Open source isn't really open any more. It's just pre-acquisition. I'm happy to the creators for their payday but honestly just happy I opted out of BetterAuth building my latest product.
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Better Auth is joining Vercel
61–70 of 95 posts
Re: Better Auth is joining Vercel
#62Bereket Here the team at Vercel has been my biggest inspiration and always reflected many of the reasons we started working on Better Auth. This would allow us to focus more on what made better-auth great in the first place It hasn't even been 2 years since we started but thank you everyone from the open-source community for helping us make an impact in short amount of time. There is a lot to do to improve on open so…
what will be your role at Vercel? Aren't you afraid that you might lose control over the project's future - becoming a cog in a much more complex system?
Re: Better Auth is joining Vercel
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably the first time reading that the Ory stack is unfinished! Sorry you had a frustrating time, but there's 10 years of development and many happy customers + adopters who see it differently! Polis / Boxy still works as before, we didn't gut or take away anything. Open source development needs to be paid by someone - most of the time people complaining about paying for software are working themselves (for money!)…
>Open source development needs to be paid by someone - most of the time people complaining about paying for software are working themselves (for money!) in some company making huge bucks, or looking up to "successful (as in money) tech leaders". There is software that is cutting edge and always changing, and those types of products need to be paid for much more than software that is stable. With a stable product like…
Auth is not stable, it‘s constantly changing and evolving and also a lot of work to keep secure, and scalable. Auth is critical infrastructure and certainly not free. Most companies with homegrown at some point go to a vendor because it is so much work to DIY.
I can’t speak for Vercel‘s goals or pricing - but Ory is evidently still open source while many others went other routes!
Re: Better Auth is joining Vercel
#64Congrats BetterAuth! It was the system I was considering before I rolled my own auth system around the passwordless concepts of: OTP + Passkeys + Google login. It is quite nice and simple and I've ported it to 3 separate projects now just via LLM: Talk: https://ben3d.ca/blog/passwordless-login-system Live Demo: https://passwordless.ben3d.ca Demo Code: https://github.com/bhouston/passwordless If you are building a use…
On one hand I love how much easier the email + OTP / passkey flow is on the dev side, I find it _very_ frustrating as a user of services. User+password combos are straightforward at least.
I would rather have keypass and "email me a temp auth link" which then requires 2-factor confirmation. I tire of passwords.
Re: Better Auth is joining Vercel
#65Congrats BetterAuth! It was the system I was considering before I rolled my own auth system around the passwordless concepts of: OTP + Passkeys + Google login. It is quite nice and simple and I've ported it to 3 separate projects now just via LLM: Talk: https://ben3d.ca/blog/passwordless-login-system Live Demo: https://passwordless.ben3d.ca Demo Code: https://github.com/bhouston/passwordless If you are building a use…
On one hand I love how much easier the email + OTP / passkey flow is on the dev side, I find it _very_ frustrating as a user of services. User+password combos are straightforward at least.
Passwords are definitely not better than passkeys for login flow as a user, at least not on MacOS / iPhone, etc. I just tap my finger onto the fingerprint reader on my MacBook or I just look at the camera on my iPhone - biometrics for the win.
But you need something as a backup to passkeys so I choose emailed OTP, but it isn't meant to be the primary way to log in.
Re: Better Auth is joining Vercel
#66Hmmm so Convex support is going to take even more of a backseat I guess
Re: Better Auth is joining Vercel
#67Open source isn't really open any more. It's just pre-acquisition. I'm happy to the creators for their payday but honestly just happy I opted out of BetterAuth building my latest product.
Is it about the license? I see less and less new projects using GPL, and a lot of MIT(ish) licenses.
Most complex open source projects like Linux for example have a lot of contributions by corporations. The GPL kind of forces them to participate in open source, instead of just creating internal forks.
GPL and even LGPL are tricky for libraries though.
Re: Better Auth is joining Vercel
#68Reminder - KeyCloak was donated to CNCF so a safe choice https://www.keycloak.org https://www.cncf.io/blog/2023/04/11/keycloak-joins-cncf-as-a...
Keycloak is awesome, but whenever I used it the documentation gave me too little guidance. On how to use it in the right way, without having to customize it too much.
Re: Better Auth is joining Vercel
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's one of those things you shouldn't trust LLMs to such an extent; that part should be very solid because the consequences of bad practices are getting to front page of hacker news :)
depends what LLM you are using but most frontier models have seen almost every github/doc/best practices its very hard to get something like supabase/lovable type of mess unless you purposely prompt it to be bad without much inner knowledge but even then it is rectifiable with the right prompts
Everything is "rectifiable with the right prompts" if you handwave the hallucinations it makes (which yes, even frontier models do. Or I guess all companies that had major outages within the past months were using fossil models).
And it's funny this same argument can be said since Sonnet 3.7. But the issues still pop up.
Re: Better Auth is joining Vercel
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is keycloak still the only real game in town for open source authorization (not authentication; that part is totally fungible)?
If you're willing to take the pain of setting up an actual authz model, I've found OpenFGA^ to be really nice. We used it to set up some pretty complex authz involving cross-agent/user/org creation and sharing of data. It's not _simple_, but it is effective. It's Apache 2.0 and a CNCF incubating project. [^] https://openfga.dev/
Thank you. This is very interesting. I'm excited to see an open source project adopt a zanzibar-oriented approach to resource management. This is exciting!
Just before I hurl myself at this for several days/weeks -- where were the pain points? I'm usually wary of new projects in this space but OpenFGA looks pretty mature already