In this RedMonk conversation, Daniel Roe, Nuxt Project Lead at Vercel, discusses the recent acquisition of NuxtLabs by Vercel and its implications for the Nuxt framework, UnJS, and Nitro. They chat about the importance of maintaining Nuxt’s independence, the strategic vision behind Vercel’s investment, and the role of community governance in open source projects. Daniel shares his personal journey in open source and emphasizes the need for sustainability and a positive approach to funding in the open source ecosystem.

Transcript

Kate Holterhoff (00:12)
Hello and welcome to this Redmonk conversation. name is Kate Holterhoff, Senior Analyst at Redmonk. And with me today, I have Daniel Roe, Framework Architect at NuxtLabs. Daniel, thanks so much for joining me on the MonkCast.

Daniel Roe (00:23)
Hello Kate, it’s pleasure to be here.

Kate Holterhoff (00:25)
So let’s begin with your big news so what’s new and exciting at Nuxt this week?

Daniel Roe (00:32)
Well, it would be difficult, I think, for me not to say the big thing is that Vercel are investing in Nuxt. So they’re acquiring NuxtLabs and they’re hiring four of us on the Nuxt core team to continue to build Nuxt. So that’s something I’ve been talking about a lot, answering people’s questions. so, yes, it’s pretty much today has been answering questions, which has been a lot of fun.

Kate Holterhoff (00:57)
I love that. Okay, well, here we are. I’m going to be asking more questions and I appreciate you taking the time to answer them. All right, so we have not buried the lede here. We are just getting right into it. But for folks who are less familiar with what Nuxt is and what it does, can you give us the breakdown of what is Nuxt?

Daniel Roe (01:14)
Absolutely. So Nuxt is a framework for building full stack web apps. It’s built with Vue and we have, we use Vite as a bundler, although we are agnostic, you can bring your own bundler. And we have Nitro for server, for the server backend. It can be deployed to lots of platforms with zero config from Netlify to Cloudflare to of course, Vercel to Azure, AWS and lots more.

Kate Holterhoff (01:39)
Great. And I was a little unclear about the announcement. Sébastien Chopin, the NuxtLabs founder, he has posted the sort of announcement that’s on the nuxtlabs.com website. And you’ve sort of given us the framework about what it means that NuxtLabs is joining Vercel. So Vercel in the past the way that it has sponsored these frameworks has…

taken different forms. And it sounds like in NuxtLab’s case, it is an acquihire, but it also they’re investing in the platform. Talk to me about that part a little bit. I think acquihire makes sense. But is all the IP going to convert to Vercel at this point?

Daniel Roe (02:19)
So one of the key things to say is that NuxtLabs and Nuxt are quite different things. the founder, the creator of Nuxt originally is Sébastien Chopin. Sébastien and his brother Alex created Nuxt and we’ve had a core team for some time. We’ve been through versions one, two, three. That was back in 2016.

Kate Holterhoff (02:25)
Okay.

Daniel Roe (02:38)
And Alex and his brother also founded a company and the motivation for that was to enable sustainable development on Nuxt. So they’ve built a number of things. They’ve built some products, things like NuxtHub, Nuxt Studio, Volta. They’ve built a UI library, Nuxt UI Pro. And all of those have, I think, have been pretty successful.

And as a result, they’ve funded development into Nuxt. So for example, I’m sponsored by NuxtLabs. I’m not employed by them. Well, I mean, until recently, I was sponsored by them. And they do employ some members of the core team. It’s not a one-to-one correlation. So we have core team members in Nuxt who aren’t funded by NuxtLabs or are funded much less by them. And they do support developers across the ecosystem. So…

really a great thing as far as I’m concerned. So what Vercel has done is acquired NuxtLabs and their products and their team, which I think is fantastic. It’s obviously great to see a successful exit. They’ve built some great products which now are going to be open sourced. So Nuxt Content will have Nuxt Studio, this way of editing your website live. It works great for everybody.

whether or not you have a tech background or not. And that’s going to be open sourced. The same is true of NuxtHub, which hitherto only worked with CloudFlare. It’s not going to become agnostic. But in a sense, I’ve not really been involved in those products because I’ve been focusing on Nuxt. Now, Nuxt is remaining independent. It’s still an open source framework. It’s still independent. I lead Nuxt. I’m the lead of the core team. And I’ll still be doing that.

