| ▲ | TekMol 4 hours ago |
| What is the business model behind open source projects like bun? How can a company "aquire" it and why does it do that? In the article they write about the early days We raised a $7 million seed round
Why do investors invest into people who build something that they give away for free? |
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| ▲ | taylorlapeyre 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The post mentions why - Bun eventually wanted to provide some sort of cloud-hosting saas product. |
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| ▲ | TekMol 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Everyone could offer a cloud-hosted saas product that involves bun, right? Why invest into a company that has the additional burden of developing bun, why not in a company that does only the hosting? | | |
| ▲ | simonw 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The standard argument here is that the maintainers of the core technology are likely to do a better job of hosting it because they have deeper understanding of how it all works. There's also the trick Deno has been trying, where they can use their control of the core open source project to build features that uniquely benefit their cloud hosting: https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/deno-kv#user-content-the-... | |
| ▲ | simpsond 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Hosting is a commodity. Runtimes are too. In this case, the strategy is to make a better runtime, attract developers, and eventually give them a super easy way to run their project in the cloud. Eg: bun deploy, which is a reserved no op command. I really like Buns DX. |
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| ▲ | knowitnone3 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Except Amazon would beat them to it |
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| ▲ | Supercompressor an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Free now isn't free forever. If something has inherent value then folks will be willing to pay for it. |
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| ▲ | ChrisbyMe 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I mean if you're getting X number of users per day and you don't need to pay for bandwidth or anything, there's gotta be SOME way to monetize down the line. If your userbase or the current CEO likes it or not. |
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| ▲ | rglover 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Either for a modest return when it sells or as a tax write off when it fails. |
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| ▲ | bcye 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | VCs do not invest for a modest return. | | |
| ▲ | rglover 42 minutes ago | parent [-] | | No, but faced with either a loss or a modest return, they'll take the modest return (unless it's more beneficial to not come tax season). Unicorns are called unicorns for a reason. |
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