Inside the Netlify and Gatsby Acquisition with Mathias Biilmann

Episode Description

JavaScript Jam discusses Netlify's acquisition of Gatsby, featuring Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann and SolidJS creator Ryan Carniato on open source monetization.

Episode Summary

This JavaScript Jam Live open mic session centers on the breaking news of Netlify acquiring Gatsby, exploring what the merger means for the JavaScript ecosystem and the broader challenge of open source monetization. Hosts Anthony Campolo and Ishan Anand set the stage by tracing the intertwined history of Netlify and Gatsby from their early Jamstack collaboration through Gatsby's pivot to building its own competing cloud platform. Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann joins to explain the strategic vision, highlighting plans to reopen Gatsby as a true open source project, integrate Gatsby's build speed innovations across all frameworks, and launch the Valhalla product — a data middleware layer that extends Gatsby's source plugin ecosystem to any modern front end framework. SolidJS creator Ryan Carniato offers a candid look at the limited monetization paths available to framework authors, from corporate backing and VC funding to patronage models, each carrying significant trade-offs. The conversation broadens into whether the Jamstack concept remains relevant, with Biilmann arguing the architectural shift from monolithic backends to decoupled front ends is now crossing the chasm into mainstream adoption. The discussion closes with reflections on what the ecosystem still needs — better open governance, improved content editor experiences, and more robust data integration tooling — to sustain this transition at enterprise scale.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Introductions and Setting the Stage

Anthony Campolo hosts JavaScript Jam Live for the first time from the official account, welcoming co-host Ishan Anand. They introduce the open mic format, explaining that the weekly Twitter Space covers anything web development or JavaScript related, and that listeners are encouraged to raise their hands and join the conversation.

Ishan describes the show's format and teases the major news of the day before running through introductions. Anthony notes several notable audience members from Netlify, Prisma, and Everfund who are already in the Space, setting an expectation that the conversation will draw from people deeply embedded in the JavaScript ecosystem.

00:03:38 - Netlify Acquires Gatsby: The Big Picture

The hosts jump into the headline news of Netlify acquiring Gatsby. Anthony provides historical context, explaining how Netlify and Gatsby were originally tightly linked in the early Jamstack era, with most Gatsby sites deploying on Netlify. He traces the split that occurred when Gatsby launched its own competing cloud platform and frames the acquisition as a reunification after that divergence.

Anthony also highlights the GraphQL undercurrents, connecting Netlify's earlier acquisition of OneGraph — which was later sunset — to Gatsby's Valhalla product, a standalone GraphQL content mesh. Ishan then broadens the discussion to the VC thesis behind framework monetization, noting that nearly every major open source React framework now has corporate backing, and questioning whether this acquisition validates or undermines the model of building a cloud platform around an open source framework.

00:13:34 - Matt Biilmann and Ryan Carniato Join the Conversation

Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann and SolidJS creator Ryan Carniato join the Space. Matt explains that Netlify will maintain its framework-agnostic strategy while reopening Gatsby as a more genuinely open source project. He expresses excitement about incorporating Gatsby's build speed innovations across the entire framework ecosystem and advancing the Valhalla product as a universal data middleware layer.

When asked about the relationship between Valhalla and the shuttered OneGraph product, Matt confirms that Valhalla represents the next generation of that middleware vision, informed by lessons learned from the OneGraph experience. The conversation establishes the strategic rationale: faster builds for everyone, a unified cloud platform, and a source plugin ecosystem decoupled from any single framework.

00:20:02 - Audience Questions and the Open Source Monetization Challenge

An audience member named Suresh asks what the acquisition means practically for end users, and Matt explains that existing Gatsby customers will see an improved experience while non-Gatsby users will benefit from technologies being extended across all frameworks. Chris from Everfund asks about immediate benefits for customers of both platforms, and Matt details the plan to unify the two cloud products over time.

Ryan Carniato then offers a deeply candid exploration of open source monetization, outlining four paths: corporate sponsorship tied to internal use, VC-funded platform building, brand licensing, and finding patrons with aligned interests. He notes that each approach carries significant trade-offs, from roadmap control to credibility concerns, and that the JavaScript framework space remains without a clear sustainable model despite universal dependence on these tools.

00:33:35 - Foundations, Patronage, and Framework Economics

Matt raises the absence of influential open source foundations in the front end ecosystem, contrasting it with infrastructure projects like Kubernetes that benefit from shared governance among competing companies. He suggests this gap may stem from the rapid pace of UI expectation changes or simply from not having found the right organizational model yet.

The discussion continues with Bro Nifty praising the patronage model and Ryan's unique value as both an engineer and ecosystem connector. Anthony introduces the distinction between investing in a brand versus investing in a person, and Ishan brings up Tanner Linsley's novel approach with TanStack, where a seeming competitor like AG Grid sponsors React Table because they serve different audience segments. Ryan acknowledges the creativity of such models but notes that ambitious JavaScript frameworks face particular challenges in finding non-competitive monetization angles.

00:48:15 - Is Jamstack Still Relevant?

Ishan pivots to a question raised in press coverage: whether the Jamstack concept still holds meaning. Matt traces its evolution from static site generators and early React through the introduction of serverless functions and edge runtimes, arguing that no other term better captures the fundamental architectural shift from monolithic backends to decoupled, self-standing web front ends.

He notes that many newer developers have never experienced the old monolithic paradigm and simply take the decoupled approach for granted, which paradoxically makes the term feel less necessary even as the architecture it describes becomes dominant. The discussion touches on WordPress market share finally beginning to decline and the challenges of crossing the chasm into mainstream enterprise adoption, where stability and tooling maturity matter more than cutting-edge innovation.

00:56:43 - Crossing the Chasm and Closing Thoughts

Matt outlines what the ecosystem still needs to achieve mainstream adoption: open governance for long-term stability, better data integration tooling to connect diverse sources to front end UIs, and improved experiences for non-technical content editors and marketers who currently face friction in decoupled architectures. He highlights companies like Storyblok, Stackbit, and Builder as innovators working on the visual editing problem.

Ryan closes by expressing genuine excitement about working alongside the Gatsby team at Netlify, emphasizing the rare opportunity to collaborate with people who have built large-scale JavaScript frameworks. Ishan wraps up the session by previewing next week's guest, Josh Goldberg, who will discuss TypeScript, and reminds listeners to subscribe to the JavaScript Jam newsletter. The episode ends at 01:05:46.

