alt Hacker News> Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point.
I think it is insane that people got into a situation where they had committed to a javascript runtime that had to "figure out how to monetize at some point". It is also bizarre that some people are still hopeful despite it being acquired by one of the most enormously unprofitable companies in the most enormously unprofitable sectors of our industry.
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> I think it is insane that people got into a situation where they had committed to a javascript runtime that had to "figure out how to monetize at some point".
Why? What's the risk? It's open source. Also, speaking of open source, we are happy to commit to open source projects that have no monetization, nor any plans to ever monetize.
I partially agree with you, but I also think that it's good that people can make something they want, that seems to have no monetization path, and have some hope of being bailed out.
It's not great that the search for profit will usually corrupt projects, but the other most common option is that the projects don't exist at all. It's very rare (or it used to be before this year) that someone can do something like this on their own with no compensation. So now at least Bun exists.
It's a bit insane, but the cost of switching to regular NodeJS is low (for all but most bun-specific projects).
All valid points though, I'm pessimistic about Anthropic still actively diverting resources to these side quests when tough times hit (which might be in a week for all we know).
I know people say it is unprofitable but I wonder if there is a way to verify it is truly is. I will not say any details but I worked for a giant company which was barely making money YoY but somehow the bonuses for heads were bigger and bigger given a proxy metric related to profit.
There are way too many ways companies arrange to pay themselves and never be profitable to avoid taxes.
Are there any situations you would compare this to historically?
To me, the obvious comparison seems to be Docker. Their tooling revolutionized software development and made cgroups and containerization accessible to the masses. Yet they generally seem to have failed to extract payment from users, even with managed service opportunities.
It seems to me that there are substantial obstacles to monetizing a project licensed with even a weaker OSS license like MIT. I think this is especially true for projects that don’t have managed service / “open core” potential.
Any gratis project you rely on runs the risk that it will no longer be provided gratis. That alone is not a strong basis for making decisions.