And I’ll be doing that with independence and autonomy. So I think acquihire is probably a good way of thinking about it, but I would push back a little bit on that, on the acquisition side of things. It’s an acquisition of NuxtLabs, but that doesn’t mean that Nuxt itself is becoming a proprietary framework. That’s not what’s happening.

Kate Holterhoff (04:26)
Okay.

Okay, okay. Yeah, one of the things that struck me about the announcement on the NuxtLabs website was that the word open appears nine times in Sébastien’s statement. And it just seemed to be a little bit on the defensive of like anticipating that folks are going to be concerned about this because currently Nuxt has an MIT license, is that right? Okay, okay. And so there’s no danger of there being a rug pull and a license change as far as you know.

Daniel Roe (04:55)
It does, yeah.

No, there isn’t. And that’s not just as far as I know. mean, it’s pretty essential. one, it’s really essential. think the…

Kate Holterhoff (05:05)
Okay.

Daniel Roe (05:17)
I think it’s not, I don’t want to speak for other people, but certainly for myself, I would think I’m certain for the rest of the core team. The reason why we’re excited about this is that there is like, is how convinced we are that this is a great thing for Nuxt. So the fact that Nuxt is staying independent is essential for me. So I’m not particularly interested in leading.

framework which is not independent and doesn’t keep the vision that we have. And I think the fact that Sébastien mentioned open so many times, it’s very interesting. I also wrote an announcement that focuses obviously not on the NuxtLabs piece, but on Nuxt itself, which is on our GitHub discussions. And I probably use the word open a similar number of times. But that’s, I think, not, that’s because it’s such an important concept.

So what we’ve done with Nuxt is we’ve obviously built something which can be deployed to lots of different places. And so it has this open model for deployment providers. That is something that’s really essential to what we are and offer. It’s not some kind of optional extra. Obviously people have questions. What happens when some of the core team are employed by one particular provider? And it would take a lot.

to get rid of that as a core value for us. We’re not touching that. We believe in being open. We believe in making Nuxt deployable everywhere. And it’s not just about deployment. So our image integration works with any image provider. I mentioned that we’re built on Vite, but you can swap in any bundler. The same is true with our font providers or our database backends or our key value stores.

The whole concept of Nuxt is that it focuses on user choice. I think it’s personally as close to a core value of the web as I can think of. one of the really nice things is from my conversations with Vercel leadership, that is actually one of the things they really value about Nuxt. So they’re keen to see us carry on, obviously. They’re not touching our vision or roadmap. And actually almost the other way around.

They want us to sort of inspire a similar kind of openness. I’d like to think it’s a very powerful statement that Vercel are making in backing us and backing that openness. It’s not an optional extra in terms of why they’re hiring some of the core team, I think.

Kate Holterhoff (07:41)
And did they talk at all about why they want to do this? Is this just for making developers happy? Is this just like, a feel-good story about open source? Or is there a strategic reason why Vercel wants to position itself as being a scion of open source values using Nuxt in particular?

Daniel Roe (07:57)
So obviously I can’t really comment on the full strategy behind why Vercel are bringing us on board. I can give you my speculations. So I think there are a couple of different approaches to building a successful business and to growing on the web.

Kate Holterhoff (08:00)
Sure.

Daniel Roe (08:16)
I think one approach we’ve seen, I certainly saw in my early days on the computer. remember when, I don’t know if you know, I remember when Microsoft, for example, was this monopolistic software giant. You you will not touch Microsoft Word format. We’re going to keep you in our software. We’re to stop you from getting out of it. And I can tell you that what that bred in

me was resentment, bitterness, almost hatred at times because it was someone like deliberately stepping on the freedom that I wanted to have to, in this case, edit my documents. And I discovered Linux and delighted in it and basically used only Linux from that point onward. Microsoft changed. They turned round, they adopted a very different strategy.

