Healthy skepticism is good. Dev tools are hard.

There are hundreds of open source companies - many making gobs of money. Not all - many fail. This team has name recognition and a few successful projects already - Babel and yarn. I can see it working out.

JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages. Millions of developers. With solid execution, there are monstrous markets here.

> There are hundreds of open source companies - many making gobs of money.

[citation needed]

It seems there may be many open source companies with tons of users, but they seem to struggle with monetization and turning those users into paying users.

Redhat which used to be the epitome of a company making money from open source got acquired by IBM.

A lot of other open source companies are switching to non-open source licenses.

OSS Capital, which participated in the Rome Tools, Inc round, has compiled a list which includes commercial open source companies, revenue estimates, and how much VC raised: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17nKMpi_Dh5slCqzLSFBo...

34 billion dollars doesn't count as gobs of money?

Even though a company's software might be open source, the company does own the intellectual property of the open source project. It chooses what license under which the software should be offered and has the freedom to commercially exploit the software in ways that nobody else can.

That being said, a compiler toolchain is not so easily monetized as something like Grafana, which has obvious enterprise features that need filling in and which can be hosted as a cloud service, generating revenue that way.

I imagine the team has ideas for monetization, otherwise they would not have raised $4.5M from some top shelf venture capitalists. I would like to know what those ideas are.

this team also has had at least one example of unilateral non-open source decisionmaking https://www.vice.com/en/article/pawnwv/open-source-devs-reve...

Is it a given that because the software is open-source, the decision-making will be, too? Almost seems there should be a separate set of claims for what the decision-making process will be (like how there are various software licenses).

From the article:

> Eric Raymond, the founder of the Open Source Initiative and one of the authors of the standard-bearing Open Source Definition, said Kyle’s decision violated the fifth clause of the definition, which prohibits discrimination against people or groups.

Okay, so the issue wasn't decision-making, then, and you agree with the parent comment that open source need not have open decision-making?

The Rome license will stay MIT.

Linus is probably a tie-breaker, and thus a unilateral decision maker for Linux when necessary too. What's the problem?

> Dev tools are hard.

That's true. The market is small and price-sensitive.

Over at r/javascript, Sebastian mentioned the business model would be based on providing services. He mentioned things like code quality monitoring and remote cache, so it sounds like it's up the alley of CI/CD cloud platform offerings.

Does seem like quite a departure from the original premise of Rome, but it seems like a sensible strategy. FWIW many companies easily spend 6-7 figures on CI/CD per year, so there's definitely room to carve out a niche there.

It's not a "JavaScript library" it's an entire toolchain. In the same way that `git` generated billions of dollars worth of value in the form of companies and productivity, Rome will do the same. Possibly even bigger.

I have no doubt that Rome will massively increase the producitvity of thousands of companies and developers. But the hard thing in open source is how will you capture some portion of that value. The vast majority of libraries, toolchains and other open source projects out there which has massively increased the developer producitivty are underfunded let alone generate millions of dollars in sales. Rome not only has to find a sustainable way for funding the project as well as figure out a way to 100x the returns of VCs? How is Rome planning to do that?

> I have no doubt that Rome will massively increase the producitvity of thousands of companies and developers

I would like to see that measured.

My suspicion is that many developers are already too reliant on tooling and that reliance harms productivity rather than improves it. Bundling those tooling concerns eliminates some operational costs associated with a plurality of tools but increases dependency upon the tool.

This problem is not a technical problem (as in how do I solve a problem), but a cultural problem (as in what is the proper way to solve a problem). It comes down to the difference between a product focus (what do we ship) versus an operational focus (what do we work on).

I think you're being very selective with what you call "tooling" here. I understand where it's coming from though, and I agree that in some circumstances people are adhering too much to what might be perceived as "standards" instead of building or using something more fit to the task.

On the contrary I would also say that I see a lot of developers not being reliant enough on tooling. A simple example is getting very acquainted with the debugger in your language of choice. It's very common to sprinkle logs everywhere instead of properly learning how to step through code.

I mean tooling as generally as possible, everything outside your application's execution runtime and the shell it runs in. Of course developer's will benefit from a code editor and a language compiler (assuming there aren't many), but how much tooling do you really need to deliver a product?

> How is Rome planning to do that?

Clearly they have a vision that investors thought was compelling enough to buy into.

Perhaps be patient and see what they announce in the future? This is their day one (zero?)..

If there was an easy answer here, someone else would have already done it.

edit: they (sort of) answer in another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039330

Yeah. I geuinely hope they work it out. And hopefully more open source projects can follow their playbook.

git doesn't make linus torvalds money though.

People used git because it was mandated for linux kernel work.

To your second point, I remember when git was announced. I remember it was such a breath of conceptual fresh air over what I had been using (svn, mercurial) for me. I use it because it makes a lot more sense to me and how I work, and I've never worked on the linux kernel.

never used it, but afaik mercurial is basically git's doppelgannger - functionally they are identical. Am I wrong here?

No, doppelganger seems like a pretty incorrect term to choose here.

http://www.rockstarprogrammer.org/post/2008/apr/06/differenc...

Who is getting rich off "git"?

GitHub, yeah absolutely, but git makes no money because noone pays for git.

Likewise, noone pays for command line package managers (in fact I doubt anyone pays for a command-line tool at all). So its ok to say it generates value, but if you can't caputre that value its not a sound business model.

> In order to support the open source project, we’ll be building supplemental products and services. This aligns our incentives with the community and our open source users, with a focus on interoperability, performance, and usability.

like every open source company, they will sell additional services to companies. When you have millions of users you always find a way to monetize it, even if you think you are just a "javascript library". Redis is just a database, Word is just a text processor, ...

Compiler As A Service obviously. I'm half joking.

I really hope they don't start charging $1 for every time I install Babel through npm.....