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NPM Bans Terminal Ads

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Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#111

Post by lacker »

chaostheory wrote: post #57

I’m hoping that with GitHub getting into the donation game, things will get a little better for funding open source. This is just the symptom. It’s really difficult to convince people to part with just $100 a year to fund something critical to our org. I do fund some projects, but there are plenty of others that I use regularly that I don’t fund monthly

The problem is that the $100 usually isn’t funding something critical to your org. If you are getting some key feature in return for your money most organizations will be happy to pay, a lot more than $100 really. But giving someone $100 for a product whose stated price is $0 doesn’t make as much sense.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#112

Post by Nasrudith »

Avamander wrote: post #58
Nasrudith wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they depend upon it then there are two obvious solutions - provide it doing the work themselves or fund it.

Unfortunately people pick the third option that is dissing the developer who has made that piece of code for trying to get funding for the work.

That is just a ruder version of the null option "doing nothing, leaving it unreliable and suffering the consequences".

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#113

Post by jeoeo929 »

cj wrote: post #11

While I don't particularly like the idea of stuffing ads into npm logs, I don't have the same visceral negative reaction that many people have in these HN threads on this topic. The overwhelming majority of the people complaining about this are well-paid tech workers writing code for well-funded companies that profit off of open source code without providing any reciprocal value to the open source projects in return.…

This says more about the state of society than anything else

Profits are up, inequality is up.

That’s by design.

We should be working on making it so people can eat and be healthy, and not have to be reduced to such bottom feeding tactics.

But everyone thinks it’s mean and petty to tell kids of dead rich people they don’t get to inherit all the power.

If I learned anything getting an MS in mathematical linguistics: economics is not physics and mass delusions infect smart people’s limbic systems too.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#114

Post by mLuby »

wvenable wrote: post #66
cj wrote: post #11

While I don't particularly like the idea of stuffing ads into npm logs, I don't have the same visceral negative reaction that many people have in these HN threads on this topic. The overwhelming majority of the people complaining about this are well-paid tech workers writing code for well-funded companies that profit off of open source code without providing any reciprocal value to the open source projects in return.…

If you are a software developer and you want to make money, sell your software. If you want give away your software for free, do that. Giving away software for free and then using adware to make up the difference is something else entirely. If someone wants to make money with developing software, they have many many ways of doing that. Framing this as poor starving software developers getting the shaft by for-profit…

1. Sell

2. Gratis.

3. Gratis; donations welcome.

#3 is barely adware. Sometimes people are extra appreciative of someone's work and want to express that through action; this just tells them how.

On a personal level, I have no issue with an OSS author asking for donations. I draw the line at a company doing so. (An individual soliciting donations for something unrelated, like vim's "Help poor children in Uganda!" insert, isn't my favorite.)

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#115

Post by raesene9 »

prepend wrote: post #27
yebyen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't heard of Tidelift before until recently, and I don't see it mentioned here in the discussion. Is this the kind of thing you'd like to see? https://tidelift.com/ Something has to be done to ensure that Open Source which plays a vital role in our business ecosystems remains sustainable. There are real business implications if some package we all depend on is under-funded and implodes (we can all name well-know…

OSS is sustainable. I don’t like how tidelift seems to present a partial story. If there some OSS crisis that I’m not aware of? Separately, just because something is an approach doesn’t mean it’s worth talking about.

What makes you think OSS is sustainable? There have been various problems with key projects due to lack of funding (e.g. OpenSSL, GPG)

There area huge number of libraries are are becoming unmaintained due to lack of resources, which will likely cause problems down the line.

I'm not sure I'd call it a crisis, but it's definitely a problem.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#116

Post by thsowers »

huntaub wrote: post #8

The rationale from the author of the package who adding advertising is enlightening and definitely worth reading. https://feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/

I think another thing the author misses is that Standard is _just_ a formatting library. It doesn't need/deserve as much resources as libraries that do more and deliver more value for the developer/company such as Vue, webpack etc.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#117

Post by esotericn »

liability wrote: post #93
icebraining wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, like a typical nerd, was just pedantically annoyed by the misused of the term "malware". I don't actually disagree that the ad industry should burn to the ground.

Adware being considered malware used to be the norm. The temptation of money has normalized adware, but being normalized doesn't make it any less malicious. Subjecting people to advertising is an inherently malicious act.

Yep.

Adware is malware. It's software that does a thing the user doesn't want it to do. That's definitional.

About the only exception I can think of would be oldschool stuff like the AllAdvantage toolbar that would pay users for watching ads. That was intentionally installed.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#118

Post by Nasrudith »

ryanlol wrote: post #56
Nasrudith wrote: post #21

Really ads in a terminal is a needless attack vector that is a dumpster fire for security that is part of the reason /why/ they have so many detractors.

This makes no sense at all.

I am assuming a more traditional terminal set up where it could be used for injection attacks and escape sequences to execute arbitrary code - combined with the dubious tradition of unchecked ads as a vector.

It is possible they had learned from mistakes of the past and have proper output and input segregation to prevent such shenanigans entirely. In which case that would still leave social engineering as an attack surface. "Use X for your product - except X is ransomware or harvests sensitive data."

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#119

Post by reaperducer »

liability wrote: post #79
reaperducer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there some OSS crisis that I’m not aware of? I think there might be. I'm not involved in OSS circles, and don't really pay attention to the issues much beyond what I see on HN, but recently in a survey I completed for a tech company there were a number of questions asking my opinion on whether OSS is still a sustainable model, and if I believed it would be around 5, 10, 15, 20 years in the future.

So you admit you don't really know much about the matter, but consider your opinion qualified by virtue of somebody asking you for your opinion? You can ask me what I think about inflation but that wouldn't make me an economist, would it?

That seems an unnecessarily hostile response.

So you admit you don't really know much about the matter, but consider your opinion qualified by virtue of somebody asking you for your opinion?

Yes, I admit that I don't know much about OSS. But I did not state that I have a qualified opinion. In fact, I answered "Don't know/no opinion" on those questions.

The reason I posted my reply was to indicate that there must be some people worried about the situation, or it wouldn't have appeared in a survey from a very large, frequently mentioned on HN, tech company.

You can ask me what I think about inflation but that wouldn't make me an economist, would it?

No, but you could relay the fact that somewhere there are people who are apparently concerned enough about inflation to ask you about it.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#120

Post by kortilla »

tempguy9999 wrote: post #98
jasode wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is an unfair go at the poster. He said "I'm not arguing that npm install logs should be packed full of ads (it shouldn't)." That's clear as can be. Please reread my reply to OP carefully and notice I did not say he endorsed NPM ads. Instead, I specifically disagreed with his suggestion to redirect the discussion away from the NPM ads to the general topic of open-source funding. >He's asking the same question I…

you said > However, if the concrete implementation of trying to get money is unwanted and unexpected ads, then the correct focus of discussion is the criticism of that ad delivery method But he'd already said, prior to that > I'm not arguing that npm install logs should be packed full of ads (it shouldn't). He'd already said no to them; you're both in agreement. There's nothing to argue about. Having agreed that nobo…

You’re missing the point and illustrating it further. The comment was garbage because it derailed the entire discussion around terminal ads to try to direct it to FOSS funding.

It doesn’t matter if they both agree that text ads are bad. It’s basically a “think of the children” derailment except it’s “think of the poor foss dev”.

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