The problem is that particular type of slippery slope mindset.
What if some next big change doesn't align with the best interest of the community?
You can see some future parallel to Microsoft and the `dotnet watch` debacle[0] where the dotnet team introduced a feature to allow hot reload then some executive neutered it except for Visual Studio because "it wasn't stable yet".
No one will know the true reasons why it was pulled (and then re-released after community outcry), but it left a sour taste in the community. And in the case of Microsoft, I think they have even smaller incentives to pull this kind of stuff (VS is a very tiny, tiny portion of their revenue compared to Azure and Office) whereas Vercel is much more tightly bound to Next.js so it seems inevitable that there will be a point in time when Vercel's interests comes to loggerheads with the community's best interest.
It may seem far-fetched right now, but all you need to do is look at the HTML source for Target.com and Walmart.com and see how a corporation has created tremendous leverage under the guise of OSS. The obvious outcome is to use that leverage at some point in the future to extract capital. The fact that they built something novel instead of embracing an already really good community solution (Vite) smacks of creating leverage in the same way that Apple has been empowered by their walled garden platform ownership.
I trust Evan You far, far more than I do Vercel to make decisions in the interest of the community.
What if some next big change doesn't align with the best interest of the community?
You can see some future parallel to Microsoft and the `dotnet watch` debacle[0] where the dotnet team introduced a feature to allow hot reload then some executive neutered it except for Visual Studio because "it wasn't stable yet".
No one will know the true reasons why it was pulled (and then re-released after community outcry), but it left a sour taste in the community. And in the case of Microsoft, I think they have even smaller incentives to pull this kind of stuff (VS is a very tiny, tiny portion of their revenue compared to Azure and Office) whereas Vercel is much more tightly bound to Next.js so it seems inevitable that there will be a point in time when Vercel's interests comes to loggerheads with the community's best interest.
It may seem far-fetched right now, but all you need to do is look at the HTML source for Target.com and Walmart.com and see how a corporation has created tremendous leverage under the guise of OSS. The obvious outcome is to use that leverage at some point in the future to extract capital. The fact that they built something novel instead of embracing an already really good community solution (Vite) smacks of creating leverage in the same way that Apple has been empowered by their walled garden platform ownership.
I trust Evan You far, far more than I do Vercel to make decisions in the interest of the community.
[0] https://dotnetcoretutorials.com/2021/10/23/the-hot-reload-de...