Comment by sxiao
5 years ago
Not sure if this topic is worth our time to debate. There are millions of ways of subtly controlling/influencing entities. And it's much easier if you pay money, ESOP and pay even more money if future goals and exits come alive.
The Zope Corporation hired Guido van Rossum to work on Zope for three years (a Python web application server and content management system), then he moved on. That didn't destroy Guido, or Zope, or Python.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zope
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum#Work
>He has worked for various research institutes, including the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). From 2000 until 2003 he worked for Zope Corporation. In 2003 Van Rossum left Zope for Elemental Security. While there he worked on a custom programming language for the organization. From 2005 to December 2012, he worked at Google, where he spent half of his time developing the Python language. In January 2013, he started working for Dropbox. In October 2019, Van Rossum officially retired before coming out of retirement the following year to join Microsoft.
Guido and Rich are both uncontrollable forces of nature!
Even if Vercel came out and said “we’ve bought Rich Harris’s voice, every choice will be controlled by us” (which they haven’t!) they still wouldn’t control the project because Rich isn’t a BDFL.
Good point and I agree about Rich but I rather trust healthy markets and competition more than people.
If we have such trustworthy markets and competition, then how the hell did we end up with React and Angular, huh?
Ayn Rand sucks at software design, as much as she sucks at philosophy and economics and social design and writing. Your trust in her is certainly misplaced.
Anyway, why do you have such a huge problem with Rich acting in his own best self interest, that you found a need to personally attack him so viciously and often as you did in this discussion for all that he's done for himself and the Svelte community?
Don't you believe the invisible hand of the market, which you trust so much, will prosecute your vengeance on Rich, who you find so untrustworthy?
Wouldn't Vercel benefit from being the defacto platform to deploy Next & SvelteKit apps?
Yes sure and it's not Vercel's fault that there's no other competitor left out there. I would have hired Rich as well if I were Vercel. But the market will suffer because one (and the better) player just left the market. We can only blame Rich who got weak but yeah, nobody is perfect.
Calling someone weak is a personal attack. You are not Rich. Don’t speak for him or his attributes. Keep the discussion constructive, you’ve already been asked in this post to calm down the personal attacks even after Rich gave you a kind reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> We can only blame Rich who got weak but yeah, nobody is perfect.
this comment. just wow.
He did not leave the market and on top of that now has financial safety so can work on the project 100%. That's a net gain.