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Comment by popcorncowboy | Hacker News Reader

Because late stage open source capitalism is now bypassing the messy business of building something popular and going straight open-core/vercel-model on the back of already popular libraries and frameworks. The emerging playbook is:

- Find successful open source project - Fork with "reasons" - Pour VC into helpful features, great docs, DX and evangelism - Run the Vercel playbook

We're gonna see a lot more of this.

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>- Find successful open source project - Fork with "reasons"

To be fair, Vercel did not 'find&fork' Next.JS, they are the authors of the framework.

they probably intend its relation to React.

- Create a marketplace with pro (payed) version of all packages

“late stage open source capitalism”

Considering the GNU manifesto is from 1985 I guess we’ve gone through multiple stages quickly. What were they?

Interesting. Got more examples of this playbook?

I can think of:

  Sqlite -> Turso  
  PostgreSQL -> Neon  
  Chromium -> Arc browser

not exactly fork, but aimed at riding popularity of an already-established thing:

  Nodejs -> Bun

IRC -> Discord

IRC -> Slack

Early slack actually supported being used by 3rd party IRC clients

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