And they became beloved in the developer community for what they’re doing. If you look at VS Code and GitHub and NPM and Playwright and so many projects, Microsoft have shown their bona fides that they actually are about openness now. And that actually can beget a kind of, well, not a kind of, it can beget loyalty. People understand that this is something that they actually want a part of.

if I use one of the open source products or if I even use a Microsoft product, if I’m talking about Word now, for example, I’m using that because I think it’s a great product or because I have confidence in the company it comes from. And so you can think of open source as a way of doing exactly that, of positioning a company very strongly in favor of openness and against.

this kind of predatory model of locking down and stopping people. So I think one of the things that Vercel is doing, and not just by what they’re doing with Nuxt, bringing us on board, but also what they have been doing consistently. So bringing Rich Harris on board, for example, and some of the Svelte team and other open source projects that they’re funding as well, is saying we are about openness. So we’re about seeing lots of different frameworks flourish.

We’re not about locking people down. And I’d like to think that our particular focus in Nuxt of this open SDK model of having different providers looking for a good user experience, allowing users to choose where they want to go. I’d like to think that it’s particularly powerful that Vercel are backing us and backing that. So far from being a strange thing, I think it makes sense.

I think it makes sense as part of betting on the open web, betting on choice and looking to build a business that is based on user loyalty rather than lock-in. Now, that is all my supposition as to strategy, but I can say for sure that there’s nothing I’ve heard, no conversation I’ve had at any point in the process that’s made me doubt Vercel’s commitment to the openness of Nuxt, and what we’re about.

Kate Holterhoff (11:07)
All right, has there been any talk about creating a foundation for Nuxt as a third party independent way of managing the community to make sure it doesn’t, you know, in some way get absorbed into Vercel and more of a, you know, corporate structure?

Daniel Roe (11:24)
That’s, no, there are actually, I haven’t heard any conversation like that. It’s interesting. So I think Nuxt more than a lot of projects is community-based and very dependent on the community as well. we are, I mean, for example, I started contributing to Nuxt as a user and I think that’s probably true of a lot of the contributors to Nuxt, with people who use it. And…

up with face bugs or come up with ideas and want to implement them. So that makes us very practical, very pragmatic, very grassroots focused. Stuff isn’t coming down from a central point to say this is what things need to be like. that also means I think Nuxt is, and we’re also very, I didn’t mention this when I said what Nuxt was, but Nuxt is phenomenally extensible. So you can ship your own modules, for example, there are over two

hundred and seventy modules that are in our official registry, but there are probably lots more besides that, of ways people have built integrations that build on top of Nuxt and add functionality and features to it. So Nuxt is really very, if you look at why it’s successful, I think a big part of that is because of the community. All of which is a very long way of saying that we are accountable to that community, not just in the very practical terms of

Do people use it? Will people fork it in the sense that any open source project is? But we’re also dependent on that community for new ideas, for bug fixes, for contributions. in a way, I think putting Nuxt as a project in a foundation, I’m not even sure what that would really mean for an MIT licensed project, which is, but the IP is all.

open and out in the open anyway. But I’m not sure it make a lot of difference in terms of the practicalities, which is that at the end of the day, we are accountable to the community, no matter what happens. We do have a governance. The governance is that Sébastien, owns, who created Nux, I should say, decides, he and Alex and Pouya decide who leads the project.

So I, for example, could be removed. But while I’m in place, I guess a little bit like a CEO and a board of directors, while I’m in place, I set the direction. I lead the framework and the team. I think that’s a very good thing to have that accountability speaking for myself, because obviously I have the ability to lead at the same time if I go wrong, I can be taken out. And I think the same is true for any open source project. So if we take the project in the wrong direction,

The community obviously always have the final say in that. a say, I hope there will never be any pause to use, but I think it should give people a great deal of confidence. Accountability is always a good thing.

Kate Holterhoff (14:07)
Yeah, that’s interesting. mean, Vue has a benevolent dictatorship model with Evan You. It sounds like Nuxt has something similar, where there’s a sort of board and they represent the community, and they answer only to what they perceive to be best for the project.

