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NPM Bans Terminal Ads

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Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#171

Post by reallydude »

slovenlyrobot wrote: post #86

Far, far more harm is caused by a package repository electing itself as a censor than could ever be caused by a few additional chunks of ASCII turning up in a 4MB Travis CI log. Free software is supposed to be about freedoms, not having those freedoms dictated to me regarding what kind of software I can or cannot create. There are limits to explore in this area, for example, I doubt anyone would disagree with censori…

Seems like an opportunity to compete in a market. It's just a matter of time now before npm has competition.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#172

Post by 0xffff2 »

JonathanMerklin wrote: post #151
0xffff2 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where exactly is this message? I use Vim fairly often and I've never seen it...

:help license I think in earlier vim versions, you could see a message if you opened vim without a file (vim -u NONE # to prevent .vimrc from doing whatever shenanigans you've set up)

Huh. My .vimrc is pretty simple and definitely doesn't include a "don't show donation messages" line, but I do see the message on the front screen when I do `vim -u NONE`. It's not there when I execute `vim`.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#173

Post by archgoon »

jalfresi wrote: post #148
kortilla wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

I think you are making an extremely valid point; i often see the same “think of the children” argument made when discussing advertising and the web. Likewise, no one is saying websites shouldn’t have an income.

If you're only talking about how you don't like the solution; and refuse to talk about the underlying problem; you're going to keep seeing the bad solution again and again and again.

Here everyone says they don't like ads; and then are shocked that people want to talk about why ads are showing up and what to do about that.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#174

Post by mras0 »

0xffff2 wrote: post #135
rrss wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vim isn't ad-supported. Vim has one messsage that you might consider an ad, and the money doesn't support vim's development, it goes to charity. I think it also used to be possible to donate to vim directly to support the development, but I think that money goes to charity now too. (I personally don't think "help poor children in Uganda by donating" is an ad).

Where exactly is this message? I use Vim fairly often and I've never seen it...

When you start Vim (without arguments) it says "VIM - Vi IMproved" .... "Help poor children in Uganda! type :help iccf for information". I just noticed that it actually cycles a few through messages now (version 8.something), so you may have to restart a couple of times to see the message. But IIRC it used to always just display the "help children in Uganda" message.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#175

Post by shagie »

nnnmnten wrote: post #108
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.…

>You have people working mostly for free I think citation is needed here. Many big open source projects are created and maintained by the paid employees of big corporations.

This is an important point to consider.

For large corporations, it is easier to hire a developer to work on a critical piece of open source software than it is to go through the approval process of sending money (no strings attached) to a particular individual.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#176

Post by lolinder »

kelnos wrote: post #99
lolinder wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but I still think that's acceptable. README.md is one of a very small number of places that open source developers can reach their users. Most of the time I only read it once, so if there's an ad there, or a link to their other products, as long as it's not a GIF and they didn't find some way to embed a tracker in README.md, I'm cool with it. It's about as relevant as advertising gets, and it's not coming fro…

As an open source developer, I would refuse to "reach" my users in such a tacky way as selling ad space in my README. You're correct that the README is one of the few touch points with users, and I wouldn't dare waste that on something I consider so disrespectful.

Oh, I'm not talking about selling ad space. I agree that what Funded did was misguided at best. But what my parent was responding to was the idea of even putting a little ad for a paid product by the same developer or company.

If JetBrains, for example, wanted to remind me on the README for Kotlin that they have an IDE that works well with the language, that doesn't offend me.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#177

Post by depr »

duxup wrote: post #105
lioeters wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, just this week I noticed the npm package `core-js` used by the Babel transpiler was polluting my build logs. It listed opencollective and patreon as possible channels of support. That I didn't mind so much, but then there was a message (repeated countless times in the logs) that the author was looking for a job. That's just spam in my terminal, unacceptable. Background and heated discussion in the following GitH…

Interesting, thank you. I'm not heavy on the "hell i'll just import anything" kinda thing so I often feel immune to some of the random "omg this package" panic. But... Babel... that's some serious stuff once it hits there.

The serious stuff is that this library that's used in over 3 million projects according to Github, let alone projects that Github doesn't count, is only making the author a measly $200 on Patreon.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#178

Post by dragonwriter »

ToFab123 wrote: post #84
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.…

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…

> I work on Enterprise projects and we rarely (never) contribute back financially

I work on Enterprise projects and we almost always buy support contracts, for both paid-license and open-source software, if they are available; you don't need creative licensing models to get enterprise to pay for open source software, you just need to provide an opportunity to pay to have a live person respond to and manage issues for enterprise customers.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#179

Post by 0xffff2 »

mras0 wrote: post #174
0xffff2 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where exactly is this message? I use Vim fairly often and I've never seen it...

When you start Vim (without arguments) it says "VIM - Vi IMproved" .... "Help poor children in Uganda! type :help iccf for information". I just noticed that it actually cycles a few through messages now (version 8.something), so you may have to restart a couple of times to see the message. But IIRC it used to always just display the "help children in Uganda" message.

Strangely, it doesn't do that on any machine I have access to, despite the fact that I can find nothing in my .vimrc file that would suppress it. If I run `vim -u NONe` as the sibling comment suggested then I do see the message.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#180

Post by saagarjha »

heyoni wrote: post #163
tempguy9999 wrote: post #68

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. He's asking the same question I am, how do we get sufficient funding for these projects. Re your patreon suggestion, I thought we recently had an article where someone got little to nothing on that. > or getting hired by FAANG So one way to support foss software is t…

Since when are FAANG companies considered to be closed source? Have any of them snatched up maintainers to continue development behind closed doors? There are examples of large corporations hiring maintainers to work on open source and keep those projects open source. I believe pypi is an example of that.

I am fairly certain that Apple has hired people who previously worked on permissively-licensed projects to work on the closed-source fork.
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