago
  >Paying for that software is one way or another is a normal business expense. It should be, but conventional bookkeeping hasn't really kept up with the economic realities of this industry. Same reason why they fail to account tech debt as a liability, refactoring as amortization and debugging as interest payments.
canucklady 4y ago
Shopify is the Canadian meme stock. When I worked there everyone I met knew about them, not because of the product, but because the news loved to talk about Canada's one domestic tech success in the last 10 years. During the pandemic they briefly became Canada's most valuable company, and then lost all their gains for the past 2 years, then did a stock split because it was trendy with retail investors. They have a ton of terrific engineers but the nouveau riche people from the IPO are largely insufferable, and the amount of reverence for tobi inside and outside of the company is just unhinged.
jrockway 4y ago
This amount of money is well within what you'd expect to pay for various proprietary software packages. You can probably add up all unused-but-not-deleted VMs, S3 buckets, and their payroll/vacation tracking software and you're at 1 million dollars. I've started responding to "hey, do you want to talk to sales?" messages with "sure", just to see what stuff costs in the real world. Everything is 5 or 6 figures, even static website hosting. I wouldn't pay $20,000 a month to host a static website, but someone must be, because that's what people are asking for on these calls. I can see a world where you say yes to even a few of these vendors, and the cost of securing the entire Ruby ecosystem looks like a rounding error in comparison. At the end of the day, I doubt the investors care. If they want to cut costs, there are much better ways.

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vlunkr 4y ago

Hopefully by this point investors know that Shopify both relies on and contributes to lots of FOSS.

mstipetic 4y ago

Shopify has more than 5 billion usd in revenue. I don’t think investors care much

jeromegv 4y ago

Shopify is built with Ruby. The whole tech stack depends on it. Paying for that software is one way or another is a normal business expense.

Tabular-Iceberg 4y ago
>Paying for that software is one way or another is a normal business expense. It should be, but conventional bookkeeping hasn't really kept up with the economic realities of this industry. Same reason why they fail to account tech debt as a liability, refactoring as amortization and debugging as interest payments.

canucklady 4y ago

Shopify is the Canadian meme stock. When I worked there everyone I met knew about them, not because of the product, but because the news loved to talk about Canada's one domestic tech success in the last 10 years. During the pandemic they briefly became Canada's most valuable company, and then lost all their gains for the past 2 years, then did a stock split because it was trendy with retail investors. They have a ton of terrific engineers but the nouveau riche people from the IPO are largely insufferable, and the amount of reverence for tobi inside and outside of the company is just unhinged.

jrockway 4y ago

This amount of money is well within what you'd expect to pay for various proprietary software packages. You can probably add up all unused-but-not-deleted VMs, S3 buckets, and their payroll/vacation tracking software and you're at 1 million dollars. I've started responding to "hey, do you want to talk to sales?" messages with "sure", just to see what stuff costs in the real world. Everything is 5 or 6 figures, even static website hosting. I wouldn't pay $20,000 a month to host a static website, but someone must be, because that's what people are asking for on these calls. I can see a world where you say yes to even a few of these vendors, and the cost of securing the entire Ruby ecosystem looks like a rounding error in comparison. At the end of the day, I doubt the investors care. If they want to cut costs, there are much better ways.