Daniel Roe (14:22)
So yes, Nuxt has effectively a two-stage benevolent dictator model. Although I don’t like the concept, I don’t like the phrase, because really we’re very collaborative in our approach. And when I stepped up to lead the project, I did a huge and heavy edit of the governance document, which is by the way, open source on https://github.com/nuxt/governance because I wanted to take us away from

Kate Holterhoff (14:29)
I like that.

Sure.

Huh.

Daniel Roe (14:51)
dictatorship and a lot of the language that was present in that model. But yeah, so it’s effectively a two stage. there’s no committees, there’s no none of that, which actually I think is a good thing. I think it enables us to move quickly and to be agile. We’re not always second guessing ourselves. There’s the ability to just.

do something and build an experiment. That I think is really good and it’s helped us keep a feeling of being fresh and entrepreneurial, even though we’ve been around since 2016. So I think that’s great. And then, but so obviously I’m doing that leading, but then there’s the second stage of, I can be taken down at any time for whatever reason. I think that’s really important. So there is this sort of check on the…

dictatorship model. But yes, so there’s no other boards. But I think it would be a strange thing if someone were to start railroading things, if I were to start railroading things through, I think the community would rightly raise a few eyebrows.

Kate Holterhoff (15:57)
Yes, I suspect you’re correct. Well, I think that makes a lot of sense. Foundations are not a panacea. folks have complaints about the CNCF, for instance. So I think that there’s room in the world of open source for different models.

I guess I’m curious from a higher level. Do you have a background in open source outside of this? I mean, it’s remarkable to me that you were able to rewrite the governance. I saw on your LinkedIn that you were involved in agency work, which was my background as well, so that jumped out at me. And you mentioned Linux, of course. So how did you learn how to work on a governance model?

Daniel Roe (16:31)
Well, so obviously I think I should probably say that I’m not saying I’m an expert on all of these things. And probably most of what I’ve learned, I’ve learned by making mistakes. And that goes for lots and lots of things. I guess if I go backwards, so before being on the core team, I was contributing to open source.

because we used Nuxt in my company. So I had a small software as a service company. We were building business to business ⁓ SaaS, helping employees navigate working parenthood. And that was fantastic. And we used Nuxt as our front end. And so I got involved in helping out. So figuring out first fixing our own bugs.

adding features, were really into serverless. I maintained the, actually as it happened, I maintained the Vercel serverless adapter. was called Now at the time. The company was called Zeit and the product was called Now. And so I maintained the Now builder. And so that was my sort of involvement in Nuxt. Before that, was a little bit involved in the Laravel ecosystem and the WordPress ecosystem.

for my SaaS and also before that the agency that I had where I basically moved from the agency started out as a word based company focusing on communication, clear communication, helping businesses communicate what they were about. And we found that when we communicated clearly, when we helped those businesses know what they were really about, they often needed technical implementation and graphical implementation of that. So taking brand into

branding. So we started doing tech, building out websites for that. And do you know, before that, before I started that communication agency, I was actually a church of England vicar. was, I had a small church in York, in the UK. And I did that for, I think four or five years. Before that, I studied theology, of course, as you would expect. Before that, I trained to be a lawyer.

So I’ve had quite a lot of different things. A lot of different things. So maybe the governance document isn’t so strange after all, I guess.

Kate Holterhoff (18:32)
It’s coming full circle.

Yeah, it’s making sense to me at this point. It’s interesting that you brought up WordPress, though, because if we think about the benevolent dictatorship model and what’s going on with Matt Mullenweg and I interviewed someone else on the podcast (Andrew Hutchings) who had been kicked off of the Slack channel, there’s certainly mixed reports with that model. So your efforts to…

Daniel Roe (18:38)
But yes.

Kate Holterhoff (18:58)
shift away from that, I think are warranted. And I am curious about what all of this says about the state of open source and maintainership, because funding open source projects really sounds like the core of this entire move on NuxtLab’s part. Do you have a position on that? Like, how do you think open source can survive?

