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Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

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Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#31

Post by throwaway91_82 »

ruffrey wrote: post #9
blocked_again wrote: post #5

> 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?…

Healthy skepticism is good. Dev tools are hard. There are hundreds of open source companies - many making gobs of money. Not all - many fail. This team has name recognition and a few successful projects already - Babel and yarn. I can see it working out. JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages. Millions of developers. With solid execution, there are monstrous markets here.

this team also has had at least one example of unilateral non-open source decisionmaking https://www.vice.com/en/article/pawnwv/open-source-devs-reve...

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#32

Post by capableweb »

Where is the company incorporated? In most countries, companies act for profits first. Especially if you raise funding from a few selected ones instead of the wider community.

This statement reads weird too

> We don’t believe in placing artificial constraints on the tool or having functionality behind a paywall. In order to support the open source project, we’ll be building supplemental products and services. This aligns our incentives with the community and our open source users, with a focus on interoperability, performance, and usability.

Supplemental products and services on top of open source projects often require (down the line) the open source project to adapt because it might hurt the bottom line of these supplemental products and services. Since there is no guarantee this won't happen, if the stake is between the company surviving or a feature being open-source vs "supplemental", the people working at the company might have to chose the option against the wishes of their open source users. I don't see how creating a for-profit company is at all in alignment with open source users. Better would have been a Co-op, a non-profit, OpenCollective, or leverage an existing entity like the Linux foundation, that can actually guarantee it for you in contracts and laws.

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#33

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

ruffrey wrote: post #9
blocked_again wrote: post #5

> 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?…

Healthy skepticism is good. Dev tools are hard. There are hundreds of open source companies - many making gobs of money. Not all - many fail. This team has name recognition and a few successful projects already - Babel and yarn. I can see it working out. JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages. Millions of developers. With solid execution, there are monstrous markets here.

> There are hundreds of open source companies - many making gobs of money.

[citation needed]

It seems there may be many open source companies with tons of users, but they seem to struggle with monetization and turning those users into paying users.

Redhat which used to be the epitome of a company making money from open source got acquired by IBM.

A lot of other open source companies are switching to non-open source licenses.

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#35

Post by jakeva »

ehutch79 wrote: post #12
amasad wrote: post #10

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.

git doesn't make linus torvalds money though. People used git because it was mandated for linux kernel work.

To your second point, I remember when git was announced. I remember it was such a breath of conceptual fresh air over what I had been using (svn, mercurial) for me. I use it because it makes a lot more sense to me and how I work, and I've never worked on the linux kernel.

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#38

Post by Oddskar »

austincheney wrote: post #29
blocked_again wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have no doubt that Rome will massively increase the producitvity of thousands of companies and developers 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…

I think you're being very selective with what you call "tooling" here. I understand where it's coming from though, and I agree that in some circumstances people are adhering too much to what might be perceived as "standards" instead of building or using something more fit to the task.

On the contrary I would also say that I see a lot of developers not being reliant enough on tooling. A simple example is getting very acquainted with the debugger in your language of choice. It's very common to sprinkle logs everywhere instead of properly learning how to step through code.

Re: Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

#39

Post by polote »

blocked_again wrote: post #5

> 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?…

> In order to support the open source project, we’ll be building supplemental products and services. This aligns our incentives with the community and our open source users, with a focus on interoperability, performance, and usability.

like every open source company, they will sell additional services to companies. When you have millions of users you always find a way to monetize it, even if you think you are just a "javascript library". Redis is just a database, Word is just a text processor, ...

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