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Recap of the `funding` experiment

feross.org

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Re: Recap of the `funding` experiment

#51

Post by lacker »

fergie wrote: post #41

It makes me sad to see the negativity that this experiment has attracted, even in this HN discussion thread there seem to be a lot of dismissive and patronising comments directed towards Feross. I'm genuinely unsure if this is because people think that Feross has much lower ability than he actually has, or if they are jealous of the attention he has received for Standard.js, or if it is just because JS programmers ar…

The negativity is because people do not want to see this becoming a trend, where CLI tools start advertising. One practical way to fight against new forms of advertising is to complain in public, complain to the advertiser, and make sure that form of advertising is associated with user complaints. That seemed to work here.

I don’t think the majority of the pushback was about Feross personally. But when people see a new form of advertising that seems especially annoying, it is quite logical to respond negatively.

Re: Recap of the `funding` experiment

#52

Post by lacker »

thosakwe wrote: post #46

I said something similar on a previous post, but more and more, it’s becoming more clear to that “open source” and “profit” are not very compatible. The truth is simple: if you use a permissive license like MIT, you will probably never see a penny from the thousands of hours you put in, and while you are struggling and feeling drained, people who will never contribute more than a vague “it doesn’t work” GitHub issue…

Some open source projects are quite profitable. Bitcoin for example is an open source project.

There are also many people paid to work on open source. Projects like TypeScript or TensorFlow are good examples.

It just doesn’t work well to first write an open source library, give it away for free, and then later try to make money from it.

Re: Recap of the `funding` experiment

#53

Post by jhunter1016 »

I worked for a company that used tons of open source software. The company itself never paid or contributed. Fortunately, individual developers on the team often built open source tools and contributed to other open source projects.

This issue of getting paid for the work you do hits home for me. I come from a writing background (before development), and the problem is very similar there. You're expected to write for free. For exposure. To better the community. But it sucks. People should be paid for the work they do.

Good luck on future experiments.

Re: Recap of the `funding` experiment

#54

Post by pessimizer »

juliusmusseau wrote: post #27
justsubmit wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That attitude is very strange to me. I care about the quality and usefulness of my software. I give it away to give back, because I have been given much. There are bugs in my software which I will never discover on my own. When a user offers me a bug report or a patch, that user is also giving back. The bug report is a form of contribution. It gives me information I wouldn't otherwise have, which I can use to improve…

Monetizing our work is not strange. It might require some contortions compared to the most direct approach (step 1. write software. step 2. git push), but that doesn't make it a bad thing. Here is Charles Dickens writing about his own contortions to monetize his work: There must be a special design to overcome that specially trying mode of publication, and I cannot better express the difficulty and labour of it than…

> Monetizing our work is not strange. It might require some contortions compared to the most direct approach (step 1. write software. step 2. git push), but that doesn't make it a bad thing.

You're answering the question you want to answer, not the one that was asked. It's important that you get paid for your work so you can eat, and it's good to figure out ways to monetize your work. Charging people for reporting bugs is strange because knowing about bugs helps you and the rest of your users more than it helps the reporter.

> I think holding onto bugfixes and feature enhancements and letting Patreon subscribers have first dibs on these makes sense.

I think that could make sense, too, but neither of those things are reporting bugs or suggesting features. I don't have a quote.

Re: Recap of the `funding` experiment

#55

Post by pessimizer »

michaelt wrote: post #43
justsubmit wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That attitude is very strange to me. I care about the quality and usefulness of my software. I give it away to give back, because I have been given much. There are bugs in my software which I will never discover on my own. When a user offers me a bug report or a patch, that user is also giving back. The bug report is a form of contribution. It gives me information I wouldn't otherwise have, which I can use to improve…

There are bugs in my software which I will never discover on my own. [...] The bug report is a form of contribution. Well, there are at least two ways of viewing a bug report: 1. A bug report is a helpful contribution towards more perfect software, giving the developer new information but no obligation. For example, pointing out a security bug. 2. A bug report is a request for support, asking the developer to work on…

The second one is strange. Just because I tell you your software is broken doesn't obligate you to fix it, and if anybody is confused by that, you can tell them. The weird thing is not having a way to be informed about the bug by unpaid users.

