alt Hacker News> The better you document your work, the stronger contracts you define, the easier it is for someone to clone your work.
Well said; this is my thinking as well. One person or organization can do the hard work of testing multiple approaches to the API, establishing and revising best practices, and developing an ecosystem. Then once things are fairly stable and well-understood, another person can just yoink it.
I have little empathy for Vercel, and here they're kind of being hoist by their own petard of inducing frustration in people who don't use their hosting; but I'm concerned about how smaller-scale projects (including copyleft ones) will be laundered and extinguished.
> Then once things are fairly stable and well-understood, another person can just yoink it.
That transparency & availability for community contributions or forks is the point of open-source.
If you're only using open-source as marketing because you're bad at marketing, then you should probably go closed source & find a non-technical business partner.
Whoever "yoinks" the package runs into the same problem because they now have to build credibility somehow to actually profit from it.