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It’s noteworthy because this comment is currently the top voted comment, probably because it hits all the notes of what you’d get if you asked an LLM to generate some content to tap into anger in a Hacker News comment section. It’s scary that this type of LLM powered engagement bait is so successfully being used to advertise on HN.
The criticism is also not very pointed. Like, I don't understand what the core message is. There is disdain for VC money and an implication that Astro could have gone without monetization. Both of which don't seem very well argued. But even if we grant those points ... so what? What is our take away supposed to be? It's a bunch of negative observations that don't funnel into some concrete conclusion.
It seems like the takeaway is supposed to be to look favorably on the commenter. "This is bad. I am good."
It's just an ad that people are upvoting uncritically.
If the purpose of this was to promote their academy or school or whatever, what was the point? Because at this point, they have lost all credibility and respect and HN isn't a gullible audience so I don't understand the point of why they did this
It’s the top voted comment right now. Their comment history has similar comments with links to their products and content.
I think they’re doing it because it was working for them. I bet they’re happy with the additional traffic they’re picking up for a minute or two of promoting an LLM and then appending a link at the end.
Only in dreams, it took off thanks to the likes of IBM that decided it was a way to save costs on their UNIX development efforts, many key projects have been founded thanks to Red-Hat Enterprise licenses, nowadays also part of IBM.
GCC, clang, GNOME, Linux kernel, systemd, CUPS, AMD/NVidia drivers, have plenty of big corp money.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
"1998: Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux."
The funding assertion leverages the re-definition of “community” in “community funded” and relates to why all those big projects offer CE or Community Editions instead of calling it free or open source editions.
Enterprises are willing to take a look at free, but "community editions" are clearly for peons, not the big boys, so they license the commercial edition. It also productizes a subset of licensing rights in contrast with the commercial licensing rights.
In any case, in today's common parlance, community doesn't mean ICs and IC donations. It can, but it's been mostly co-opted by corp donations, which are still donations and not VC.
Corporations are just groups of people. Pure grass roots "We collect the money, anonymously in cash shaking a bucket at our annual fundraiser" does not work at this scale. Even Zig, which I'm guessing is about as far away from "It's all just owned by an inhuman corporation" as you could ask for, does have big ticket corporate donors. So does ISRG (Let's Encrypt) or the EFF.
Venture Capital is a bad fit, that's the conjecture here. VC funding for infrastructure is a mistake because that big pay day won't happen if you did it correctly. That doesn't make VC inherently bad, or projects like Linux inherently defective, the claim was that it's just a bad match, like how an Irish Stout doesn't pair well with a subtle tomato and angel hair pasta dish.
Gathering around projects, talking over USENET, Gopher, phpBB forums, sharing code over email, Sourceforge, Savannah , living the FOSS dream, the whole mantra of when the GNU manifesto came to be.
The whole story (https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/) is fascinating, but here are a couple of interesting excerpts:
> I scrambled around and came up with some pricing strategy. [Motorola] wanted some enhancements to it so it could go in their phones, and I gave them a quote and at the time, I thought this was a quote for all the money in the world. It was just huge. ($80k)
> [Nokia] flew me over and said, “Hey, yeah, this is great. We want this but we need some enhancements.” I [Richard Hipp] said, “Great,” and we cut a contract to do some development work for them.
> We were going around boasting to everybody naively that SQLite didn’t have any bugs in it, or no serious bugs, but Android definitely proved us wrong. Look, I used to think that I could write software with no bugs in it. It’s amazing how many bugs will crop up when your software suddenly gets shipped on millions of devices.
If you can find paying customers that can fund your development, then it's fantastic. It's even better if those contracts give you scale that none of your competitors have. You don't need VC money if that's the case. But let's not pretend that Astro were in that situation. No one was paying for a web framework.
Didn't this just happen right now that Astro got acquired by Cloudflare? I am sure that Cloudflare has bot tons of money right now so Astro got an offer to good to refuse but worst case scenario they could've still partnered up with cloudflare,netlify,vercel etc. but also companies who deploy astro (even google deploys astro pages)
Plus, Astro has a very strong focus on being performant/fast (getting 100 lightscore) so they could've definitely focused on consultance as well to actually have the people who work in the craft who can take a look and help you get score who literally know the inside out of Astro
That being said, the Question is, could they have survived long enough to be in a position of sustainability without VC money or could they have gotten sustainability from the start, if so what could be the path that they could've taken so that they didn't need VC money or could be (day-1 profitable ie?)
What makes you think they aren't? https://docs.astro.build/en/getting-started/ says on the bottom left: Sponsored by Cloudflare, Netlify, Webflow, MUX.
> consulting to get to 100 Lightscore
Problem is, it was possible to get there with minimal effort. The default config of Astro was 100. I know absolutely nothing about web dev and my personal website was all 100s.
And in any case, consultancy doesn't scale. Interestingly Tailwind has that kind of model - free software, pay for beautifully crafted components. And their business isn't doing well.
We don't know what would have happened in an alternate universe. But it's hard out there building businesses on FOSS. Can't blame anyone for trying - VC or otherwise.
European Commission issues call for evidence on open source
The EU is looking for facts like this as it figures out how to use OS to begin to extend its digital sovereignty. I don't think it's as simple as, "get funding from a giant continental government instead of VCs!" but what I hope is that there is a structure the EU and Open Source can forge together that gives OS software the funding it needs to build more Nginxes and SQLites in a way that fosters the independence of those projects along with the independence of the entities that use it.
Modern expectations that a VC pumps in millions (or billions) of dollars and then extracts 10s of billions a few years later is an unrealistic expectation for most companies, and forcing everything into that model is killing off a lot of projects that could be successful on a smaller scale. The pressure forces small companies to sell out to bigger corporations, consolidating the industry into a few huge players who gate keep and limit competition and choice.
Many, many people working on Linux work for companies that pay them to work on Linux. Linux is not, and I don't believe has ever claimed to be, community-funded.
Nginx was bought, a couple of times maybe, so they have had cash injections of some sort.
> We need more ways to fund infrastructure that don't require artificial monetization timelines.
Funding infrastructure isn't the problem, exactly. VC is for a specific type of funding: risky businesses that need scale to make money. We have found the answer: VCs, who are willing to lose all their money on your project.
> I fully admit using Ai as my editor
No one enjoys reading AI slop. It has 0 value, and it's a huge turnoff on forums like this. You should stop doing it.