Transcript

00:00:25 - Anthony Campolo

Hello, hello. That was interesting. We had some background music playing there. This is Anthony hosting JavaScript Jam from the JavaScript Jam account for the first time. Hello, Brad. Okay. All right, let's get Ishan up here.

00:01:07 - Ishan Anand

Hello, hello. Thank you, Anthony.

00:01:09 - Anthony Campolo

Hello, everyone. I've come into a brave new world of Twitter Spaces. I've done so many of them, but never actually hosted one before.

00:01:19 - Ishan Anand

Well, you know what? Misery loves

00:01:23 - Anthony Campolo

to be by itself

00:01:27 - Ishan Anand

in some multiverse. Maybe that's the case.

00:01:32 - Anthony Campolo

How's it going?

00:01:34 - Ishan Anand

Yeah. Well, welcome, everyone, to JavaScript Jam Live. JavaScript Jam Live is a Twitter Space for anything web development or JavaScript related. We sometimes hold it as an open mic, and sometimes we have a guest. Today it's open mic night. That means anything that's web-development-related is on topic, in the ecosystem or technically, whether you're a beginner or an expert. Feel free to raise your hand and we'll happily bring you up to the stage. You can share a question, an opinion, a hot take, or comment on whatever topics we're talking about. We usually pull from our newsletter, which, Anthony, if you can get that pulled up, and we have a bunch of topics for what happened in the last week. But I think today we have some interesting news that just broke, which we'll get into in a second. Before I do that, I realized I forgot to do intros. I am Ishan Anand, VP of Product at Edgio. My co-host today is Anthony. I'll let Anthony introduce himself.

00:02:45 - Anthony Campolo

Hello, hello. My name is Anthony Campolo, and I'm a developer advocate at Edgio. This is going to be an interesting conversation. Big news in the world of JavaScript. I already see we've got some people here from Netlify, actually, so feel free. If you want to hop up and talk, you're totally welcome. Or if you want, just listen. Also welcome. Also, hey to Will. Will is the co-founder with my podcast co-host Chris on Everfund. I know they actually built an MVP with Gatsby many years ago that ended up migrating to Redwood. So it's always interesting to hear their perspective on Gatsby-related things. Also hello to Sabin in the crowd as well from Prisma. So yeah, we've got a good crew of people here.

00:03:38 - Ishan Anand

Oh yeah. Hey, Sabin. Yeah, we've already started with a good crew. As Anthony mentioned, the big news today was Netlify acquiring Gatsby. Oh, I just got added to co-host, sorry. It was really interesting news, especially given the acquisition of OneGraph in the last year. I'm curious, Anthony, if you want to give kind of your take on it as somebody who's been in the ecosystem for a long time and thought...

00:04:16 - Anthony Campolo

So far, yeah, for sure. There's a lot of different currents going along with it, because when we go back to the beginning, like the before times when the Jamstack was first being invented, really what I think the main players were: Netlify and Gatsby. There was a very tight working relationship there, in the sense that most people who created a Gatsby site would deploy their Gatsby site on Netlify because they made it really, really easy. They were some of the first taste of what everyone loves about this current deployment paradigm and what so many frameworks now offer you, which is the ability to have a single command that builds a static site that then gets deployed to a URL that's handed to you. So that was really what I think kicked off a lot of what made the Jamstack so cool. Then you ended up with this weird sideways turn where Gatsby decided to create their own cloud and compete with Netlify. Then you end up with this weird separation between the two. And now it's kind of like they have capitulated, I think, and said, we want to join the hive mind here and actually just become part of Netlify instead of trying to have their own separate thing compete with it.

00:05:40 - Anthony Campolo

So that's how I would describe the macro. There's also some interesting GraphQL undercurrents to it, which is that Netlify had acquired OneGraph and turned it into Netlify Graph last year. Then, not too long after, maybe six months or so, in December they announced this is no longer accepting users. If you're still using this, you can keep using it for now. It was kind of a weird, cryptic thing thrown into their docs, and I didn't even know about it until today when Fred pointed it out to me. Gatsby just created this thing called Valhalla, which is abstracting out their GraphQL content mesh from the framework into its own thing, which is kind of the equivalent of OneGraph, which is also the equivalent of a product I worked on for a year called StepZen. So that's also happening under the surface as well. But I think that's less important than just the fact that now these two companies are one company. That's a lot of people, and it's interesting to be right on the heels of Netlify laying a lot of people off.

00:06:45 - Anthony Campolo

So yeah, there's a lot to say about it.

00:06:49 - Ishan Anand

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. Probably the biggest thing you talked about is this, I'll call it a VC thesis, which is you have these popular open source tools or packages or frameworks, and the question is: how do they monetize? How do they get that money back to investors if they become an actual company? There was, or appeared to be, this model when, for example, Remix took money, when a lot of these frameworks took money, which is actually different from some of the previous generation of frameworks we've had in the past where, say, jQuery is actually under a foundation. There was a recognition that maybe, depending how you look at it, they were undervalued in terms of their impact on the market, and there might be other ways to leverage that value. And so what we started to see is, for example, a lot of companies would offer framework-paired hosting as the provider of the framework and say, we are the best place to host that. It seemed like Gatsby was also going down that path.

00:08:22 - Ishan Anand

And it's interesting to me when we look at the ecosystem as a whole. One thing Netlify historically had been was more agnostic to that. When they started, they were not necessarily aligned to a particular framework. Seen over the last 12 months, there almost aren't frameworks left that are non-aligned to a cloud platform in some way or form. That's a really interesting state of where the ecosystem is, especially given the macroeconomic climate we're in right now, where a lot of that VC money that was funding open source may create a funding gap when they try to move from a Series A or a Series B company to a Series C company. So you can look at the moves in the past as maybe that model doesn't work, or you could also interpret this as maybe that model does work and now Netlify has one of the most popular React frameworks under their umbrella. So it's, to me, a little bit of a Rorschach test on that monetization thesis of open source. I'm not sure where you fall on that, but that was the first thing that was going through my mind from what you talked about.

00:09:47 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, yeah, no, I think that makes sense also. Just want to once again open it up to the audience. Anyone who wants to come in and join in on the discussion is totally welcome to. But yeah, continue on.

