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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

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?

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The post mentions why - Bun eventually wanted to provide some sort of cloud-hosting saas product.

Everyone 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?

The 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-...

Hosting 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.

Yep. This strategy can work, and it has also backfired before, like with Docker trying to monetize something they gave away for free.

Except Amazon would beat them to it

Free now isn't free forever. If something has inherent value then folks will be willing to pay for it.

Well, 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!

I 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.

Ads. Have you seen the dotenv JavaScript package?

And 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.)

Wow. I am unstarring Caddy. That's absolutely wild.

FWIW 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.

Either for a modest return when it sells or as a tax write off when it fails.

VCs do not invest for a modest return.

No, but faced with either a loss or a modest return, they'll take the modest return (unless it's more beneficial to not come tax season). Unicorns are called unicorns for a reason.

The question was why do investors invest

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