Daniel Roe (19:19)
so…

think that’s an interesting question. think that open source monetization and how people think about, think there’s so much to talk about that. Like it could be a whole conversation and I have a lot of opinions about it. I don’t think for example, that funding follows value. So when people produce something that’s very valuable and they open source it, doesn’t mean that you can’t tell that by looking at their funding because

I don’t think people give, that people fund, people give, people sponsor, people have retainers, people have agreements. There are a lot of things going on. And so if you have an open source maintainer and they are sponsored, and that has been my model up until now. So I haven’t been employed, I’ve been sponsored. I’ve had consultancy agreements to help people out. But my sponsorship.

And I’ve been very clear to say sponsorship is, there is no quid pro quo. I do not offer any, you don’t get prioritized issues. There’s none of that because I don’t want to have, you know, a thousand, well, I don’t have a thousand sponsors, but I don’t want to have lots of bosses. I’m not looking for that. Sponsorship I see is a wave of, it’s a gift economy. People are giving to me. And at the same time, I see open source is about giving.

I see the work that I do on open source is about giving my time. I’m helping people whom I don’t have to help. The fact that I don’t have to help them is very important to me. I don’t want to have a contractual agreement to have to help them. That ruins the gift if you have to do it. So for me, the idea of the sustainability of open source isn’t really a question of how do I get paid for my gift because that misses the point for me.

And I am saying for me, I don’t know, I think a lot of people might be different, but for me, it misses the point. Getting paid for my gift is a non sequitur. Sustainability for open source is how can I ensure that I have the time to give my gift? And that time, if you’re thinking about it that way, this is maybe also the difference between a stipend and a salary. People who are paid a stipend are paid so they don’t have to work. So they can then spend their time doing something.

that might not make sense to pay them a salary for. And so I, for example, would look to what NuxtLabs did for me, sponsoring me and many other people as well, as giving me the freedom to spend my time giving a gift. And that meant that the sponsorship also didn’t have to match it. I didn’t look when I saw someone cancel their sponsorship of me or give me a new sponsorship. I didn’t look at someone who was giving a dollar a month for 12 months.

and think, I’m doing a bad job. Because the point wasn’t the amount of money I was getting, it was the fact that they were giving anything. It meant something, right? It’s the thought that counts. I don’t know if that’s really getting at your question, which is that obviously we want to see sustainable growth in all of these open source projects. But a lot of the way we do see that at the moment is that people are paid

by a company. And often they’re paid to do something totally different, but the fact is that means they are free to give their gift. So they’re paid to do something else and they do that in the day and then they have time on weekends and evenings to give the gift of open source. Sometimes people have the privilege of actually being paid to have the time. For example, now I will, ⁓ so Vercel are employing me to do this. And there are other…

Companies that do this as well, like StackBlitz, like Sentry, like VoidZero, plenty of other companies that do. They pay people specifically to work on open source. And I see that as part of the picture, but I really wouldn’t rule out the fact that people are also paid to do things completely differently, but it sets them free to contribute to open source in their free time. I don’t see that as fundamentally different from what I’m doing. I feel like their motivation and my motivation are probably very similar.

the key thing though, and I think the thing that we’re not talking about, talking about money and money isn’t what really matters here. it’s, well, I mean, there are a lot of things that matter, but meaning value, mental health, wellbeing are the things we should be talking about. The point is, is less about our, maintainers of open source products being paid for the project. The point is, are they deriving value?

from it, are they being appreciated? Do they feel like their work has meaning? And I think that people feel like they don’t have meaning, they feel devalued, they feel burnt out when they lack control, when they don’t receive appreciation for what they do. And I think that is a much, much bigger issue. mean, obviously the fundamentals that people need to be able to feed themselves to look after their families. And there are a lot of things that I’m sort of glossing over here, but I do think that

beyond that, there is this question of what is people’s wellbeing? Because when people do tie their wellbeing to the money they receive with a sponsorship, I think it’s a recipe for burnout because you cannot control it. You cannot control how much people give you because it’s their choice, not yours. And how much they give you isn’t based on what you put into the project. So people build amazing things and put countless hours in and they’re paid back.

pennies of that investment or less and detaching that, making it not about monetizing open source, but about recognizing that it’s about mutual giving is I think a part of the solution, a part of the road to better open source maintainer mental health. I mean, I’m speaking obviously very autobiographically here. I’m not trying to put things in for other people.