00:09:57 - Ishan Anand

Yeah, absolutely. Raise your hand. Happy to bring anyone up to the stage and get people's opinions.

00:10:02 - Anthony Campolo

And I'm going to start dropping some links and hopefully figuring out how to pin them.

00:10:06 - Ishan Anand

Okay, great. I've been going through Twitter and looking at the reactions. I'm just looking at replies right now, and I see people who were really excited. I've seen competitors commenting and congratulating the team. So, for example, I've seen Dion who works at Shopify, which owns Remix now, Lee who works at Vercel, all tweeting and congratulating them for the acquisition. I noticed Stephen Tay said all of the major open source React frameworks now have the backing of a for-profit company. Remix is on Shopify, Gatsby's on Netlify, Next.js is on Vercel. And then there's a reply to it very much similar to what we're talking about, where Svelte is backed by Vercel, and Solid and Eleventy are being sponsored by Netlify. So it's a really interesting impact on the ecosystem. On the other hand, as much as you were talking about, what's really interesting that Gatsby innovated on recently was essentially, in some ways, a competitor to OneGraph, and it's actually a more backend thing, which is really important for...

00:11:33 - Anthony Campolo

you know, OneGraph, not Open Graph, building...

00:11:43 - Ishan Anand

Which is the other thing that I will say. Having attended the Jamstack Conference in the last few years, Edgio had also been a sponsor of the Jamstack Conference in some form or another for the last few years. It did feel, as an observer, that the Netlify and Gatsby teams were close philosophically. If you look at the speakers at Jamstack Conference, which is organized and run by Netlify, there was a lot of presence from Gatsby, either as a topic or as speakers. Even down to the details of Vercel and Next created ISR, incremental static generation, or ISG and ISR, and the Netlify/Gatsby one, I think they called it deferred static rendering. As much as you might look at those and think, oh, they're all basically the same, there are little details that are slightly different between them. Those details are much more closely aligned between Netlify and Gatsby in terms of their way of thinking about things. As an example, there is a very strong adherence to a principle of immutable deploys in the original version of DSR, although they changed it so they had compatibility with ISR later.

00:13:12 - Ishan Anand

And that was also echoed in Gatsby's version as well. So they also seem to be very philosophically close. That was another way that I think this might have been a natural joining of forces. So in some sense, we're already culturally aligned in a lot of ways.

00:13:34 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, I figured it out. The two tweets are now pinned to the top.

00:13:37 - Ishan Anand

Oh, great. Okay, thank you.

00:13:42 - Anthony Campolo

So also, we've got Ryan Carniato in the house. I'm gonna just call him out and ask him to speak. Let's get his take on it.

00:13:50 - Ishan Anand

Yeah, Ryan actually has been on the JavaScript Jam podcast demoing Solid. We had him on a while back. Great to see him.

00:14:01 - Anthony Campolo

We've got Matt Biilmann.

00:14:02 - Ishan Anand

Oh, wow.

00:14:02 - Anthony Campolo

Hello.

00:14:03 - Ishan Anand

Okay. Hey, Matt. Hey, Ryan. Thanks for joining.

00:14:10 - Anthony Campolo

Right. For anyone who does not know, Ryan is the creator of SolidJS and someone who works at Netlify.

00:14:18 - Ryan Carniato

Hey, is my mic working this time? I've been having a terrible time on Spaces recently.

00:14:23 - Anthony Campolo

You sound great.

00:14:24 - Ishan Anand

You sound... yeah. And it's probably Spaces if there's an issue and not you. It's had a little flakiness.

00:14:30 - Anthony Campolo

Ishan, you were actually lagging earlier. Just...

00:14:33 - Ishan Anand

Oh, maybe it's just me and not Spaces. But thank you for the heads-up. I might change my internet router at this point and switch to the other one.

00:14:44 - Anthony Campolo

Also, Matt came up to speak. What's up, Matt? Thank you so much for joining us.

00:14:48 - Mathias Biilmann

Yeah. Hey, everyone. Thought I would also just pop in and say hi.

00:14:54 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, feel free to introduce yourself to our audience. I would assume a lot of people already know who you are, but feel free. And Ryan as well.

00:15:05 - Mathias Biilmann

Yeah, I'm Matt Biilmann. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Netlify.

00:15:12 - Ryan Carniato

Yeah, I think you guys gave me a little bit of an intro, but I'm Ryan Carniato. I created the SolidJS framework. I also worked on the Marko framework at eBay and joined Netlify in May to work on open source. So, yeah.

00:15:30 - Ishan Anand

Great. Well, thanks guys for joining. First off, congrats on the big news. I'll throw the first question to Matt. The obvious question is: how should the ecosystem and users of both products interpret it and what it means going forward?

00:15:58 - Mathias Biilmann

I think they should be excited. I'm excited. I'm excited to welcome the Gatsby team. Of course, at Netlify we've always had a framework-agnostic strategy as a platform. It's always been my view that there will never be a single front-end framework that's the best choice for all the different types of use cases and challenges and experiences out there. It's always healthy to have choice between different approaches and so on. That's still going to be absolutely true for Netlify going forward. I think we have a lot of opportunity to reopen Gatsby more and let it function more as a true open source project on its own. Then I'm really excited to incorporate some of the innovations that the Gatsby team has been working on at the cloud and infrastructure side, both in terms of the build speeds they've managed to achieve, and I'm keen to be able to apply that to the whole framework ecosystem. Then, in terms of the Valhalla product that the Gatsby team has been piloting with some of their larger customers, that's really aimed at taking the core strengths of Gatsby in terms of the source plugin ecosystem and making that available to the whole world of modern front-end frameworks.

00:17:29 - Mathias Biilmann

I've believed for a long time now that one of the next barriers to whole mainstream adoption for the Jamstack approach is really that once you start building a self-standing front end and you start talking to all these different APIs and services, where some are internal and some are external, the architects thinking through that setup also need some more robust patterns for actually getting the content and data out of those services and into the front end. And I'm excited about Valhalla for that reason.

00:18:08 - Ishan Anand

Great, thank you. And I'll just remind folks, we are an open mic format, so feel free to raise your hand. We'll bring you up to the stage. We do have somebody else who just came up. I'll call on you in a second. I have just one or two other things that came up organically from Twitter and the coverage. So one thing that came up: I saw Fred from Astro send a tweet earlier today about noticing that OneGraph was shut down. How do you relate this to OneGraph in your mind?

