Seems interesting to me that every single Laravel conference seems to bring out the same set of predominantly white male speakers. who mostly now work for Laravel, who talk about their (often) paid products, which feed back into folks pushing more and more money towards corporate Laravel, and folks just lap it up.
I don't blame them for building their hugely succesful business. But no-one seems to question it or ask for any more. Am I missing something here?
@robjmills I guess on the one hand it ensures its survival and continued development: people get paid for working on it and developing it, so they’ll keep developing it. We often hear people (rightly) bemoaning the fact that open source is a thankless largely unpaid effort, so we see an alternative model here, that so far appears to be largely working.
On the other hand there is a danger of them eventually doing an Oracle move and just enshittifying the whole the thing beyond measure to further their corporate objectives, whilst still keeping a veneer of Open Source.
And yes, the lack of diversity is terrible. As is the continued focus by its ‘influencers’ on X/Twitter. These two may or may not be connected, of course…
(I say all of this as a Laravel fan. I like working with it!)
@michael Always difficult to know what will happen now VC money is wrapped up in the product. I guess time will tell, but finding new ways to monetise the community seems set to continue.
FWIW I don't think it's problematic to be wary of these things and still like the framework. Using and enjoying a product and applying critical thinking to its ecosystem should not be mutually exclusive.
@robjmills laravel has always been aligned around hustle culture
they don’t go out of their way to exclude noncommercial or enterprise users, but the framework is a vehicle for selling stuff to a particular demographic
@emd yeah, I don’t mind the focus on money so much. The insularity is the bigger problem
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