Comment by shimman
1 day ago
VC money is absolutely not a means to an end, what is signals is that the company doesn't care about community and only cares about profit.
I'm with the OP you're replying to. Taking VC is an albatross that means a large portion of devs will never trust you or use your services (outside of bleeding your funds dry).
If this place truly cared about community they should have made a non-profit or some type of NGO, basically anything with a true community governance model. Not the current model of caring about money over a community.
We currently live in a society that solely cares about money and seriously doubt devs want to continue uplifting the current system that only benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else.
How many board seats does the company plan on giving to the community to ensure enshittification doesn't occur?
This kind of absolutism is crazy. People who are doing 90% of what we want them to do should be greatly celebrated and rewarded. Else we penalize idealistic people who are not perfect instead of penalizing the people who are actually doing the opposite of what we care about (ex. Autodesk).
Do you want software to become as closed source as mechanical engineering? No! So let's celebrate people building software that's open source, even if it's VC funded! They are awesome for doing that!
This kind of absolutism is absolute necessary against tech leadership that are anti-democracy.
Two founders of a small startup in Europe trying to build a new decentralized git forge and open sourcing their code are anti-democracy?
Come on.
The problem with VC-founded projects is that there's some kind of rug-pull, ads, privacy violation (e.g. using repos to train AI) or "feature enhancing" subscription likely coming.
As a user who would need to invest time and effort in using Tangled, I think it's fair to ask to have the plan explained. I'd rather see explicit price for services than see enshittification happen.
Just like engineering, monetizing is an iterative process. As long as they don't make it hard to move off their platform, IMO it's completely fine for them to try different monetization models.
We should celebrate people building open source stuff and in the public. The alternative is for the software tooling ecosystem to look like EE or mechanical engineering tools - all closed source, proprietary, and with super expensive licensing.
It's easy to take open source for granted - 'information wants to be free', but we are at risk of the open source movement dying with proprietary AI completely changing everything about software.
If we penalize people who are working toward the right goal, we contribute to that decline.
You're badly missing reality here. There's no "community governance" as there would be in a local farm shop or something. It's a bunch of online people with interests. They aren't going to visit you if you're sick or coach your kid's team or attend your funeral.
The two reasons actual communities work in actual locations are: 1) because to some extent the people all live in a place and want the place to be nice for them and their (grand)children, so they are invested personally and 2) companies aren't set up to help communities. Communities are the ones doing community things. It's crazy to demand other people do work in a certain way when you're doing nothing.
> the company doesn't care about community and only cares about profit.
There are plenty of examples of VC funded companies that care about community & don't "only care about profit". Bluesky is a good one (literally a community / social platform). That's such a black & white take it baffles me.
> Taking VC is an albatross that means a large portion of devs will never trust you or use your services
A "large portion of devs" (the majority) use so many VC funded services? Probably _most_ services devs use are VC funded. GitHub itself - was VC funded.
You can have an anti-VC opinion but you have to also live in reality.
> Probably _most_ services devs use are VC funded. GitHub, was VC funded?
GitHub was founded in a very different world. Would we start using it today is the question.
O yeah cuz the non profit tactic worked so well for OpenAI.
OpenAI and Claude both took VC money and everyone on this message board uses them regardless of ~community~
Not all VCs are scum
It's not about VCs being scum but about investors needing a relatively fast return on investment which is understandable but also often times incompatible with investment in large scale, open source infrastructure.