00:18:46 - Mathias Biilmann

So it's very much part of the same vision. As I said, I've believed for a long time that this kind of middleware layer is going to play an important role in the future. Launching Netlify Graph gave us the opportunity of talking through what people need from this middleware layer with a lot of different customers and partners and so on. We learned a lot from that experience and from having Netlify Graph living in Netlify Lab. Obviously, what we are aiming to do with Valhalla is very much the next step in that journey. And I'm also excited for the OneGraph team to be part of building that. They bring just a ton of experience to this whole area.

00:19:39 - Ishan Anand

Okay, so if I was to repeat back what I've heard, it sounds like basically this is going to be, you know, Valhalla being integrated is the next generation of the work that was started with OneGraph. And OneGraph is definitely being sunset, at least temporarily, so to speak.

00:19:56 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:19:56 - Ishan Anand

Is that fair?

00:19:56 - Anthony Campolo

That's fair.

00:19:57 - Mathias Biilmann

Okay.

00:19:58 - Ishan Anand

Okay. You know, I'll get to some other questions, but I want to be as audience driven as possible. So, Suresh, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. Feel free to either comment or ask your question.

00:20:11 - Suresh

Yeah, absolutely. Well, the topic seemed very interesting, and this may be a very extremely basic question. I'm sure someone else has this question too here, so I'll ask it on everyone's behalf. I didn't know the background of what Netlify did, the whole story. So what does this mean for someone trying to use the product in, like, three months from now? What does this change for them?

00:20:41 - Ishan Anand

Can you help give us, you know, there are so many different types of backgrounds for developers in JavaScript and web development. Just give us kind of a quick summary of your background to set the context.

00:20:55 - Suresh

Oh, my background? I'm not a JavaScript developer. I work in data analytics, working with databases, data visualizations. That's my background.

00:21:08 - Ishan Anand

Got it. Okay. Well, Matt, maybe I should turn that one over to you.

00:21:11 - Mathias Biilmann

Sure, sure. I mean, obviously we already have a lot of customers that have been building with Gatsby, the open source framework, since their early days, more from the early days than from the later days. For those customers, this will just lead to an even better experience. Then for customers that are not using Gatsby, we will be able to take a lot of the technologies that Gatsby built to support their framework and extend them to the whole ecosystem of front-end frameworks. That's both in terms of techniques for improving the time it takes from when you update a piece of content until you have a new version of your site live, and in terms of their source plugin ecosystem that we can make available. As someone that works on the data side, you probably won't see a lot of difference day to day from this. But if you do have a data source and you want your web teams to be able to build visualizations and dashboards and tooling around it, then the source plugin ecosystem and the Valhalla product can probably be relevant in terms of making sure that you can get that data into a UI in a way that is not going to put load or stress on your data source.

00:22:49 - Ishan Anand

Looks like that answered your question.

00:22:52 - Suresh

It did. I'm looking into more details as we talk.

00:22:59 - Mathias Biilmann

Okay, sure.

00:23:02 - Ishan Anand

Thank you for participating. Again, feel free to raise your hand and we're happy to bring anyone up to the stage. Oh, it looks like Bro Nifty is there, another regular. One of the things, while we're waiting for other folks to raise their hand, that was in the coverage: Richard MacManus at The New Stack had some coverage and he interviewed you. It was also a topic we talked about at the very beginning, that Gatsby was themselves trying to build a platform, a cloud infrastructure platform of their own, tied to their framework. What do you think this means for the thesis of, you know, you have an open source project, it gets VC funding, and the way to monetize that is by building a cloud platform around that particular framework?

00:23:56 - Mathias Biilmann

Yeah, that's a really good question. There's obviously still a lot of challenges to open source monetization in general. I think one of the challenges we saw with Gatsby was that as they started building a platform around their framework, they also started to feel a little less open, in the sense that some of the features were suddenly more tied to their platform than to a project that you could really take and run everywhere. That's one of the opportunities we have now to reopen Gatsby a bit in that way. But I think that's often a risk you start seeing with some of the frameworks that try to monetize through a platform specifically for that framework, that to really make that motion work they also have to try to make it harder to use the framework in other places. We are really committed, and I'm sure Ryan can speak to that, to not forcing the open source frameworks that we help maintain and build to be Netlify-only. I'm also constantly looking into what ways we can create alternative avenues for open source projects to thrive and monetize beyond just the...

00:25:25 - Mathias Biilmann

VC backing.

00:25:28 - Ishan Anand

Could you describe that? So I see that Ryan has a hand up, and Chris also has a question. He's on deck. But maybe, Ryan, jump in if you've got something to add to this. The follow-up question is, what are those alternatives, or what is the durable competitive advantage you can say to a VC? I'm trying to imagine, what do you say to your VC about your monetization strategy if you're completely platform-agnostic, if you're in a framework? What is the other way to monetize that you'd suggest? They're kind of between a rock and a hard place, right, if you're a framework creator.

00:26:05 - Ryan Carniato

Yeah. I mean, the thing is, there's the expectation to be able to use a lot of these tools for free. So you have to really think about what kind of angle you can do. This is very challenging because these things do require money. We live off the donations and the support of our patrons. Netlify has been supporting Solid for almost two years now on the donation side, and it does make a difference. But that's still, compared to being able to work on it and have that kind of resources, a completely different game. I wanted to say it is really cool to see this kind of progression on open source and what we've seen happening inside Netlify. Matt can obviously say this stuff and everyone can go, this is a good thing, but I'm living it. I work on the OSS team along with Zach from Eleventy, and I guess soon many of the Gatsby team members. More than that, we work right next to the integration teams that work on making sure all the other frameworks work on Netlify.

00:27:14 - Ryan Carniato

While these are slightly different teams with different objectives, it's really cool to see how much we can get by working together. This is why I'm very excited about a lot of the stuff coming in with this Gatsby acquisition, because we're talking about more tools and capability that we can add to lots of frameworks. And yeah, this just continues to grow, which is amazing to me.

