I don't use Fresh. Serverless is kind of a weird offering that forces developers to do a lot of work to adjust their programs to running all over the place. I even wish Deno had never supported NPM because that ruined their differentiator.
I'm going to keep using Deno and I hope they use this opportunity to refocus on their core product offering so that I can move back to using it from this VPS that is hosting all of my Deno servers right now.
- Deno initially seemed like something a number of us were clamouring for: a restart of the server JS ecosystem. ES modules from the start, more sensibly thought out and browser compatible APIs, etc etc
- that restart is incompatible with the business goals of a VC funded startup. They needed NPM compatibility but that destroyed the chances of a restart happening.
I’m just sticking with Node. I know Deno and Bun are faster and have a few good features (though Node has been cribbing from them extensively as time has gone on). I just don’t trust a VC backed runtime to keep velocity in the long term.
I hope nodejs copies these features. They're great.
But once you add that NPM compatibility layer the incentives shift, it just isn’t worth anyone’s while to create new, modern modules when the old ones work well enough.
It all feels similar to the Python 2 vs 3 dilemma. They went the other way and hey, it was a years long quagmire. But the ecosystem came out of it in a much better place in the end.
If Dahl had posted the typical layoff announcement people would be criticising that too.
I am selling it btw! Look at the CRT-screenshots. :-) https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/sgi-indigo-2-mit-nets...
In my opinion, FOSS and VC have opposite goals and attitudes: openness, organic growth, staying free vs moat, meteoric growth fueled by marketing, turning a huge profit. I don't see how they could be compatible in the long term, unless the FOSS project is a gateway drug into a proprietary ecosystem.
Accountability starts and stops at the top. Many CEOs (CxOs) get called out. Personally, I want to write something similar about Bluesky leadership, who have fumbled hard multiple times since peaking, and have now "raised funding" from Bain Capital (private equity).
I don't see any such claim in the post. The criticism is about Ryan the CEO, not Ryan the person.
Besides the title, from the end of the post:
> I’m not trying to hate on Dahl but c’mon bro you’re the CEO. What’s next for Deno? Give ~me~ ~users~ anyone a reason to care.
Perhaps you know Ryan and read too much into the criticism?
What if we reframe this about how the CEO treats their users and employees? Why does Ryan deserve to be free from criticism?
I'm trying to understand why you carve an exception for this one individual.
When I worked in restaurants, the owner and I had a very interesting conversation after hours, and with beers, about his thoughts and feelings being responsible for the well being and livelihood of everyone that worked there. It was a positive moment, I thought I had a great boss, I work my ass off for him.
A year later I found he was trimming hours off of my paycheck. I quit on the spot. Months later I heard he did the same to the waitstaff tips and it wasn't much longer before it all fell apart.
People can appear very different publicly than privately, and they can change over time.
I'm not saying anything groundbreaking here. Humanity is complex and varied.
i will begin to care about a CEOs feelings when they put the wellbeing of their employees before their own. not saying that the Deno CEO has done anything on the order of the raw aggression we see from other CEOs in our industry but, as they say, if you cant take the heat stay out of the kitchen.
That is the problem.
FWIW, it worked for Bun (at least for the VCs and employees), so there is a model there that works.
Decimation has been commonly used as a synonym for absolute destruction for a long time, being annoyed by it is wasted energy, better to let it go and accept the new meaning.
I'll say it.
This author is being an asshole and punching good people when they're down.
We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us). Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country they do business in...
How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort?
I don't even like JavaScript, but I applaud what these folks are trying to do.
At least they're trying.
Can't even get a decent round of applause.
My analogy was taking VC money and using it to build an open source tool.
> How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort?
According to the article, Deno raised over $25 million from venture capital. Unless you're disputing that, it seems a bit disingenuous to criticize corporations but call this an "open source effort"
It's almost all caused by the OSI.
The OSI is owned and operated by the hyperscalers, who benefit from this in-fighting and license purity bullshit.
Is the only open source free labor? Some people think so.
Are open core and fair source licenses invalid? Yeah - let's make everything BSD/MIT so managed versions can go live inside AWS and GCP and make those companies billions, while the original authors see limited or no upside.
The fact is - open source needs salients to attack the hyperscalers. It needs to pay its engineers. It needs to expand and grow. One of the ways to do that is building a business around it. Another way is building an open core plus services that drive revenue to sustain and grow the business.
Having VC money doesn't invalidate what's being done. It helps the experiment evolve faster.
Nobody's here complaining about Google and Microsoft and Amazon, yet that's where 99.9% of our ire should be directed. And yet we're pouring venom on this small and valiant effort.
We dump on Redis and Elastic while they're being torn to shreds and eaten by trillion dollar giants.
This entire conversation has become perverted to the point we're no longer talking about what matters: freedom to operate independently of the giants that control the world.
Instead we're complaining about people taking a risk, trying to actually do something impactful that matters.
Open source is a kind of licenses. Hyperscalers are a kind of service providers.
You cannot oppose these 2, these are completely unrelated concepts.
The walls around us are constantly being built up and caving in. Hyperscalers are trying to own more and more of the commons.
The web is becoming atrophied, search is a sales funnel, communication is taxed, we're about to be asked to use ID to use the Internet, ... everything is being stolen from us.
The two could not possibly be more related.