And I’m so sorry, I’m totally hijacking this. I could talk about this for very long time.

Kate Holterhoff (25:02)
I am loving this so much. I love the energy you’re bringing to this. It’s got this lovely anarchist hacker ethos about the greater good. And it’s just, it is so divergent from what I’m usually hearing, which is about rug pulls. I mean, we’re hearing a lot about the BSL. And I’m thinking of the NATs controversy with the CNCF, So…

I feel like at Redmonk, we’re often enmired in the, I don’t know, sort of the darker side of open source. And I mean that in the sense of it’s not just like, giving back and, the joy of it, but it’s more about like, how are we going to monetize this project or use this in order to get on Hacker News so that we can, you know,

game more folks to our managed solution. And the way that you talk about it, I think, is the idyllic version of open source, which I just want to live there. I want to go to this place that you’re describing, and I want to exist there. ⁓ I don’t know that ⁓ some of the Vue developers that I talk to who love Nuxt, I think, are a little worried about the darker side. And so it’s a tough one. It’s a really hard thing.

Daniel Roe (26:07)
You can bring it back

to the dark side, I don’t mind.

Kate Holterhoff (26:10)
okay well i don’t know i just want to live where you you’ve positioned us i you know it’s it’s tough now i feel very i feel very negative and you know i don’t i don’t typically characterize myself that way so no i don’t think we need to go dark necessarily but

Let’s talk about some of the logistics because in the past, Vercel has committed to spending like, their sponsorships have been like monetary based, less than acquihires. So for instance, I’m thinking of like for Astro, they sponsored it at $5,000 a month. And in the US at least, you know, that’s not always great to do it on these sort of contract levels because you need health insurance and you need job security. And so,

I sort of love this new tactic, which maps on more with Vercel’s tendency to hire some of the huge players, especially in the front end community. So I’m thinking of like, Tobias Koppers, if we were thinking about Bundler’s. And, so all of these really important projects have gone under the auspices of Vercel in the past. Some of the times they’re moving to Netlify, you know, if we’re thinking about some of the more indie or you know, early VC backed frameworks.

So maybe we can pivot a little bit. So think when most folks think about Vercel, they tend to think about the React ecosystem, Next.js. And what I’m seeing with Nuxt is that maybe they’re hoping to support more Vue users. Do you think that that’s part of the strategy here? Okay.

Daniel Roe (27:30)
I think so.

I think it’s a very smart strategy that, I mean obviously I do, but I think it’s…

Kate Holterhoff (27:36)
Hahaha

Daniel Roe (27:38)
So it depends what the strategy is, right? So if you basically are treating Vercel as infrastructure for one part of the web, then investing in React obviously makes sense. Next.js obviously is a fantastic framework. It’s inspired certainly some of the things we’ve done in Nuxt, maybe particularly in the early days. I think expanding the vision of Vercel

to not just react, but Svelte, now looking at Vue is a powerful way of saying we want this to be a good home for developers of a lot of different front-end frameworks, a lot of different full stack frameworks as well. So it feels like that makes sense. It feels like that’s a good move. And it also feels like it’s aligning…

like aligning Vercel with a strategy of openness, of so cross frameworks. So not narrowly pitching it into one, but I’m wanting to say that people are welcome right across the stack, which I like that. I think it’s something that we do too little in the front end space. We can be very focused on our particular tech stack. So we can be very focused on

on React or Vue, can be very focused on a Next or a Nuxt or something else. And as much as I can, I try and encourage the Nuxt community not to buy into that. It’s totally fallacious. So we’re artisans of the web. We build with tools. It’s a silly idea to identify yourself with your tool. You want to be somebody who’s capable and able to build things and

Yes, you can pick whatever tool you’re most comfortable with. That’s great. But it would be a terrible thing to fight wars over those tools, right? That’s not what really matters. What matters is what you get to do with it. And so the idea of setting some of those framework wars aside, I think is a really, really good thing. And I wish we did more of that. I think there’s a lot of discourse in the tech space, particularly around new stuff and hype.

fear of missing out, which actually just feeds straight into people’s own imposter syndrome. They feel like if they haven’t learned that, if they don’t know this technology, if they’re not familiar with this, they’re already behind. And I think it’s so, so not true. If someone is a good React developer, they can easily be a good Vue developer. If someone is a good Vue developer, they can easily be a good Solid developer. Someone’s a good Solid developer, they can absolutely be a good Svelte developer.

