This could be a great thing as now all of these devs are much better supported in their work, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that this situation makes me quite nervous.
Props to Vercel, I guess. Enjoy your champagne. Increased the share holder value, job well done! Clap, clap.
Tale as old as… well, the 60’s… but still, it’s an old tale.
there's lots to say here, but from my point of view, Vercel's backing Nuxt largely _because_ of our open vision.
our open approach isn't an optional extra. it's a core value we all share on the team - and indeed, I think, is as close to a core value of the web as I know.
we've pioneered cross-framework adapters and the provider pattern in all we build and there is no way we are changing direction or vision.
nuxt remains an independent framework, like svelte. the fact that a number of us on the team are employed to work full time on OSS is _great_ news for OSS sustainability.
The portability story for Vercel's own Nextjs is a disaster.
Enshittification is inevitable when VC is involved in any way whatsoever, so this doesn't strike me as a good thing. I can already see the future where we're getting convoluted features no one ever asked for for the sole reason of inflating Vercel's hosting costs, as was and is the case with Next and how they completely took over React to the point that even the official React docs mention Next before any alternative like Vite. Hell, knowing the VC playbook, I wouldn't be surprised if in a year's time they decide to shutter Nuxt completely and force everyone to move into the abomination that is Next.
This isn't a swipe against you guys, I'm thrilled to see OS devs like you who truly deserve all the success in the world get that success, I'm just not convinced that a VC-funded company with a dubious history & track record monopolizing the entire frontend framework landscape is a good thing. Thankfully Evan seems to still be independent and as such Vue will continue being independent, but it's a bit worrying that it's basically the only one.
plus, as an open source project, no one _can_ shutter Nuxt. as long as we have a community, we are alive.
from another point of view, any open source project is ultimately accountable to the community, and I think that's especially true for nuxt.
at the end of the day, if sebastien isn't happy with my leadership he can replace me. (and that's _good_ - I wrote about it here: https://roe.dev/blog/governance-and-abuse)
and equally if the community aren't happy with the direction of nuxt, they can always fork it. (and that's _good_)
in fact, I think I'd say that accountability is always good.
I know Nuxt is not Vue itself, and I'm not saying Vue is no longer independent — but I do think it's worth remembering that independence is something highly valued in the Vue community.
They now, to varying degrees, directly employ core maintainers for Svelte, SvelteKit, React, Next, and now Nuxt. This is a very clear systematic overtaking of the web ecosystem. They're a private business, so these moves must be in the interest of increasing profits. It's not just out of the goodness of their hearts.
It's somewhat unfortunate that technical and business-savvy people would both, in my experience, disregard a study saying tobacco is good if it's funded by RJR, and be excited about a giant tech company employing core maintainers for the majority of new web-related software projects. Yes, they're open source projects that you can fork. But if Vercel has influence in the direction of these projects (and of course they do) it should give people much more hesitation to use them than it seems to.
At this point, using any of the technologies that Vercel has its hands in tells me that whatever uses it - a business, project, whatever - doesn't plan to function in five years.
What I mean is that the goal seems likely to be to influence how software development is done in every way possible, from deployment to client code. Vendor locking, with even more control. I'd pitch Vercel as "Heroku's growth plan but more control of everything." Maybe with a bit of EEE thrown in, but who knows.
With Vercel hiring all framework creators, we will never know. Maybe that is what it will take to get hired by tech companies next: create a world-famous open source framework.
As also seen here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44500544
That said, I can only imagine how incredibly freeing it must be to not have to worry about funding, so I couldn't blame them in the slightest. I really with them the best and hope Nuxt continues to be great. Looking forward to v4 soon!
I choose Nuxt.js and Nuxt UI Pro specifically because they aren't Vercel products. I built two SAAS MVPs over the last year based on this, now I'll have to wait and see what Vercel (their competitor) wants to do with it.
All you have to look at is Svelte, which Vercel hired all the developer of, and that turned out to be a great thing. Svelte and SvelteKit are better than ever and nothing they have done since has shown to be forced by Vercel.
Hard to see the real reason for Vercel to do this. The pessimist in me wonders if perhaps they are hoping to influence how Vue is developed in the same way they now influence how React is developed after hiring several React team members.
But even that doesn’t seem that likely considering the relatively tiny Vue market share and microscopic still Nuxt market share.
I also consider its “community” to be a strange place too. It’s on Discord, and a couple of years ago common internet abbreviations were considered ban worthy rule-breaking offences.
Even the word “lmao” would get you an instant warning from a bot. The framework itself and its oddball community were enough poor experiences for me to stop using it pretty quickly.
I agree.
If you want an SPA just use Vue's official router. It's getting better now thanks to Eduardo working on file-based router, data loaders, Pinia colada, etc.
If you want a static site or MPA, Astro really seems like a better choice than Nuxt.
Next supremacy is very obvious
Kills all those Linkedin threads about moving away from Next. Kills the indecision for what employment-seeking devs need to optimize for. Makes those job descriptions less all over the place and even more Next focused
I also think, even if Nuxt supported React, its overall architecture is just better than Next's.
Everything just seems to plug together better.
Nuxt is the only "out-of-box-everything-works" framework for Vue.
So yes, if you use Vue, you use Nuxt.
Nuxt is great, but Chromium is great too. Yet, Google has become the driving force behind changes to the web platform, for better or worse. That’s not a desirable situation, and certainly not the only one: it’s not like there’s only a single company out there able to fund open source software. I desperately hope we, collectively, will figure out a better financing model in the future.
NuxtLabs was doing great work building out support for Cloudflare, making it a viable alternative to Vercel.
Now, I'm sure all that work will get dropped and we'll be stuck with only Vercel being a first-class host for Nuxt-based applications.
So now Nuxt joins Next in the never to use pile.