00:27:44 - Ishan Anand

So I want to be clear. I personally, as a developer, love the framework agnosticism on both sides. No developer wants vendor lock-in. We have, in our own experience, run into the same problem where frameworks had features that they never had clear, specific behaviors for, behaviors that are kind of off-book, so to speak, but yet exist on the associated cloud platform. So I appreciate that as a consumer, but I'm trying to look at it from the other side. What options are there? I totally get there's a lot of synergy here, but what are the other options, potentially, in the ecosystem for open source frameworks to monetize? There's a lot of investment that goes into the work Ryan, you do, and look at all the amount of dollars that have gone into improving build tooling and things like that. Do you have any thoughts on what that might look like?

00:28:42 - Ryan Carniato

I mean, I'll try one more time at this because it's challenging, but I've talked to a lot of other OSS maintainers about this as well because we look at it and it feels like there's only a couple choices, and most of them come with some kind of heavy trade-off. The most obvious one is find yourself a company, or create the company yourself, that basically will invest in the framework because they want to use it. The framework is the tool they use to build their main product, so they're invested that way. But then, of course, your whole roadmap is determined by that. This is what you see at larger companies too. I worked at eBay on Marko, right? Essentially the framework serves eBay first and then others beyond that. Same with Meta and React and all of those things. So it's good because people will put money into it, and you will be able to get staff, and you will build things that are important to the company. The other option is try and raise money to make a business out of the framework.

00:29:50 - Ryan Carniato

But as I said, it's essentially free. So you're kind of in this interesting place where you ask, do you make money on consulting? Do you make money on tertiary analytics? It has to be something else, on cloud providing. I think we're starting to see that trying to start with the framework and make cloud is a challenging thing, to the point that in the last few years, the last couple of frameworks that have kind of made companies out of it, it isn't terribly clear to me what the outcome of that is yet. I don't know if it's clear to anyone, but we know we need the money. So do you not take the money? I'm not sure. And then, I tend...

00:30:30 - Anthony Campolo

to usually say yes to money when it's offered.

00:30:33 - Ryan Carniato

But then, I was talking to Tanner at one point and he was like, look, I've done a good job in open source in building a brand. Maybe we could build a brand around this kind of set of libraries or framework, and then I could just kind of sell that brand off, continue the work open source, and then maybe they can pull it in. I told him, I don't know. Does it lose credibility now that it's, I don't know, some company's query instead of, you know, whatever, React Query or Solid Query, or TanStack Query rather? Does it lose credibility there? Does the benefit you're giving to that company stop actually being that benefit? I'm not sure. And then option number four, which is the one I'm happiest with right now, obviously, is find patrons. Find companies that have aligned tertiary vision that don't necessarily depend on you building it to build their product, but maybe it has some positive impact. So far that seems to be a lot of the deployment side of things.

00:31:45 - Ryan Carniato

You know, where I find myself here with Netlify, where there's kind of some synergy, but there's also a lot of openness in the sense that Netlify's infrastructure isn't built using SolidJS. There isn't that tie-in. It keeps it open, keeps the spirit of it. But the trade-off there is that's a large investment to ask for, perhaps, in something that might be not exactly what the company's using. So all of...

00:32:18 - Anthony Campolo

Another way you can look at it is that there's investing in a brand and there's investing in a person. They're not just investing in Solid, they're investing in you. Ryan Carniato is awesome. So just by hiring you, Netlify gains because of your engineering ability, your experience, and your connections. Whereas, to give maybe a counterexample, you look at when I think it was Nrwl purchased Lerna, they were buying Lerna, the project, the brand. It wasn't necessarily a person so much as Lerna, the tool that already exists as a thing integrated into people's projects. So I think there are times where it makes more sense to invest in one versus the other. Sometimes a project comes along with good people, sometimes a person comes along with a good project.

00:33:03 - Ryan Carniato

Yeah, I can definitely see that. It's just interesting though because it seems like there isn't any single way to tackle this, and it seems like all the ways that we've seen, especially a lot of times when we try to build businesses out of things that might not be businesses, face a lot of challenges. So it isn't clear, but we know we all use and need this software. So as I said, you know where I am. I'm just super stoked to have this opportunity.

00:33:35 - Ishan Anand

So I want to let Matt go because it looks like he was coming off mute. Matt, what were you going to say?

00:33:40 - Mathias Biilmann

No, I was just going to say the one thing that's a bit unique to this front-end framework ecosystem, and front-end ecosystem in general, is that we haven't really seen, we haven't really managed to get success across our industry in setting up any kind of really influential open source foundations for that. I think that's a bit of a difference when you look at a lot of the open source software that drives the infrastructure we're all building on, where foundations like the Cloud Native Foundation or the Apache Foundation or the Linux Foundation and so on have...

00:34:20 - Anthony Campolo

JS Foundation.

00:34:22 - Mathias Biilmann

Yeah, yeah, precisely. But I think there's a set there where, for example, Kubernetes is very characterized by having very large, strong competitors investing a lot into the same project because it's really shared infrastructure. Once you get to that scale, then you start having a certain level of stability and open governance and so on that will give a sense of longevity to the community around it. I think maybe it's because the frameworks and the tooling for building UI by necessity change so often because the expectations of UIs change so often. Or maybe we just haven't found the right construction yet. But I think that's something that we still haven't really seen success with in the front-end space.

00:35:25 - Ishan Anand

Yeah, definitely is a challenge. We've got a bunch of people on deck who've come up to ask questions or comment. I'll get to them in a second. We're at the halfway point, although we sometimes go an hour over. If you're just tuning in, this is JavaScript Jam Live. It's an open mic for anything web development or JavaScript related. We have it every Wednesday at noontime in the San Francisco time zone. If you are getting any value from anybody up here on stage, feel free to click on their profile and follow them. In addition, you can go to JavaScriptJam.com and sign up for our newsletter. Next up on deck, I think, Chris, you were next up as a person who wanted to ask a question or have a comment. I just want to give you time to speak.

00:36:11 - Christopher Burns

Super, super excited that Gatsby also...

00:36:15 - Anthony Campolo

yourself and your company first.

00:36:17 - Mathias Biilmann

Okay.

00:36:18 - Christopher Burns

So yeah, I'm Christopher Burns. I'm the CTO at Everfund, and we're building an SDK for creating donations on the web. My big question is: what's the immediate benefit that customers of Netlify will see, and what's the biggest benefit that customers of Gatsby Cloud will see? Because there's a lot of interchangeable technology that each platform has built independently, and how can they come together for all frameworks to enjoy?

