We have grants and corporate sponsors to keep the project alive even if the VC money runs out. This was all a side project for me at first, so I went down the "donation" route in the beginning.
Donations are great but they're not how the system works, unfortunately. Dioxus could never compete with the two most valuable companies on earth if it wasn't a self-sustaining business. VC just lets me scale the team from 2 people to 10(?) and have some cash to iterate. We were "profitable" even before taking venture money.
Now we're able to take on more moonshot-type projects like the blitz renderer, a deploy platform, UI fuzz tooling, and more. We're using our seed round exclusively to make dioxus as awesome as possible, so even if it doesn't work out at a venture level, there's still a really cool, polished, end-to-end app framework that you can build and ship with in Rust.
Just for me personally, I don't see the financialization of open source software as an intrinsic good thing and I reflect my technology choices to support this when applicable.
Donations are great but they're not how the system works, unfortunately. Dioxus could never compete with the two most valuable companies on earth if it wasn't a self-sustaining business. VC just lets me scale the team from 2 people to 10(?) and have some cash to iterate. We were "profitable" even before taking venture money.
Now we're able to take on more moonshot-type projects like the blitz renderer, a deploy platform, UI fuzz tooling, and more. We're using our seed round exclusively to make dioxus as awesome as possible, so even if it doesn't work out at a venture level, there's still a really cool, polished, end-to-end app framework that you can build and ship with in Rust.