@diacritica first of all congratulations to you and your great team. When taking on such ambitious projects it is important to be able to sustain them, and a good monetary support is essential. Especially when you want to go where huge potential is.
There’s great positioning around the FOSS codebase that is MPL-2.0 licensed. You are not strangers to working in such openness either, which is highly commendable for any business. Such decisions build Trust and over time with sustained action in the right directions, will establish your Trustworthiness. Trust is what attracts first FOSS contributors, Trustworthiness is what makes them stick around and help assure a thriving and open community.
My worry is that, by accepting VC money, there’s been immediate damage to that. I’ve read the announcements and your interactions on Hacker News and you have eloquently explained there’s no need for such concerns. Yet, because VC investors are among the most untrusted parties in Free Software communities, your involvement with them will have a dampening effect on their involvement.
In various Fediverse timelines and also Matrix chat I already see people have nagging doubts, about what this all means. I posted myself on the Fediverse just now, before I thought it’be better to react here as well:
On Hacker News you mentioned: “we, as a company, don’t actually own the whole thing”. But that’s only the ever growing in size and complexity codebase. What you do ‘own’ are:
- The fulltime experts you can pay to work fulltime on this.
- You, your board and sales department watching eagerly how to earn the significant ROI the “patient, fellow-founder” VC’s expect.
- You own the strategy and project direction. The next VC deal in preparation, maybe??
Maybe in future you own the killer app that is suddenly publicly launched, and is entirely not so open. A PenpotHub, who knows, with a similar OSS strategy that made Github great…
At the moment no one contributor and community participant has any clarity. There’s no need to explain either, that is up to you. But more insight in product direction, strategy and vision may help put minds at rest, mitigate the dampening effect of the VC influence you are now subject to.
Before I end I want to mention OpenCollective whose acceptance of VC money has imho done a great deal of damage to reputation in FOSS circles and held them back. They are on an Exit to Community trajectory now, and I don’t know how far along that is. But they still have a major task in spreading the word on that, and regain Trust. With Trustworthiness following much further behind.
