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Comment by adamgordonbell | Hacker News Reader

Author here. This is me thinking out this thing I see happening a lot where incentives of some dev tool end up leading to things going sideways over time.

TLDR: Aligned incentives lead to good outcomes. Everything else is a problem waiting to happen.

What do you think?

I don't think a VC-based dev tool company is necessarily a problem, as long as they thought through how it will play out. I wish companies would talk about this more explicitly.

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I wish the Selenium (and Appium) projects would get mentioned in these kinds of conversations more. When starting these projects, I was very intentional that we set things up to not screw over users down the road and that we set things up so that multiple commercial vendors running SaaS services (not just my own: Sauce Labs and Tapster) could succeed, too. And, yet, the success of the Selenium ecosystem to thrive for 19(!?) years is basically invisible in most discussions about open source funding and incentives.

Do you have a writeup somewhere about this?

No. Maybe that's why it never gets mentioned anywhere. Maybe I should do a podcast tour or something, too?

yes, yes you should. I highly encourage this.

And sit down with Gergely Orosz over at Pragmatic Engineer, he'd be a good person to get a written interview with

Ironically, he's the advisor for a test tool/company combo that specifically markets themselves as better than Appium (with a quote endorsement from him on their homepage), so he's either the best or worst person to do an interview. :)

No one can repeat or cite the story not told.

You should sit down with the OP and author of this article, Adam. He has a really good podcast called Corecursive, and your story seems right in its wheelhouse.

I sometimes wonder if Selenium wouldn't have been able to beat back Playwright more if it had reserved the rights to run SaaS services on top and used some of the proceeds to fund more development.

It's a fantastic tool but I think Playwright wouldn't have been able to take off like it did if more dev time were dedicated to it.

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