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> Together, we’re announcing that we’ve raised $4.5 million in seed funding, led by A.Capital Ventures and OSS Capital. VCs fund startups which has the potential to 100x their returns right? How is that going to work here? How will they monetize a javascript library? Will we have an IPO for a javascript library? Or are they betting on a big tech company to acquire a Javascript library for 100s of millions of dollars?…
Some of the open source companies have had an easier time monetizing than others. Databases, for example, have a somewhat obvious path nowadays of offering a hosted version. NPM and Docker, on the other hand, developed incredibly popular tools but struggled to monetize. So I'm curious to see what Rome will do.
The other interesting question to me is what Rome will focus on. There's a really wide array of things in the JS toolchain and it's tempting to boil the ocean. How much of it can you really boil? Running a nice JS browser stack of course. Supporting TypeScript I presume. How about Node on the backend? An Electron app? All of those in the same codebase?
Some tough decisions here but I'm glad the team working on them is set to grow and attack this problem. Good luck Romans ;-)
possibly sensitive question - i recall Sebastian and Kyle had their differences during the ICE issue of 2018 https://www.vice.com/en/article/pawnwv/open-source-devs-reve... what are Rome's intended policies on OSS licensing and usage by ICE?
Disclaimer: I know the foundation of Rome was largely written by Sebastian. This question still applies to Rome though, but more so to “open source companies” in general. https://rome.tools/credits/ How many of these people are going to receive an employment opportunity from this company? How many will receive equity? I suppose the same questions can be asked if any big project, like React, though that had FB’s backi…
Disclaimer: I know the foundation of Rome was largely written by Sebastian. This question still applies to Rome though, but more so to “open source companies” in general. https://rome.tools/credits/ How many of these people are going to receive an employment opportunity from this company? How many will receive equity? I suppose the same questions can be asked if any big project, like React, though that had FB’s backi…
thats not how OSS contributions work. you contribute of your own free will, they don't owe you any equity or employment. of course you'd have a leg up on hiring but they don't owe you a thing.
They certainly deserve any and all success, I just wonder how those decisions will be made.
Can someone tell me how this is different than something like webpack?
After using esbuild and experiencing fast builds, I'll never go back to tools written in javascript/typescript again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a "JavaScript library" it's an entire toolchain. In the same way that `git` generated billions of dollars worth of value in the form of companies and productivity, Rome will do the same. Possibly even bigger.
I have no doubt that Rome will massively increase the producitvity of thousands of companies and developers. But the hard thing in open source is how will you capture some portion of that value. The vast majority of libraries, toolchains and other open source projects out there which has massively increased the developer producitivty are underfunded let alone generate millions of dollars in sales. Rome not only has t…
I would like to see that measured.
My suspicion is that many developers are already too reliant on tooling and that reliance harms productivity rather than improves it. Bundling those tooling concerns eliminates some operational costs associated with a plurality of tools but increases dependency upon the tool.
This problem is not a technical problem (as in how do I solve a problem), but a cultural problem (as in what is the proper way to solve a problem). It comes down to the difference between a product focus (what do we ship) versus an operational focus (what do we work on).