Eleventy is Now Build Awesome?

First off, I know I am being curmudgeonly here. You’ve been warned. It was announced yesterday that Eleventy is now Build Awesome, a new product being offered by Font Awesome. The change has been teased for a while, beginning with changing the color of the Eleventy mascot’s balloon from red to green, and then the addition of a weird slider over the Eleventy wordmark on the home page.

The core of Eleventy is supposed to remain open source, and they will add some paid features — a perfectly cromulent model for funding open source projects. I’m also glad of the possibility that Eleventy’s governance will no longer rely on Zach being Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL). I think Zach has shown a lot of maturity in the way he’s managed Eleventy over the years, I just think that Eleventy reached a point a few years ago where it needed a more mature governance model than a BDFL. Aside from governance, this also means that Eleventy has a better long-term outlook; there’s less risk of the project being abandoned because the one person working on it burns out or loses interest.

All of this is good, and yet I find this change has left a bad taste in my mouth. I suppose a lot of that could be attributed to my cynicism towards corporations. I would certainly have preferred Eleventy to remain independent. Some of this may also be attributed to the fact that I am (probably) turning into a graybeard; I’ve been using open source software since high school, when my dad brought home a copy of Red Hat Linux from Incredible Universe, and I’ve long felt that the vibe of open source in the JavaScript community is a little bit different than what I think of as the broader open source movement. Open source JavaScript projects often feel a little more tied to corporations than Linux, or Python, or NeoVim.

Which is not to say I have a problem with people getting paid to write open source software, it’s just that I prefer to see open source projects governed independently of the financial interests of a company. Realistically I know this is hard, far too many open source developers are taken advantage of. Nonetheless, this is a preconceived notion I have that no doubt affects my feelings about this change for Eleventy.

Beyond my own biases against companies,¹ I was a little unhappy with how these changes were announced.

Last year-ish, Zach began working on getting Eleventy to run in the browser; a feature that, for a static site generator, baffled me. Zach teased bigger things to come when I asked about it, and it now appears to me — though this is pure speculation — that those bigger things were some of the features that will be available to Build Awesome Pro subscribers, such as Live collaboration, and built-in Publishing and Preview Tools.

It feels kind of bad to me that so much effort was put into Eleventy when it was still representing itself as an independent open source project for a feature that was going to be behind a paywall after the project was handed over to Font Awesome. I would feel much better about this if Build Awesome had been announced first, and then work started on the client-side support. To me — and this gets back to the vibes of open source — open source projects are not just open in the sense that their source code is available for you to modify, but open in the way they are operated. To be working on a big change to an open source project for secret reasons that turn out to be paid features that are offered as part of transferring ownership (or something, I’m not really sure) to a company for more than six months just doesn’t feel “open” to me.

Now, of course, this is speculation on my part. It’s entirely possible that Zach was working on this change because he just wanted to support live previews for any content management system, and they only later decided to turn Eleventy in Build Awesome and make this feature the cornerstone of a lot of their paid features. But from the outside, it really looks like this change has been in the works for a long time, and it feels like a little bit of a betrayal to have had so much effort go into paid features before it was announced that these changes were coming to the project.

Another thing I find myself wondering about with this change is what happens to Eleventy’s OpenCollective fund? Will the fund remain open? If so, what for when there is a paid tier to support the project? If not, what happens to the extant money in the fund? Mostly it seems like the OpenCollective fund has been used to cover some infrastructure costs for Eleventy and some community-led efforts, but now that there’s a paid-tier to support Eleventy is this still necessary? Hopefully the future of the OpenCollective fund will be clarified in the future; it’s understandable that this is not one of the first things they dealt with when announcing Build Awesome, nonetheless, it is on my mind in light of this change.

Something else that I hope will be elucidated in the near future is the fate of the Eleventy GitHub projects. What I hope happens is that Font Awesome forks the projects into their own GitHub organization and archives all of the Eleventy repos, leaving them up for posterity. Though, based on what appears to have happened to Shoelace after it was turned into Web Awesome, it does not look like this is what’s going to happen. It appears to me — though I never used Shoelace and didn’t follow this transition at all — that Web Awesome just continued to develop in the Shoelace repositories, perhaps with some renaming. My concern is that if anyone does not want to move on to Build Awesome for whatever reason, that may be harder without a clear separation between the last release of Eleventy and the first release of Build Awesome. I think it would be much easier to either stick with the last Eleventy release or, dare I suggest, fork Eleventy (if that’s the kind of thing you’re into) if the current repositories are archived on GitHub and development of Build Awesome is moved into a new repository.

So where does all of this leave me? Not really sure. I don’t want to overreact by proclaiming that Eleventy is so over and rebuilding my site in a different tool.

That said, this is a possibility that has occurred to me. Short-term, I doubt anything will change materially. Longer-term, who knows? But it was ever thus. Mostly I’m just trying to think through what about all of this is making me uncomfortable because it’s currently living rent-free in my brain.