From the start of TFA:

Netlify Acquires Gatsby Inc. to Accelerate Adoption of Composable Web Architectures

Acquisition of new Valhalla Content Hub platform provides Enterprise developers increased flexibility when building composable web experiences with any modern web framework

Gatsby web framework to remain open source for all developers to use

Gatsby was primarily developed by Gatsby Inc, a VC-funded company https://www.gatsbyjs.com/blog/2020-05-27-announcing-series-b...

you realize that organizations that develop open source software can sell support contracts, consulting, services, hosting, etc, all things that generate revenue.

I guess you could have said the same about RedHat, yet IBM acquired them for $34 billion. I wonder why they would pay that much for an open source company? Hmmmm... there must be a reason?

IP? Patents?

Other companies use those technologies and have to pay for commercial licenses? They can freeze out competitors? I don't know, just spitballing.

Gatsby Inc is a SaaS that provides hosting.

aren't they just an AWS wrapper?

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but that is like saying that AWS EC2 is “just a wrapper” of Xen, or that AWS RDS for PostgreSQL is “just a wrapper” of PostgreSQL. There is an entire business around those with value add/sales/support/marketing as well as a strategy for growth.

Wait until you hear about Heroku!

Who's "they" - Netlify or Gatsby?

Does it matter? How many person do you know around your circle, uses netlify or gatsby? It sounds like a cdn business to me

Isn't a CDN just a wrapper around Dell?

It's fastly. Fastly dns' points to a server in located in CA.

I would assume all the tech around Gatsby’s enterprise offerings. If we take this example to NextJS, it would be like if they bought Vercel.

their market share, their traction, highly targeted source of clientelle

Open Source is just Freemium with more steps.