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NPM Bans Terminal Ads

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Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#181

Post by depr »

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…

Yes but those bits of text disturb the worldview of the financially comfortable and privileged kids that write Javascript and we can't have that

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#182

Post by liability »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #64
liability wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire advertising industry is scum. I worked in it for two years and wish I never did. That's a sin I now atone for by discouraging younger developers from making the same mistake, using the harshest language I think dang will permit. It doesn't matter if there is no telemetry (and if this were to be normalized, there would eventually be telemetry. Such are the economic incentives in the ad industry. When it's p…

But yet, part of the allure of hobby magazines, for instances, are the ads. Ads need not be scummy, and just because some are doesn't mean all are. Ads _can_ be primarily informational without being "scummy" or "sleazy". Sure, yes, most of the ad industry is currently about being manipulative and invasive, but it need not be that way. We, as a society, need to figure out how to stop it from being that way across the…

Advertisements are designed to make you feel informed, rather than to actually inform you. When a product is bad, inferior to the competition or just generally harmful to you (think: sugary soda pop ads), advertising professionals will promote it with just as much vim and vigor, if not more.

(To the extent that bad products get more enthusiastic advertising, in a perverse sense viewing ads might actually make you a more informed consumer if you deliberately avoid any product with slick marketing. However I cannot advocate for such an approach because I think the theoretical advantage here is washed out by the practical reality that advertising will effect you in ways contrary to your own interest, but in line with corporate interests.)

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#183

Post by ToFab123 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #178
ToFab123 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree, and yes, we do the same when that option is available.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#184

Post by rohansingh »

NobodyNada wrote: post #126
nothrabannosir wrote: post #101

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…

> Consider a world where the norm is not MIT/BSD but GPL dual licensed with MIT for a fee 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.

I'm not sure that would actually be that big of an issue.

Let's say you have some sort of model where a monthly subscription gives you an MIT license for all commits made that month. Who is actually going to go to the trouble of mirroring every commit or release from upstream to their own public repository? If somebody actually did that gratuitously, the copyright owner could just decline to renew their subscription the following month.

I'm sure there's some issues with this that I'm not thinking of, but I think generally if somebody is willing to pay you for a license, they're not going to be a jerk and try to undermine your business.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#185

Post by simplecomplex »

duxup wrote: post #165
simplecomplex wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not spam, anymore than your comment is. It’s a message from the author of the free software you’re using. Asking for a job. If that offends you you should get over yourself. How entitled and spoiled you are to think you should have a right to use their software for free and not be bothered by a short message from the author.

Your comment seems unnecessarily confrontational. "to think you should have a right to use their software for free and not be bothered by a short message from the author" I don't know of any real rules about free software as far as what kind of messages someone should expect or shouldn't, but people can be bothered by it if they want.

You’re bothered by seeing a message from the author of software you’re using for free (probably to make yourself money!). And you don’t see how that’s self-centered and entitled.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#187

Post by keoor9 »

chessturk wrote: post #160
jeoeo929 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: e…

I'll second this downvoted opinion. The mismatch between economic good created by and economic incentive to create OSS is just tragic from a hard numbers perspective. How do you fix it though? A large funding program? If the state or private industry were the backer, how do you prevent manipulation? The only viable models (that spring to my mind) are Spanish-Anarchist type stuff of generally funded unions of technica…

We already have a large funding program called taxes. We seem to enjoy giving it to private interests instead of state and local governments directly.

Kind of wondering how, given that direct pipeline of transfer payments from the fed to private companies we can ever believe the “our economics is a free system of ideas.”

Prevent manipulation of the state by prioritizing policing of state acts, not average folks on the street.

Absolutely none of these ideas are new. It’s a fact of our biology that sees us favoring the mental model we know versus the unknown of a new social hierarchy. A reasonable “how to” is well detailed though.

The public must engage the political system directly and not through the business sector administrators inserted in the middle of the process via manipulation of the financial systems flow of capital.

Look what happens when there’s a half assed effort to get something like Obamacare. Imagine if the effort wasn’t so half assed?

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#188

Post by _frkl »

Hm, difficult topic, I can see both sides. I'd be interested what would happen if npm decided to add a 'contains-ads' metadata field which package authors can set to true if they want to display adds. By default, those packages would not be listed when searched, and would not be be installable, except the user sets an 'accept ad-packages' flag for that (or all) packages (opt-in), on the client side.

I guess the main problem is that developers (rightly, in my way) think that the usual suspects of suggested open-source funding methods which rely on deliberate actions from users (donations, etc.) are not really feasible. Double-licensed copy-left at least requires users to make a decicsion to acquire a private license in case it's necessary. But if you for some reason don't want to use copy-left, I guess the ad model would seem like an option, as it does not require the user to do anything.

What I suggested above would take care of the fact that unwanted ads are pushed upon the user, and users would have to make an active decision to allow ads if they wanted to use a certain package. I'd be interested how many people who complain about this idea right now, would still be principled enough to not install such a package in the case where the package is high-quality, and there is no good alternative around...

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#190

Post by duxup »

simplecomplex wrote: post #185
duxup wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment seems unnecessarily confrontational. "to think you should have a right to use their software for free and not be bothered by a short message from the author" I don't know of any real rules about free software as far as what kind of messages someone should expect or shouldn't, but people can be bothered by it if they want.

You’re bothered by seeing a message from the author of software you’re using for free (probably to make yourself money!). And you don’t see how that’s self-centered and entitled.

There's nothing about free software that I'm aware of that means you should or shouldn't like a message.

We discuss our preferences for all sorts of things in software (free or otherwise) HN, all over the internet

It's free software... pretty sure you're "entitled" to it, and can have opinions about it.

Side note I don't know what people mean by "entitled" anymore, it's like a placeholder for an empty sentiment these days.

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