There are much more mature and stable examples to point at for community-supported open source. Successful open source generally doesn't happen because of direct dollar contributions, but because companies that depend on the projects decide to employ the project maintainers, or assign their existing employees to fix & improve critical projects.

For example, I know that at least $100k/month is being poured into Ember right now. There is no visible patreon page to point to, because it's all employee salaries. But multiple very-big companies -- in tech, finance, and media -- are using and depending on Ember and are paying their employees and contractors directly to keep making it better.

That estimate is certainly lower than the true number, because I'm only counting the group of people whose time is 100% allocated to Ember. There are a couple orders of magnitude more people who get to allocate some of their paid working time, and that group adds up to quite a lot more money.

> The open source project that has really stood out to me in terms of funding is vuejs.org who's funding is almost entirely public at https://www.patreon.com/evanyou

I'm excited about the success here, but it's extremely atypical. Most open source projects gets tens of dollars a month, barring large sponsors (despite over 100 sponsors, 80% of Evan's funding comes from the top 11 sponsors)

What differentiates Vue from all the other client rendering libraries out there? (Angular, Polymer, React, Ember, Knockout, etc).

At first glance it looks kinda like Knockout.

It seems like a full framework, easy to start with, yet doesn't feel bloated or confusing (personal opinon).

Here's an obviously biased (obvious biased since it's from the creator of vue himself), yet pretty good comparison: https://vuejs.org/guide/comparison.html

Oh no. This: https://vuejs.org/guide/reactivity.html#Change-Detection-Cav...

    Vue.set(vm.someObject, 'b', 2)

This is exactly the kind of gotchas that drove me away from the likes of Angular, Knockout, and Polymer to the simplicity of "Just re-render everything" that is React.

Yeah, I often use React or a more react-like library because of this reason.

That said, I feel Vue does offer some things that, say, Angular/Knockout/Ractive don't to offset this, so I could see myself using it in some cases where I would otherwise go for React.

I rather like the documentation, for one, as well as the tooling that offers single-file components (js/css/markup) and plays well with the editors I use (Sublime, Atom).

I've also found that it's often easier for others to learn the angular-like markup compared to learning React.

My understanding is that one of its selling points is that it doesn't have to be a full framework. You can use it for views, create components, or use it as a full blown-framework.

Thanks for the link. Interesting. Seems it supports an angular/knockout-like template syntax by default, but allows you to drop down to the virtual dom layer or even use JSX if you want to. Also it has knockout-style computed properties which may be why it outperforms React. This may go nicely with something like RxJS, so maybe I should try it out with Horizon after all.

As I understand it (mostly from hearing Evan on various podcasts), it's essentially the simplicity of Angular 1 from a development perspective, with a React-like architecture.

Plus the computed properties system from knockout. Yeah, it looks like a nice mashup of everything out there.

Vue, like Ember, is not controlled or authored by a large tech corporation. That doesn't make them better or worse, but it's an idea I like.

For me it's that I can easily get work done in it compared to React.

There seem to be a lot of "thin-server" type frameworks that are meant to bridge between the database and client, typically injecting basic authentication and user management.

If the goal is to create a 0-backend firebase like interface why can't this become a module of the database? Not to harp on the project, it seems cool, but I'm genuinely curious what no DBMS bother to try.

I think they also could of, as a flat fee structure, with listed consulting fee rates, could have done what compose.io does just for RethinkDB, as well as a SaaS model for cloud-ready instances on a handful of popular cloud platforms.

That may have taken away from the core development, but may have been a better case than some of the bits they did with Horizon, which does look interesting to say the least.

Could have.