Re: Recap of the `funding` experiment

#56

Post by makomk »

justsubmit wrote: post #14
danShumway wrote: post #7

I'm in the early stages of building some tools to automatically lock new issues in my own Open Source repos, and to give Patreon supporters automatic access to comment on locked issues. Anyone will be able to read existing Github/Gitlab issues, but only supporters will be able to join the conversation or file new issues. It's loosely based on some ideas that William Gross[0] and a few other sources have proposed. You…

That attitude is very strange to me. I care about the quality and usefulness of my software. I give it away to give back, because I have been given much. There are bugs in my software which I will never discover on my own. When a user offers me a bug report or a patch, that user is also giving back. The bug report is a form of contribution. It gives me information I wouldn't otherwise have, which I can use to improve…

Not only that, writing a useful bug report can involve a surprising amount of work - sometimes far more than is required to write the fix. (For instance, a couple of bug reports I've filed against Pulseaudio fall firmly into that category. They were obnoxious, system-specific crashes that were a pain to pin down and would probably be really hard to reproduce elsewhere, but once pinned down there was an obvious one-line fix for each.)

Re: Recap of the `funding` experiment

#57

Post by pjmlp »

lacker wrote: post #51
fergie wrote: post #41

It makes me sad to see the negativity that this experiment has attracted, even in this HN discussion thread there seem to be a lot of dismissive and patronising comments directed towards Feross. I'm genuinely unsure if this is because people think that Feross has much lower ability than he actually has, or if they are jealous of the attention he has received for Standard.js, or if it is just because JS programmers ar…

The negativity is because people do not want to see this becoming a trend, where CLI tools start advertising. One practical way to fight against new forms of advertising is to complain in public, complain to the advertiser, and make sure that form of advertising is associated with user complaints. That seemed to work here. I don’t think the majority of the pushback was about Feross personally. But when people see a n…

What about making a trend to actually pay for the tools one uses?

Re: Recap of the `funding` experiment

#58

Post by miguelmota »

The problems with this 'funding experiment':

- If he does advertising, everyone will eventually start doing it. Then everyone will start using adblockers, defeating the purpose originally planned for. It's a classic case of the Tragedy of the Commons situation [0]. This experiment would have never worked in the long term and only benefits those who do it in the beginning momentarily.

- He created a github issue thread asking for feedback from everyone [1], but then closed the issue thread. Later one he went on saying that he doesn't care what people say unless they're contributors to the library [2]. He could have just limited the thread to contributors only but he prefers pushing the goal post.

- If you can no longer support OSS, then hand it over to an organization open to the community, or archive the project. As an example, Fatih archived projects he could no longer support and the community had no issues at all [3]. People who can contribute will fork the project and continue with it.

- The core-js maintainer started doing ads like that first, promoting his own job advertisement [4]. It got to the point where he started deleting comments and blocking people on github which he disagreed with. Keep in mind that this is a package with million of weekly installs and used by babel libraries so people's output logs looked like this [5]. I believe it was violating NPM's terms of service too.

- Authors can do whatever they want with their own packages including spamming post install logs with ads, but expect the programming community to be very vocal against the practice [6]. A package meant for the community should listen to the feedback of the community, instead of calling them wrong.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

[1] https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381

[2] https://twitter.com/feross/status/1165515455882096640?s=20

[3] https://arslan.io/2018/10/09/taking-an-indefinite-sabbatical...

[4] https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/548

[5] https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/548#issuecomment-...

[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cus0zu/a_3mil_...

Re: Recap of the `funding` experiment

#59

Post by mrosett »

lacker wrote: post #51
fergie wrote: post #41

It makes me sad to see the negativity that this experiment has attracted, even in this HN discussion thread there seem to be a lot of dismissive and patronising comments directed towards Feross. I'm genuinely unsure if this is because people think that Feross has much lower ability than he actually has, or if they are jealous of the attention he has received for Standard.js, or if it is just because JS programmers ar…

The negativity is because people do not want to see this becoming a trend, where CLI tools start advertising. One practical way to fight against new forms of advertising is to complain in public, complain to the advertiser, and make sure that form of advertising is associated with user complaints. That seemed to work here. I don’t think the majority of the pushback was about Feross personally. But when people see a n…

The feedback on HN was harsh but not personal. The 1k comment thread on /r/programming was very nasty and made me less likely to engage with that community again.

Re: Recap of the `funding` experiment

#60

Post by mrosett »

ohazi wrote: post #8

I think there were two problems here. 1. You hit a nerve with the distribution method. Everybody knows that npm is a ticking time bomb for malware delivery. Developers already tend to react poorly when weird things happen to their build system, and the paranoia around npm made them react explosively. 2. I think targeting developers is probably the wrong approach. If you're serious about tackling this problem, you sho…

Re: 2 - he already does that.
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