Vercel CTO's Thoughts on Open Source Vs. Closed Source

yeah I would actually say that really the philosophies aren't even a bit different but they but what is different is not the emphasis so if you put yourself in the position of the buyer in the abstract sense because the open source project is free right the person who selects like next.js to be the thing that runs one of the most important parts of the company like if I'm that person I want to you know be able to understand it equally I want to be able to make its existence not depend on the

you know future of some startup like for sale and I want to be able to like if the project goes a different direction I'm not happy with be able to kind of continue maintaining it my my personal favorite anecdote is this is 15 years ago so not that long ago okay 15 years ago like this the internet was already a thing with Web 2.0 was like in full swing and I was at a consultancy and we're building uh Airline website and it was running on on is internet information server which is Microsoft's

Windows space web server and we have performance problems and we didn't have a support contract with Microsoft and so I was looking literally at the UI like there was like a you know Windows settings dialog for this like heavy production grade web server and there was a check box that was labeled burst mode it's like that sounds interesting right like outer performance Revenue like maybe I need to activate burst mode and so I I checked like I Googled it 50 years ago Google was already told me

things I Googled it with a Microsoft documentation for this but uh text box and the docs say activates Burst Mode and that was it that was and I was you know that that made it so clear for me like how absolutely impossibly like in Spain it is to run this piece of we've actually critical software that I can't understand um like you just cannot be in that situation where you have this problem and so that's why I think there's just

this broad consensus that the things that that you run as production infrastructure yourself you have to like deeply understand and so I think next kind of false it is this this bucket and and hence has to be open source