Open SDK strategy
By Steven Van ·
Vercel commits to building frameworks and SDKs like Nuxt, Svelte, and Flags as open, portable tools that work outside its own platform.
Vercel has published an "Open SDK" strategy laying out how it will build frameworks, SDKs, and tools going forward. The company says it commits to building in the open by default, using the most permissive open source licenses where possible, and to avoiding lock-in: tools should work well on Vercel but remain usable on any platform. New projects will ship first on Vercel to iterate quickly, then be generalized once mature so they can deploy elsewhere.
Vercel traces the strategy to decisions it has already made: React's deployment-agnostic design, developer demand to run Next.js at full potential on other managed platforms, making the AI SDK platform- and framework-agnostic after acquiring the ai npm package name, and NuxtLabs joining Vercel. It says the approach doesn't necessarily extend to its commercial products, but is being applied across a growing set of open source projects, including:
- Nuxt, bringing the same design principles to the Vue ecosystem
- Svelte, for high-performance apps with flexible deployment options
- Flags, a portable feature flag system not tied to a specific provider
- Nitro, Turborepo, and SWR, among others
Read the full Open SDK strategy announcement.