Lee from Vercel here. The governance of Svelte isn't changing – it's still the same independent, open-source project and community. We're just supporting Rich and helping the project grow!
Absolutely, but in my mind this means Rich/Svelte have been "blessed", and I've built enough Next.js apps to know that you aren't going to find a better Dev UX/superior experience to what Vercel is providing.
Benefits of being a framework owned by a business that makes a lot of money off of it.
Next.js 12 as any indicator, I'm just going with whatever falls under the Vercel umbrella now -- I can tell you that Nuxt is not a competitor (as an unbiased voice and someone who doesn't particularly love React).
> We're just supporting Rich and helping the project grow!
I'll admit that I have a negative bias towards this... in spite of Basecamp+RoR, Mozilla+Rust, or all the great OSS HashiCorp makes, it's still hard for me to believe that business do anything out of the goodness of their heart.
Is there a strategic goal for hiring Rich? is it that Svelte is used so much in house that it only made sense to support it? Is it to get more cred with developer by supporting projects they love?
Again, sorry if this question is to skeptic and cynical... I love to be wrong on this! :)
In the case of Vercel, I'd imagine that improving svelte's reach positively affects them commercially seeing as they're a major player in the relatively small market of svelte hosting.
This is the standard narrative when OSS contributors got hired but ok, I'd write the same.
But then just tell us what was the motivation of Vercel's shareholders and CEO to acquire Rich for such a high price (he is the compensation and ESOP you pay absolutely worth) but what's your gain? "Just supporting Rich and helping the project grow" or just buying him out of the market?
On a high level: if Svelte succeeds, the Web succeeds and Vercel succeeds.
More concretely: we want Rich to help shape Vercel's support for frameworks as an open platform. We want to hear how, as a framework creator, the platform can best serve him. We project this work will have ripple effects like making Astro or Remix better on Vercel, or the next framework you invent. You'll hear about this work soon.
We want to hear what edge infrastructure would make Svelte the fastest for developers and visitors. We want to also help him build a better Svelte by connecting him with customers who are betting on it in production. We want to learn from his DX expertise so that we can make better products.
We are very excited about this and we think betting on Open Source for the SDK together with an Open Platform for infrastructure is the only way to succeed in our space.
