Next.js Isn't OSS | Hacker News Reader

Next.js Isn't OSS

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9 pointskiltucista5 comments

Someone at Shopify might want to consider hip-checking Ryan if they’d like Remix to go somewhere. He doesn’t seem articulate enough or in the right position to have this conversation. I’m not taking sides here. This whole Next.js (and Netlify) situation is fast becoming a mess. Ryan has a point buried in his hot take somewhere. Lee is basically lying by omission and distraction. Matt is overwhelmed and maybe even a bit naive.

I’m not sure what the solution is. It’s driven us to consider going back to basics by building our own internal SSG React framework to avoid the intermittent grief of running Next.js on Netlify. It’s sad because there are things we like about all parties involved here.

Can you clarify what you feel I’m lying about?

Of course. From what I can tell, there is virtually zero effort to create, accommodate, or contribute to adapters that allow Next.js to run at bug-free, full (or close to full) performance on any other turn-key serverless platforms i.e. Netlify or Amplify. I think Next.js' poor performance on Netlify ultimately reflects poorly on Vercel as much as it does on Netlify, for better or worse. We (the customers) are being swept up in what appears to be your skirmish.

Meanwhile, Next.js is becoming increasingly opinionated in ways that make it difficult to justify ongoing investment. Turbopack was announced without any commitment for plugins, for example. Hats off to your team for being able to attract and retain talent, but I (and I suspect many others) have a growing sense of anxiety centered around the fact that you can pull the rug out from under the rest of the ecosystem at any time. In exchange for that we're being given incremental build performance improvements and more configuration requirements that we could live without on all sides.

It's untenable to try to secure commitment to migrate a plethora of sites implemented in a given framework to its parent platform when that platform effectively appears hostile towards alternatives.

Turbopack will have plugins – we're just not there yet. But the plan is to absolutely support them. The great thing about open source is there isn't really "rug pulling". If you aren't satisfied with Next.js, you can use another tool, like SvelteKit, and that's okay.

Vercel's goal is to make it easy to run any of these frameworks. If you prefer an alternative to Next.js and want to switch, from Vercel's platform perspective, that's fine. I'd certainly love to make Next.js better in that instance, but it's not trying to lock you into the box. There's too many good options for frontend frameworks today to do that. And if you're dissatisfied with Vercel, you can also always self-host Next.js.

Isn't this like a device with open-source firmware? I guess the vaunted wrt54g firmware isn't OSS after all.

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