How does Netlify sponsoring open source projects and frameworks benefit both the company and the developer ecosystem?

Our intention with sponsoring projects is we really want to be good citizens in the open source ecosystem. Open source moves everything forward. If we didn't have all the people who volunteer their time to work on these projects, we would be just so far behind where we are now. We want to make sure that Netlify is not taking advantage of that labor, and we want to set a good example by trying to pay back into the systems that we're benefiting from. So for us, it's really important that we reinvest into the open source ecosystem and give back to these projects because Netlify's strength is its ecosystem.

The breadth and depth of expertise in the Jamstack ecosystem -- that modern web ecosystem -- is unbelievable, and what makes Netlify powerful is that you can take any one of those pieces and deploy it to Netlify. What we're trying to do is align incentives. We want to invest in open source frameworks so that they are sustainable, because for us, competition is good. We want more frameworks, more options in the ecosystem, because that's going to push the whole web forward. We want to be close partners with these frameworks so that they are interested in trying to make things work really well on Netlify, because we want to have the best deployment experience. We want every framework out there to work really well on Netlify, so we're trying to align ourselves as closely as we can there.

The other piece of it, too, is we believe that, as teams mature and grow, it's significantly more challenging to standardize on one stack in a big company. The idea of trying to go all in on just Angular or just Next, or just whatever, you name it -- you're going to find yourself with a lot of cases where you're either using way too much machine for the thing you're trying to build, or you're going to have rogue cells inside of your company that are going to say, “Well, we don't want to use that main framework. We're going to use this other one.” If you've built your entire infrastructure around one stack, you are then setting these other teams up to fail. You're setting yourself up to be really fragile when the ecosystem shifts in the future. So Netlify is looking at -- to borrow a phrase from Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- being anti-fragile with the way that they've set up their stack.

For us, that broad experience and broad compatibility with the ecosystem is the key to that. We will evolve with you as you go through whatever iteration. Your head architect quits, the next one who comes in wants to change the whole stack -- fine. You don't have to rebuild your whole infrastructure as well. We've already got you covered. That's I would say our biggest differentiator and the thing that we're most excited about is: the fact that, as developers continue on the maturity curve and want to use other tools, they can just do that. We're not saying, “Well, you should use this because this is the one that we built and it's the best.” We're instead saying, “Yeah, use whatever you want. We work with all these frameworks, and we're super invested in their success. So please bring all of your projects to us. We want them to work.”