These things are not the kind of walls that people put in place. The key skill in all of this is the ability to learn and to use the tools that you have, the technology that you have to solve problems that you’re encountering. Sure, experience is good and it’s obviously a good thing. You get better when you do something more than once and obviously even better when you do it lots of times, but the barriers here are miniscule.

compared to what they could be. We’re all in the JavaScript world, in the web world, we’re talking about HTML and CSS and JavaScript, and sometimes I think we put a lot more store in some of the small differences in the tooling that enable us to build for the web.

Kate Holterhoff (30:43)
Okay, I like it. I staying on the positive spin of this. I mean, I just sometimes I think I feel like

Daniel Roe (30:50)
not spin! okay, yeah, no no no, okay,

go dark, go dark, take me really dark then, get me off the positive

Kate Holterhoff (30:57)
No, no, I’m not doing it. But I do think just in terms of marketing, the fact that it’s Next and Nuxt, we’ve got one vowel separating these two frameworks. Like they got to do some sort of fancy. I mean, they got all the designers at Vercel, right? They’re going to like put the triangle behind it and like, use the same letters here. I mean, that can’t be coincidence. I feel like Guillermo Rauch was like, we must, we must involve Nuxt. Like this is, this is going to complete the triangle.

Daniel Roe (31:21)
thought so many times, like, this is so confusing to people. Initially, was, I because, you I only came on, I only started contributing to Nuxt in COVID times. That was my sort of open source my debut But I did hear one story back when I used to be on Twitter.

I was scrolling down and saw somebody totally, they were talking about Nuxt and so I was very interested. And it was a business owner talking about, they were an entrepreneur and they said, yeah, we built our app. And someone said, you built it in Nuxt, why is that? And they said, actually that wasn’t the plan. I wanted it to be built in Next, but I’m from Australia. And when I told the agency to build it in Next, they heard Nuxt, they built it in Nuxt.

So, you know, obviously that was a very long laid strategy that we had, which paid off in that particular case, know, confusion actually does work.

Kate Holterhoff (32:14)
You’ve worked it out. I’m trying to hear how someone would say, Next, with an Australian accent, my talent for voices is non-existent, so I’m not even going to try. But I love that idea so much. That cracks me up. See, here I am thinking that there’s SEO missteps here. And in fact, this was a master play.

Daniel Roe (32:35)
Yeah, exactly. Maybe we lean into the confusion.

Kate Holterhoff (32:39)
Precisely. This is wonderful. OK. Let’s talk about UnJS. What is the story around that? Is that going to be involved in this acquisition at all?

Daniel Roe (32:48)
So I think one of the key things is just separating the projects from the acquisition piece of things. So, and I think that’s equally true for UnJS. So UnJS is a GitHub org that we created as part of building, we recently rebuilt, well I say recently, three years ago, rebuilt Nuxt from scratch. So I’m not sure a single line of code exists that’s the same between Nuxt version two and Nuxt version three. And I have a lot of thoughts about that as well.

Kate Holterhoff (32:53)
Right.

Daniel Roe (33:16)
which I won’t bore you with. Maybe there’s good things in positive sides but I wouldn’t encourage anybody to rewrite their framework from scratch. But it did lead to great things in our case. And one of the things that came out of that was that we took all the stuff that we were using internally and we actually made it general purpose. And the idea, and we actually created this new GitHub org, UnJS, because we actually want to

Kate Holterhoff (33:17)
Ooh.

Daniel Roe (33:39)
collaborate with other framework authors. We want these things to be useful across the web ecosystem. We don’t want to be building the empire of Nuxt. We want

tools that actually are good for all of us. So we’ve built lots of tools in UnJS. And one of the key ones is actually Nitro, our server engine. It was originally called Nuxt Sigma. It was going to be our cool new server.

