4 ms·
What is the business model behind open source projects like bun? How can a company "aquire" it and why does it do that? In the article they write about the ear
by TekMol 11mo ago
What is the business model behind open source projects like bun? How can a company "aquire" it and why does it do that?
In the article they write about the early days
We raised a $7 million seed round
Why do investors invest into people who build something that they give away for free?
- rglover 11mo agoEither for a modest return when it sells or as a tax write off when it fails.
- bcye 11mo agoVCs do not invest for a modest return.
- ChrisbyMe 11mo agoI mean if you're getting X number of users per day and you don't need to pay for bandwidth or anything, there's gotta be SOME way to monetize down the line. If your userbase or the current CEO likes it or not.
- koakuma-chan 11mo agoAds. Have you seen the dotenv JavaScript package?
- quectophoton 10mo agoAnd don't forget when Caddy was putting ads in your servers via a `Caddy-Sponsors` header. (It was reverted after the situation gained visibility, as is tradition.)
- koakuma-chan 10mo agoWow. I am unstarring Caddy. That's absolutely wild.
- quectophoton 10mo agoFWIW they do seem to regret it, but goes to show how very tempting it is for projects to go down the ads route once they have users.
- taylorlapeyre 11mo agoThe post mentions why - Bun eventually wanted to provide some sort of cloud-hosting saas product.
- TekMol 11mo agoEveryone could offer a cloud-hosted saas product that involves bun, right? Why invest into a company that has the additional burden of developing bun, why not in a company that does only the hosting?
- simonw 11mo agoThe standard argument here is that the maintainers of the core technology are likely to do a better job of hosting it because they have deeper understanding of how it all works. There's also the trick Deno has been trying, where they can use their control of the core open source project to build features that uniquely benefit their cloud hosting: https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/deno-kv#user-content-the-deno-deploy-cloud-hosted-version https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/deno-kv#user-content-the-...
- simpsond 11mo agoHosting is a commodity. Runtimes are too. In this case, the strategy is to make a better runtime, attract developers, and eventually give them a super easy way to run their project in the cloud. Eg: bun deploy, which is a reserved no op command. I really like Buns DX.
- morshu9001 11mo agoYep. This strategy can work, and it has also backfired before, like with Docker trying to monetize something they gave away for free.
- knowitnone3 11mo agoExcept Amazon would beat them to it
- Supercompressor 11mo agoFree now isn't free forever. If something has inherent value then folks will be willing to pay for it.
- aizk 11mo agoWell, if they suddenly changed the license, we'd get a new Redis --> Valkey situation. Or even more recently, look at minio no longer maintaining their core open source project!