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Comment by css_apologist | Hacker News Reader

i'm interpreting this in the reverse

if dev tools can only be "monetized" by being bought out, it does not feel sustainable on any level

we will see companies attempt to do things like close source these projects, go subscription based, or just straight up drop support

there is no incentives for cloudflare to make astro better, or even keep it around

same goes with bun, svelte, and i'm sure countless others

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Then we'll finally be getting the world we deserve.

Decades of VC cash has trained developers to never pay for anything that powers their entire career like dev tools. The assumption is you can always squeeze some rich business customer that employs the dev.

If AI kills hiring of software engineers, then there's less devs inside businesses to sell to. So we can either pay for the products we use directly, or not have them at all.

It will take a decade to shift penny pinching behavioral habits of devs but slowly over time the market will correct itself. Chefs have always had to buy their own knives. This is good imo.

Who's to say there's no incentive. Anthropic using Bun internally is plenty incentive to make it better even if for their own use-case. I think it is a bit of a doomer perspective to think anything being bought out means the end of the line for that project. Sure, some things might change depending on the interests of the new owners but that's not to say it'll automatically become bad. Microsoft bought Github and Mojang, they're both doing better than ever for example

GitHub is without question worse for users now.

GitHub continues to become less and less usable (slower performance) while the number of features proliferate. On the one hand, being part of larger company _can_ relieve the pressure to stay profitable. But on the other hand, acquisitions tend to get cannibalized by the companies that acquire them. Profitability tends to become less and less aligned with usability.

Realistically to maintain a modern web framework to even a minimal standard you need a few people working fulltime on it, and more than a few if you want to take it places. There needs to be some kind of long term sustainable vehicle for funding those developers, either a corporate sponsor or a foundation.

So all those frameworks have to end up somewhere, and I’d rather it be somewhere else than vercel, as they already own way too much of the web frontend space.

that very much depends on your definition of "modern web framework".

> there is no incentives for cloudflare to make astro better, or even keep it around

There is - to counter NextJs. NextJs is a pain to host outside Vercel and makes Cloudflare lose customers. In theory that's why Gatsby was bought out.

> same goes with bun, svelte, and i'm sure countless others

Svelte was also taken over by Vercel. To control frontend hosting. Bun isn't in the same bucket. There isn't such competition going on.

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