> I’ve seen this game plan often enough.

I probably haven't been around as long as you. Could you provide an example of one that comes to mind?

Elasticsearch

Redis

Mongo

Bitnami

Gitlab

SourceGraph

Cockroach

prisma

Auth.js: Vercel hired the lead dev and it stopped improving, leading to better-auth

Time for Vercel to hire the lead dev of Better Auth next?

thebestmotherfuckingauth.com

I bet Vercel buys better-auth and makes it a first party auth solution

Isn’t Vercel’s CEO an investor of Clerk? A direct competitor to all these FOSS auth libraries.

Yes, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45393382

Now better-auth had raised $5M so they can't undercut Clerky by too much or they'll fail

We all know how this ends. The open source project ends up being crippled to the point it's no longer useful.

Not outright crippled; just strategically neglected compared to the paid variant, unless it’s effectively useless without paying. And then Vercel steps in, buys the whole thing, and Better Auth becomes „Next.js“ first, ideally only fully effective on Vercel.

I would say once a company becomes vc funded, it will have some different priorities.

Although Deno seems to be working out good so far. They are providing value to the general JS eco system. And yes there is Deno deploy, but competent sysadmin and DevOP people will have no trouble running it on their own and scaling.

Thing is though, where will they get their returns?

consulting? deploy hosted? (why not just use cf workers/vercel/etc.)

if there was a way for the industry to support these things by everyone pitching in, that'd probably be the best but I don't see that happening soon