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PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

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Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#221

Post by westoque »

IshKebab wrote: post #55
azernik wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a classic "public good" - an economic activity whose benefits are impractical or unworthwhile to deny to those who don't pay. Things like emergency services, last-mile road infrastructure, and environmental protection work. A special-case of positive externalities. These are a classic example used by economists of a natural place for government in the economy.

Which makes me wonder why governments don't give more grants for writing open source code. They do it for research, which is another thing that would otherwise probably not pay for itself. I guess if they started doing it a lot of commercial companies would complain to them about the competition.

Or companies for that matter. I know other companies that have an open source division like AT&T labs.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#223

Post by x0x0 »

egeozcan wrote: post #174
cookiecaper wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I really think that open-source software shot itself in the foot by incorporating unlimited free sharing for every recipient into its mantra. Now everyone thinks that open-source has to mean impoverished, because despite all the happy vibes, very few people will pay for software that they could otherwise get for free. You can make your software "source available", i.e., not open-source under activist definition…

There's no shared source license which bans commercial usages but I think the software industry desperately needs one. I'm selling the software and want to enable the user to make modifications for private use and even share those modifications if they so desire = I have to hire a lawyer and hope he comes up with something that stands the test of a trial. Not giving away something for free (as in freedom) but asking…

That's typically the purpose of AGPL plus a dual license offering for cash. This will probably require copyright assignments to make it work tho

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#224

Post by renownedmedia »

est wrote: post #164
akx wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see the problem. After all, you just install those deps once in your Dockerfile, right? ;)

chromium-browser requires these chromium-browser chromium-browser-l10n chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra cpp cpp-4.8 fontconfig fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core hicolor-icon-theme libasound2 libasound2-data libatk1.0-0 libatk1.0-data libatomic1 libavahi-client3 libavahi-common-data libavahi-common3 libcairo2 libcloog-isl4 libcups2 libdatrie1 libdrm-intel1 libdrm-nouveau2 libdrm-radeon1 libfile-basedir-perl libfile-desk…

I'm assuming a lot of those dependencies (x11, libgtk) will disappear once installing a special headless version of chrome.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#225

Post by paulddraper »

misingnoglic wrote: post #163
mobilefriendly wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kind of in a bubble, there is a lot of U.S. government support for open source and most agencies use it. See https://code.gov for a starting point. There's never going to be a huge multi-billion dollar grant program because it is unfair to closed-source companies (who pay taxes) but you are imagining a debate or hangup that doesn't exist.

Why is it unfair? Those companies presumably charge for their software, and maybe will be incentivised to go open source.

It's unfair because those companies can't extract their required funding at gunpoint.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#227

Post by brazzledazzle »

lurker456 wrote: post #172
nulagrithom wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This problem was well demonstrated at my shop the other day. There's a lot of fear of open source here. We needed to run a simple FTP process. I said I'd write a short script. "You've gotta be careful with those free tools though... Never know what will happen when they break. You can't get any support. Besides, we need logging and alerting too." "Oh, $currentTool does logging and alerting?" "Well, yes... But it's cu…

Open source doesn't allow you to pass the buck. Commercial software with support contracts does. There is also the "look how much we're paying! it must be good" factor.

Many companies are paid handsomely to take the blame.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#228

Post by brazzledazzle »

jonny_eh wrote: post #130
hackits wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats more surprising is the company I work for does have a support agreement with Oracle, although when we've run into problems that do need a technical expert from Oracle such as crash dumps and stack traces we're told to figure it out our-self. Kind of defeats the whole reason to have a closed source system when you're still on the hook and charging out $500 per hour to clients.

and then you can't search stackoverflow for help, compared to using something like postgres

Is it fair to say that kind of people that want to pay for an SFTP client for an automated process probably aren't doing much digging around on stackoverflow?

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#229

Post by Jimmed »

corford wrote: post #65
hpaavola wrote: post #25

Also Firefox will get headless mode in few releases https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1338004

And while people wait, you can already do a 'poor mans' headless Firefox thanks to SlimerJS and xvfb. Phantomjs is less resource heavy if you're constantly spooling up and down lots of instances but I prefer SlimerJS w/ Firefox since it lets you keep up to date with a modern version of Firefox (rather than relying on sporadic QTWebkit updates from Phantomjs). If you're using Casperjs, SlimerJS is virtually a drop in…

A colleague and I spent a couple of days setting up high-fidelity webpage->PDF rendering, and by far the best results were got with SlimerJS and xvfb.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#230

Post by ble »

redsummer wrote: post #4

I'm curious - What is the utility of headless browsers? Are there people who earn money by getting it to automatically fill out forms, enter competitions etc?

I used PhantomJS as part of a report generation pipeline which served no HTTP requests and contacted no outside servers. We made PDFs and ready-to-email, single-file HTML reports with some minimal interactive features. (Ready-to-email, single file == all images turned into data URIs, styles inlined, for HTML files sent as attachments)

PhantomJS loaded up an HTML file written earlier in the pipeline. The HTML consisted of a big slug of JSON containing all the relevant data (which would vary from one run to another) and a bunch of scripts and templates (which were fixed for any given report type). The scripts built into the HTML file would chew up the JSON slug and build up the DOM required for the report. Then the PhantomJS script would identify all the images in the DOM and replace all of them with data URIs, strip out the JSON slug to prevent giving away more data than contained in the DOM, and strip out all of the templating JavaScript, leaving behind only the JavaScript needed for the interactive features, which was inlined.

We went with PrinceXML for PDF generation. I was briefly nervous because I saw people praising PhantomJS' pdf generation capabilities... but then I saw the people saying, "we used PhantomJS for pdf generation, we used wkhtmltopdf, then we just paid some money to get something that wouldn't produce weird output some of the time." CSS Paged Media Module FTW, y'all.

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