00:36:52 - Mathias Biilmann

Yeah, I mean, there are different pieces of answers to that. There's the cloud system where, of course, over time you'll see us unite the two products. So there's just a Netlify cloud platform and not two different ones. But obviously the Gatsby Cloud team has made a bunch of innovations that's been driving their product, and it's been working really well for them. They've had the advantage also of starting their cloud product later and being able to really see what this kind of cloud product should look like and think from first principles. So there are some things that we might have evolved over a long time that will have better responses in their infrastructure and their technology, and then other things where our cloud is just so ahead in terms of the scale and type of customers we've been working with by now that obviously that's going to be the way ahead. But in short, over time you can expect us to help get faster build times to everyone and a better edge cloud product to everyone. And then, of course, the Valhalla project I've mentioned a couple of times is the big new product that will come out of this that will really allow you to use the source plugin ecosystem that Gatsby pioneered together with any modern front-end framework.

00:38:32 - Mathias Biilmann

This morning I was building a little demo of Valhalla with SolidStart just to play with it as an example.

00:38:39 - Anthony Campolo

Ah, that sounds so tight. I'd be curious if Chris would be interested in Valhalla because he tried a very similar product once known as StepZen. Chris, you still there?

00:38:52 - Christopher Burns

Yes, yes. It's late, so I'm doing a lot of chores around the house. I'm super interested in seeing how products can integrate with Gatsby Valhalla and also how it can basically take that need of having a database and an API away from that front-end web developer and just not have to worry about it.

00:39:15 - Anthony Campolo

Lob those GraphQL queries over the wall, get back whatever they want. Live in the dream.

00:39:24 - Ishan Anand

Sometimes you don't get as much of the dream as you want. But yes, that seems to be the front-end developer dream. I think what Chris just said there is very much the front-end developer dream: everything's an API. I don't have to think about anything else, whether it's databases or infrastructure in general, which makes a lot of sense. Bro Nifty, I think you are up next on deck.

00:39:49 - Bro Nifty

Yes, thank you, Ishan. Hi, everybody. I actually wanted to make a comment on the patronage subject specifically to Ryan. I feel like Ryan is a brand unto himself and everybody knows he knows pretty much at least as much as any of the best people on the React core team, the best of the best. So if you're doing patronage and you can bring Ryan under your umbrella, you not only have access to him as a consultant, but also anybody who's helping him and a complement of OSS contributors who are also contributing. So you have the entire stock of people who, yeah, we have a new issue and maybe it serves Netlify. That's fine, whatever. It's to the greater good, right? So you have that whole base. You're getting more than you bargain for in terms of that. I pay people to consult me. I put them on retainer just for mentorship to help me answer difficult questions and things like that.

00:40:59 - Bro Nifty

Just because you need people to help you. I'm not smart enough to answer these questions, you know? But yeah, Ryan's number one. So I would say that is a really good bet. I don't have any commentary about anything else though.

00:41:12 - Ishan Anand

You know, I... Oh, go ahead, Ryan. What were you gonna say?

00:41:15 - Ryan Carniato

I was just gonna say thank you. That's very kind. I do appreciate being in the position I am and the opportunity it opens up, and I'd like to think the relationship is mutually beneficial. I think it's always good to have your ear on where things are heading or what's going on and getting to work. I got hired on for OSS. Obviously I do a lot of work on Solid, but this has also been able to facilitate really cool things. I was working on benchmarks that the guys over at Builder were working on, and we were benchmarking a bunch of different frameworks on the server, everything from Qwik to Astro to Next to Nuxt. Having that kind of opportunity to do that kind of stuff as well... I started making demos in most frameworks just to kind of get an idea of what the feel was, some of the [unclear].

00:42:13 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. And just like, why predict the future when you can build it, you know?

00:42:18 - Ishan Anand

Thanks.

00:42:19 - Ryan Carniato

Yeah. And that was the kind of thing, right? That kind of R and D is sometimes difficult to find time for. It's not just R and D though, because it also promotes goodwill. You saw a little while ago this kind of became a topic that came up around the fall, all these kind of co-tweets between JavaScript frameworks on Twitter and a lot of mutual handshaking and whatnot. I feel like this is the kind of environment that can promote that. I think that's really good because that's how these ideas propagate. I learn a lot from other frameworks and I look at different things different people are doing. To have that kind of opportunity and the environment to be able to do that is just incredible.

00:43:09 - Ishan Anand

Yeah. Well, first off, Ryan, I think even before you were sponsored by Netlify, you've just done an amazing job with Solid. Huge amount of respect for what you've built. But if I was to rephrase what you described there, Anthony was listing off this idea of you invest in the brand versus investing in the persona, or the person, as much as you invest in the product itself. I think there's another benefit here, which is the ability to short-circuit, I guess, participation in and influence in the ecosystem as a whole through both the framework and relationships that are built and cross-pollination of ideas. It sounds like that's what you're describing here, which is really powerful. I guess going back though to this question of the monetization routes you had mentioned, we were talking a little bit earlier. You mentioned, for example, TanStack and you had this conversation with Tanner Linsley. For those who don't know, he's created a variety of popular open source React, well originally React-focused, frameworks like React Table, now renamed TanStack Table, and React Query, or TanStack Query.

00:44:29 - Ishan Anand

And I actually had a very similar conversation about this topic with him at Jamstack Conference. The perspective he gave was very much echoed by what you were saying here. But in his case, financially, he's concerned about the strings that might, I guess to speak for him, follow on that expectation. You know, whenever Anthony said earlier, I tend to say yes to money when it's VC money, you have to worry what you're potentially saying yes to that follows on that expectation. He's in a position right now where he just enjoys the open source work he's doing. But he also has come up with a novel monetization strategy to a limited extent, which is TanStack Table, or whatever it's been renamed to now, is sponsored by AG Grid, which you would have thought is a competitor, a competing kind of table product. But one of the things he said when he announced it was that he learned that the audiences for both are actually different. In one sense, he's kind of an onboarding point for people eventually migrating.

00:45:37 - Ishan Anand

And that was an interesting way for him to look at monetization that I thought was fascinating. When we think about other ways for open source work to get rewarded, that's one potential way. Yeah.