But actually we decided to take it out. We called it Nuxt Nitro and then we just called it Nitro. And then it became a standalone package in UnJS. And now it’s actually its own GitHub org. But the idea is very much for all of these things, the same as Nuxt. They’re all independent projects. honestly, I mean, I’ve obviously had the same kind of questions with…

you know, as part of looking at the offer from Vercel for me personally, one of the key things I really value, there are a couple of things I really value in what I do because I don’t do it. I think, for example, I could be, there are a lot of things that I could do that would probably fulfill lots of needs in my life better than working on open source. So

I work on open source because I believe in it. so it’s, so these values, they weigh disproportionately on me and on a lot of the contributors to Nuxt. And I think this is true also of a lot of open source authors. We’re not rational in the sense that we’re rational, but our priorities are maybe not what you would expect. So for example, when people, I mean, I understand that people have a lot of…

of concerns, but people can be also cynical and yeah, you should be cynical, you should ask questions, don’t be naive about things. But for me, I care a lot about the independence of Nuxt. I care a lot about it. I don’t want to lead a project that’s not independent. I don’t want to lead a project if I’m being told what to do. Maybe that’s just my own anarchist streak. I’m not interested in that. I’m not going to a different position no matter how well paid where I have to play the part of being an independent open source.

maintainer. I actually want to be it. So I care a lot about the fact that Nuxt, Nitro, UnJS are independent projects, have their own governance, have their own roadmap, which is public, are accountable to the community and whose maintainers still have the autonomy to lead them. So that is like, that’s a red line for me. I mean, obviously I can talk about it for Nuxt. I had to make sure that that was the case. And I should say this wasn’t some kind of fight. It wasn’t like Vercel were trying not to do that.

in, my conversations with them, that was what they wanted. So the idea was, look, Nuxt is doing a great job with this. we want you on our team. We want to enable you to flourish. We do it. We’re not going to tell you what to do, but, we want, we want you on, on, on the team. We want you in our garden. that’s, that’s great to hear. and I think the same is true for, for UnJS and for Nitro.

Kate Holterhoff (36:32)
Okay, so again, we’re leaning into the positivity. Yeah, I…

Daniel Roe (36:38)
Sometimes things are just positive.

Kate Holterhoff (36:40)
Yes, and that is how you announced it and and that is the spirit in which we are we’re moving forward with it and I mean I I’m very interested in the governance, side of the story So i’m glad we spent some time on that.

Daniel Roe (36:52)
I think it’s totally natural to be worried or to have questions because that’s certainly what I would, I would absolutely have a lot of questions if this is something that happened to my favorite framework. I think, I think I had probably all those same questions myself in this whole process. And so most of

what I want to be doing in the days to come is to convey what reassured me to other people. At the end of the day, I don’t want to just say, trust me, because I want to be able to point to say, like, look, this is the situation. This is what I’ve been told. Like, this is how things are going. I I realize at the end of the day, probably it does come down to trust. That is how a lot of things work. But…

I think it’s also trust with accountability. But anyway, if people questions or want to know the answers to anything, I’m very reachable. So people can DM me. I have an open diary on my website. Anyone can book 10 minutes of call with me if they want to. Like reach out if you’ve got questions. I think this is a really positive thing. I think it’s really positive for open source sustainability. It’s really positive for Nuxt. It’s a great endorsement of our approach. And yeah, I’m looking forward to getting going.

Kate Holterhoff (38:07)
All right. I think that’s a great way for us to wrap up our conversation. So Daniel, thanks so much for joining me on the MonkCast. Again, my name is Kate Holterhoff, Senior Analyst at RedMonk. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe, and review the MonkCast on your podcast platform of choice. If you’re watching us on RedMonk’s YouTube channel, please like, subscribe, and engage with us in the

A RedMonk Conversation: Daniel Roe on Vercel’s NuxtLabs Acquisition

Links

Transcript

No Comments

Leave a Reply Cancel reply