It's fine to be forthcoming about the financial interests of your projects – this is Hacker News, after all. We live on VC. The tone of your previous comment suggests there is none.
I find it hard to believe that anything you would spend your company's time on would not push the mission of the company forward. This creates a financial incentive.
I'll address the first non-clickbait question and try to provide some insight, as I think you might be a bit confused on how COSS startups work.
We don't plan to monetize WASIX. WASIX is just an enabler to allow any program compile to WebAssembly. If other open-source technology existed and fulfilled what we want to accomplish is more than certain we would not have created WASIX.
In our case, the community was asking to have sockets, threads, forking, subprocesses and more fully working on Wasm. And there was nothing that supported that (or that aimed to support it), so we worked on it.
Now, let me give more insight on what we actually plan to monetize: Wasmer Edge [1]. Wasmer Edge is the alternative to the expensive big-tech providers that allows any person or company to host their websites at a fraction of the cost.
Wasmer is a VC company building a platform that depends on the existence of these platform APIs – sockets, threads, forking, etc. They have a vested interest in the existence of these APIs, and the health of the developer ecosystem, to stay alive. From here, it kind of seems like the fundamental foundation of everything Wasmer is building.
Meanwhile, Bytecode Alliance is a registered non-profit with many large corporate backers. They are building out the WASI standard with careful due diligence to learn from and avoid the mistakes we have found in POSIX. BCA has their own financial incentives, and they are aligned differently than yours.
BCA ultimately is moving slower than works for Wasmer. So I guess you were faced with three options: A) wait for BCA, and do nothing B) work with BCA and push it forward C) fork it and do it yourself.
So you chose to fork it and reimplement POSIX with all its warts. I assume because this applies pressure to the community (candidly, a good thing) while letting you make progress immediately.
Where I, and I assume others, have issue with all of this is:
You have chosen a name that has created confusion in an already confusing space.
You have whitewashed it by promoting it as a new open standard, but the controlling entity realllyy is just Wasmer[0].
You have demonstrated through your actions a complete lack of willingness to work with people in the community, preferring to strong-arm with veiled threats[1] or perverting incentives financially[2].
The issue isn't with WASIX, but with you and your actions. I have no confidence in your ability to lead this community forward in a way that has my (our) interests ahead of your company's.
If you dismiss all criticism of your behaviour in this way, you'll never gain any insight into why so many people find your behaviour so objectionable.
It's not because "haters gonna hate". It's not because you're operating in a competitive and highly visible space, and so of course you're going to receive some "hate", or whatever other dismissive narrative you might have cooked up. Look around you: people in similar positions just don't generate the reaction that you do.
When Wasmer eventually folds, it will be your fault, because you refused to reflect on how your antisocial behaviour destroyed all trust in the brand.
I don't know how to stop that from happening. Maybe a good therapist could help? Heck, your board would probably even be happy to pay for it, given the potential upside for Wasmer.
Without entering in any detail on what you mentioned (other than sincerely thank you for the belief in the potential upside for Wasmer!), I think we may have very different definition of what a hater is.
A hater, for me, is someone that lacks of constructive criticism.
This is kind of my point. It would be refreshing to see the CEO that would like our industry to build on top of his platform to show some humility. Do you care to admit to making any mistakes in your interactions, or is it all because we are just a bunch of haters?
A charitable interpretation could be that a rising tide lifts all boats. Syrus/Wasmer may sincerely believe that WASIX contributes to the rising tide, and it will therefore benefit Wasmer and all other Wasm-related ventures alike.
Under this interpretation, there would still be a financial incentive, but it would not be underhanded.
I find it hard to believe that anything you would spend your company's time on would not push the mission of the company forward. This creates a financial incentive.