00:45:53 - Ryan Carniato

I mean, if you find the angle to make that fit in because one product almost being like a funnel into the other one, or being able to cover the whole range, it makes a lot of sense. I do think JavaScript frameworks, in how ambitious they are, might have a bigger challenge in that sense. It does feel sometimes, at least externally, like, does this just have to be a battle? Do these things have to be competing with each other directly because they're both trying to take over that portion of the world? So yeah, I think Matt already covered it quite well when he was talking about foundations and different ways to fund these things might ultimately be the way. Because at a certain point this goes beyond what a single author does. For Solid right now, this is a really good place to be. But when things grow to a point like React-type heights, I think you're talking about a very different kind of situation and consideration. But I suppose by that point there are probably other options.

00:47:12 - Ryan Carniato

I think it's tricky to get to that point without having some amount of funding behind it though.

00:47:19 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. The last thing I would kind of pop in in terms of axes to think about these things on: I always found what Tanner was doing really interesting because he didn't build projects first and then try and monetize it or figure out a way to make money on top of it so much as he built tools that were immediately useful to him in his business that he was already doing. So they were kind of forged in the fires of real use cases. Then it was something that everyone else, once they saw he had built it, were like, hey, I want this, to the point where they would actually start paying money to ensure that it continues to survive. So I think that's kind of a cool model. When I first heard him describe it, I said it was like open core inside out because you start with building something for a business and then open source it versus starting from open source and then building a business around it. I think that's something that hasn't been explored to the same extent.

00:48:15 - Ishan Anand

Yeah. I'm going to pivot us a little bit to another thing that came up in the coverage of this. It was actually in Richard MacManus at The New Stack. When he wrote his article and interviewed you, Matt, he had a section where he basically said, is Jamstack still a thing? The definition seems to keep changing. He walked through his understanding of the definition and how it's changed over the years and what this new change is a reflection of in terms of the definition. Do you want to elaborate on what Jamstack means today versus what it meant half a decade ago?

00:48:53 - Mathias Biilmann

Yeah, I think the whole ecosystem around it has evolved so much from when we started out. When I coined the term, the ecosystem around us was on the one hand very community-driven open source static site generators like Jekyll, Hugo, Middleman, and Roots, and on the other hand application frameworks like Angular and Ember and an emerging React. It was very early days. There was an API economy emerging. But the massive dominating tools for building for the web typically were based on your choice of backend determining how you were building your front end. People would pick Ruby on Rails and they would get the asset pipeline and everything from there, and the choice of template languages. They would build a store with Shopify, and now their front-end developers have to work in Liquid and its constraints. Or they would build with WordPress or Drupal, and now there's a whole set of constraints on what kind of user experiences can you actually build. Or in large companies, maybe there would be customers of Adobe Experience Manager and everything would be decided for them around that.

00:50:20 - Mathias Biilmann

Right? And from the start, the key thought behind coining a term that was sort of a category shift was that I thought we would move towards a world where we would decouple the web experience layer from the whole backend layer and treat that web experience layer as essentially its own application, with its own build toolchain, its own deployment layer, its own release management process, and everything. Back when we started, the way to do that was static deploys, like static deploys to a CDN. Then in 2017 at Netlify, we introduced Netlify Functions as a part of our stack and opened up a new set of possibilities. Then in the last couple of years we've seen edge functions emerge as yet another runtime layer for this stack. But I still don't think there's any name or nomenclature that better describes the fundamental shift we've seen in the web architecture of today, from tools like WordPress and Drupal and Ruby on Rails and Shopify and Magento and Adobe Experience Manager toward this whole modern world of self-standing web frameworks, from Next to Gatsby to SvelteKit to SolidStart to Astro to Eleventy and so on.

00:51:54 - Mathias Biilmann

It's just been a very foundational change, right? I was on this code podcast the other day and explaining some of this change, and the guy who ran it said, it's interesting, right? If you describe this, most of our students will never have seen the old world. They will never have experienced it. They just take it for granted that you build these web UIs as self-standing experiences. But that really wasn't the case, right? So in that way, of course, there's also a certain level where we start just talking about modern front-end as the nomenclature. But I still think if you want to describe this architectural difference between the monolithic approach where every single website, web app, or web store is one application grouping both the user experience and the business logic and data access, and then the typical modern approach of building self-standing web UIs, I haven't seen a term that describes it better than Jamstack.

00:53:06 - Ishan Anand

So I'll again remind folks, feel free to raise your hand and we'll bring you up to the stage to ask questions. There's a lot to unpack there, some of which was in the article. The first question I want to ask is, it feels like the wind has been at the back of the API-first, headless, Jamstack, composable approach over the last five or ten years, because there was a lot of investment in technology. Software was eating the world even if you weren't a tech company. So it was very clear you needed to invest in a developer-focused type solution that gave this type of audience and persona a lot of power to perfect the interface and output. It feels like there are some headwinds that are related and some that are only partially overlapping that. For example, there definitely seems to be a push against maybe very heavy JavaScript frameworks. There's potentially a push against the investment it takes to migrate a legacy site from a monolithic architecture onto a decoupled architecture, because it requires development work.

00:54:30 - Ishan Anand

So there's kind of this investment that you need to do to get there. Right now in the macroeconomic environment, people are trying to figure out what their budget's going to be, especially in enterprises where it's run partially by a procurement department. They're like, well, okay, right now this idea that we need to be a software company even though we're producing these other widgets isn't necessarily a high priority. Do you feel like you see those headwinds, or what's your interpretation of that?

00:55:00 - Mathias Biilmann

I feel more like we're sort of crossing the chasm, right? If you look at a signal like just WordPress adoption, WordPress was growing in market share until the middle of last year. That was the point where it finally started to stagnate and now it's slowly decreasing. But I think a lot of those developers that are not the very early adopter crowd that are constantly looking for new frameworks, but are more in the world of, look, whatever we pick, we need to have some stability. We are not able to spend the majority of our time re-engineering our web front end every year, every two years. We need some more stability. I think we'll see that all of us vendors have to build some more tooling for them. It's one of the areas where Gatsby and Gatsby Cloud has had a lot of commercial success in terms of the mid-market to enterprise businesses, where Gatsby being a bit more opinionated in how you connect to data, get it into your UI, and build with it has been really useful for those developers to get from one place to the other faster.

00:56:22 - Mathias Biilmann

And I think in general now that we are entering this stage of this category fundamentally going really mainstream, all of us will also have to think about what that means for the next set of tools that we need to offer to this next set of developers.

