121–130 of 377 posts
The rationale from the author of the package who adding advertising is enlightening and definitely worth reading. https://feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/
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Doing open source without utilising the the code in some form of paid product is a foolish thing to do. The entire computer industry was founded on people writing software for the joy of writing software and giving it away for free. 90% of software available through the early 80's worked this way. We called it "public domain software." (As an aside, the earliest version of the word "hacker" that I can remember was wh…
I think that's revisionist thinking. I wrote software through that period; I remember it as expensive and closed. The free stuff was exceptional because it was free. Come on; Linux started in 1991; Stallman was an unknown and just beginning his ministry in the 80s. Corporate software dominated everything, including the IBM PC which was the flagship of Silicon Valley. DOS wasn't free; software for it was for sale ever…
I wrote software in that period, too. So, no, it's not revisionist. Yes, closed software was very expensive. You'd pay upwards of $1,000 for a compiler, or $500 for a spreadsheet. But there were tens of thousands of public domain programs that were also available. Some of the PD libraries from organizations like TPUG were massive. No, it wasn't all good. But if you wanted higher quality, you paid the money for it.
Come on; Linux started in 1991; Stallman was an unknown and just beginning his ministry in the 80s. Corporate software dominated everything, including the IBM PC which was the flagship of Silicon Valley. DOS wasn't free; software for it was for sale everywhere.
I think you're thinking of a later period in time than I am. I'm not thinking x86 era. I'm thinking Z-80 era.
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I work on Enterprise projects and we rarely (never) contribute back financially, because we cannot for practical reasons. It is simply not possible for us to add a "donation" cost to our projects. That will not get past accounting. A license, on the other hand, we would have no issues purchasing that. We purchase (expensive) licenses to proprietary software all the time. We could and would do the same for the open so…
What about a completely pointless "support the project" license? So you basically chip in for the maintenance, but don't get any additional rights?
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
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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 s…
You’re running their code, whether it prints an ad or not. There’s no need for “injection attacks and escape sequences” at that point.
I know this is a controversial opinion and I know it won’t directly solve the issue at hand, but it’s related and it addresses some of the concerns raised by many people in this thread: how do we get open source the funding it needs? Consider a world where the norm is not MIT/BSD but GPL dual licensed with MIT for a fee. This would give back control to maintainers of a library, and it would allow people without funds…
Note that the MIT license allows redistribution: anyone who bought a single MIT license could legally distribute MIT-licensed copies without continuing to pay the original author for additional licenses.
However, it's not like the developers of and contributors to these projects naively go in thinking they're going to get paid anything. They graciously choose to make the fruits of their efforts freely available regardless of compensation. And, yes, there are companies making money off of that generosity.
My point is; nobody is in the wrong here. Both parties have entered into this agreement willingly.
Injecting ads like this is wrong because the developers are reneging on that agreement. It's as if the developers are saying, "You know what? I changed my mind and I want some money for this because companies are making money off of it now." What's worse is they aren't even charging the companies directly.
I'm all for a discussion around how to help generate funding for FOSS projects but have we not learned from Google, Facebook, and others how wrong a path advertising can be? At what point are the advertisers going to want demographic information and the module developers start requiring you provide that information at 'npm install'?
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.…
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…
If you are a software developer and you want software without adverts, pay for it. If you want software for free, you accept whatever the author of that software chooses to do to pay their bills.
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.…
I think we have got open source funding all wrong. The thing that makes open source great is that, in parallel, half a million projects are ticking along from which we are learning what is good, what is bad, what is the future of our art. It is education. It is research. We look for 100,000 individual solutions to making rent while FAANG are just sitting there with a quarter trillion plus in cash waiting to benefit f…
You miss the point of open source if you think it entitled you to money from people who use it.