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Playing the Open Source Game (2021)

You've surely read plenty about how simple is good, but what's wrong with easy?

Andrew did an amazing job laying the foundations, from deliberately choosing a non-profit corporate model, to picking clear values based on respect and empathy for the community to crystallize around, and finally by leading development by example both when it comes to exploring new ideas and when doing the methodical part of the work required to go from a proof of concept to a reliable tool, like zig cc, for example. While the core team itself might be fine, we can't forget that all those developers have hierarchies above them and they lack the ultimate power that Antirez had: copyright ownership and undisputed control over the codebase which allowed him to raise a big, fat middle finger to pressure coming from Redis Labs or any of the clouds. Unfortunately their talent got completely wasted because every high level detail of the whole story made that impossibly hard, from the company structure, to its financial strategy, up to external forces like toxic (and effective) marketing and sales tactics from AWS and other players.

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