I don't understand what is the business case for acquiring an open-source framework?
Can someone explain why couldn't they just contribute or fork the project?
Can someone explain why couldn't they just contribute or fork the project?
It's in Shopify's best interest to maintain that developer love and Remix can help with that. Here are two hypothetical situations to highlight that point:
1. If someone else, say, Swell [1], had better DX than Shopify, we would see Shopify start to lose market share to Swell for the segment of the market where developers can influence the tooling decision (i.e. agencies).
2. If in two years from now, everyone is using Next.js to build e-commerce sites, that would put Vercel (the company behind Next.js) in a good position to promote/partner with other e-commerce providers or build their own e-commerce solution and compete with Shopify.
The developer market segment is important and DX is key there.
I think about Google a lot more due to how prolific Material Design is throughout my web experience, I think about Meta a lot more due to how prolific React is throughout my web experience, etc.
So that could also be the rationale for Shopify acquiring it. Alternatively, they could've just wanted to acquihire an excellent team.
He has a really cool concept on how Open Source Software will eat Software.