Announcing Rome Tools, Inc.

I had a quick look at how they are set up and I like what they are doing from the point of view of actually creating an OSS community. I don't actually know much about what they do as I'm not one of their users. Judging this purely from a "does this make sense as an OSS company" point of view.

- License: MIT. Great pragmatic choice. Generally a good fit for not obstructing your users to actually use, copying, modifying, etc. your code. Too many OSS startups play games with this and end up going for something too restrictive. IMHO not having copyright transfers is the key to longevity for any OSS community. It basically progressively removes re-licensing as an option as more contributors would have to agree to such a thing. Most long lived oss projects have long lists of contributors and no history of license changes past an early stage of their development. Also, MIT is very compatible with just about anything in the ecosystem. Given their stated goal of being good OSS citizens, that's a hard requirement.

- Contributing.md: no mention of copyright transfers. Also they have close to twenty contributors. I assume this means the license will stay as it is and there are no plans to change that. Great! This is key to building a successful open source community with people actually contributing as well as using the code. It also ensures the code can survive acquisitions, bankruptcies, mismanagement of the company, etc. Committing to this upfront is important and a big step.

- Community: There are seventeen contributors, most of which are not employees (I assume). And they probably integrate a lot of other libraries/tools.

- Explicit stated goal that affirms the above: "The company exists to support the open source project, not the other way around.".

That does raise a few question marks around valuation and ways to profit from this. I'm curious about their plans for adding value in the form of services on top of this. I assume this means some cloud based services and/or support contracts with consultancy. But then, it's good to remove the nuclear option (relicensing) from the table early on to create clarity for developers and investors that this is just not that sort of company.

It's smart from a business point of view as well because most of what they do will come from outside the company anyway. The nature of the javascript community is people rapidly iterating on tools, libraries, etc. and forking left right and center as needed. So, a lot of value is going to be added through people doing exactly that. You can work with them or against them. With them is the smarter option.

no, much worse. they might actually win by overspending on marketing and feature-bloat, and we’ll be stuck working with slow tools

I've been keeping the core contributor team updated on the funding process since December. We've also been publicly speaking about it in the Rome Discord server too. I posted about securing funding in early April in #general.

Emanuele and Yasser both approached us during this period to offer their interest in joining and have stayed actively involved in development.

It's a good question around how to compensate the shoulders of the giants you're standing on, and I don't think anyone has a good answer for that. I think it's important to note that the credits page is meant to be as exhaustive as possible. I am not aware of many other projects that have something similar, and theirs are likely to be even longer.

In the end the community is getting value because we'll now be able to do more to improve the project than we otherwise would have. Babel most notably has struggled for funding and is even currently undergoing a serious funding shortage. It has been used as one of the poster children for the JS community and it's clear that donation-based funding isn't effective, at least on the order of magnitude required to support a team.

This was my first thought as well. More and more devs are beginning to discover Svelte as a milestone in the evolution of Javascript. I would be surprised if it wasn’t already on the roadmap.