00:56:43 - Ishan Anand

That's really interesting. Are there other areas that you feel the ecosystem needs to solve, whether it's on the frameworks or the vendors? Obviously you talked about the integrations, I talked about the issues with performance in certain client side heavy frameworks. Are there other things that you think the ecosystem has to solve in order to push us over the chasm?

00:57:09 - Mathias Biilmann

Some of it ideally comes to some of these foundational pieces of governance. I think once you start making decisions in very large companies on building something that's going to stick around and that you are going to keep developing on, open source projects that are not just open source but also have open governance and open roadmaps are going to be really appealing because you need a level of stability and you need to know that you don't suddenly get a set of completely breaking changes thrown at you at a keynote or something like that, but that there is long-term stability. The other piece, that's obviously one of our strategic directions, is I think as you start making this more mainstream, we also have to make it easier to get the data from all these different data sources, both internal sources and headless commercial systems. We need to make it easier to get them out of there and into the web UI.

00:58:15 - Ishan Anand

Okay, that's an interesting list. I don't know the polite way to say it, so I'll just say it like this: do you still feel that WordPress, so to speak, is the enemy? Or what's your view on that ecosystem and say that the stacks of...

00:58:31 - Anthony Campolo

WordPress as nemesis instead of enemy.

00:58:37 - Mathias Biilmann

No, I rarely... I'm just not the person to perceive the world so much in terms of enemies. Also, from where we are sitting, if you look at Netlify's customer base, every use case and vertical, from Twilio's core product engineering team building the core SaaS app of Twilio with Netlify to Unilever.com replacing Adobe Experience Manager with Netlify for their properties, to luxury brand e-commerce like Sennheiser building their storefront on top of Netlify, to old-school retailers building their omni-channel UIs with Netlify and so on, the total web space is so big that it's not so relevant for me to point to a specific enemy. It's more like a fundamental re-architecture of everything to be composable, whether it's sites or stores and apps, and a lot of the legacy systems keep living on. One of our customers has like more than 2,000 Drupal sites sitting around, and they're not going to be able to go in and replatform every one of those and rework them to different headless CMSs and so on.

01:00:03 - Mathias Biilmann

But they do want to be able to iterate on the visual experience of those without relying on Drupal. So in that way, they need this middleware to get the data from the old sites into new front ends and so on. So I wouldn't say that it's one specific target. It's more like a large, broad foundational change in how most businesses are actually building web UIs.

01:00:33 - Ishan Anand

Another area that I've come across is that this is a movement that started with developers, and sometimes the non-technical stakeholders' ability to modify and edit and control either the content or its look and feel in a lot of setups can be constrained and adds more friction, ironically, on those people, but the developers have full reign. Sometimes the content folks are told, and they're not technical at all, right, you've got to write Markdown, and they're like, this feels backwards if they're used to a WYSIWYG editor. Do you feel like the ecosystem has solved that or it's still on its way to solving that?

01:01:13 - Mathias Biilmann

I think there's still work to do. There's still work to do and lots of different work going on across the industry to solve both the intersection of how developers build these tools and how the content editors and marketers interact with it, and how developers build these tools and how designers and design systems flow into it. I think there's still a lot of innovation and a lot of work to be done in that space.

01:01:45 - Ishan Anand

Is there anybody that stands out that you think is doing a good job there in solving it?

01:01:52 - Mathias Biilmann

There are many different ones, from companies like Storyblok that build more of the visual experience into a headless CMS, or companies like Stackbit that abstract that layer and bring in marketers in a multi-origin system, to companies like Builder that are really innovating in the sense of making the component library what decides how content editors can get visual editing and interact there. There's just really a lot of innovation going on in that space right now.

01:02:32 - Ishan Anand

Okay, great. Well, we are basically at our time slot so I'll turn over to you and Ryan if you have any last thoughts and anything you want to leave us with.

01:02:53 - Ryan Carniato

Okay, I'll go first. Honestly, this whole thing and this news, I know there's been a lot of talk about Gatsby in different ways, and this is the kind of world I live in. When I see it, I'm very excited to have that experience on the team, and I'm very excited to be working closely with people with this experience because there aren't that many out there who have built large JavaScript frameworks used by so many people. To be able to bring that into Netlify, bring those ideas out, talk, integrate, I am very excited for the future here and I'm looking forward to things only getting better.

01:03:47 - Ishan Anand

Great Matt. Anything else you want to close it off before I wrap up the session?

01:03:53 - Mathias Biilmann

No, nothing special. I'm just more excited than ever for the future.

01:03:59 - Ishan Anand

Okay, well thank you Matt and Ryan for jumping on. Thank you, our regulars Chris and Bro Nifty, thank you, and Anthony, our developer advocate at Edgio, for hosting. I want to remind everyone we are here every week at 12pm San Francisco time on Wednesday. Anything JavaScript or web...

01:04:27 - Anthony Campolo

now San Francisco time.

01:04:29 - Ishan Anand

Pacific time? Well, it's the new New York of the west, so yes, US Pacific time zone. Just if you think I'm too San Francisco-centered, I'm not in San Francisco, although I used to live there for quite a while. But yes, we're here every Wednesday, 12pm Pacific time, to talk about anything web development or JavaScript related. Next week we will have Josh Goldberg, who will be talking to us about TypeScript, and he just did a crash course on TypeScript for us. In fact, if you went to the Jamstack Conference or you saw the State of Jamstack survey, or you saw the State of JavaScript survey, you know TypeScript is off the hook. Everyone who uses it loves it. You can't say that about almost everything else in the ecosystem. So if you've been meaning to get on the TypeScript train, now is the time. We have a great crash course that Josh did, and he'll be here one week from today to answer questions and talk about TypeScript, so definitely check that out. You can go to JavaScriptJam.com to check it out. While you're there, feel free to click and subscribe to our newsletter.

01:05:42 - Ishan Anand

And with that Anthony, I'll let you close us out. Thank you.

01:05:46 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, thank you so much. It was really great to have this conversation. Thank you, Ryan and Matt, for hopping in and talking about this. Definitely going to be sharing this recording around for anyone who wants to learn more about this because we went very deep into it. Ishan already said we'll be here every week. Unfortunately, I do not have Scott's usual closing music, so we're just going to have to end it right here. But thank you so much, everyone, for being here and hope to see you next time.