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NPM Bans Terminal Ads

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Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#221

Post by dragonwriter »

cj wrote: post #16
prepend wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t agree with his problem statement that OSS developers need payment. I think that paying people for valuable work is a good thing. But I don’t think there is a problem with this as evidenced by 50 years of great OSS software written by professional and amateur developers. Saying I spent 4000 hours on a project without pay is not enough info to be useful to determine that I need payment. I volunteer time to lots…

That reasoning makes sense at first. Until you consider the fact that critical infrastructure depends on underfunded open source projects that sometimes have trouble staying afloat. NTP is the classic example of the problem. https://www.infoworld.com/article/3144546/time-is-running-ou... http://www.ntp.org/

> Until you consider the fact that critical infrastructure depends on underfunded open source projects that sometimes have trouble staying afloat

This is not principally an issue of a funding problem for the maitnainers, but an issue of a risk management problem for the relying parties.

Unfortunately, it's probably going to take a massive costly, critical failure before it gets addressed, but once that happens it will be addressed quickly, and critical infrastructure will rapidly not be relying on underfunded open source projects. (Whether that is through those products—whether the existing core project or a new fork—getting better support from well-heeled downstream parties, as many widely-critical open source projects (e.g., SQLite) already have, or whether it means those products get replaced may not be consistent from product to product. If they do get funding, though, it's not going to be without the funding parties taking a keen interest in governance, as the risk doesn't go away with unaccountable funding alone.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#222

Post by sequoia »

rohansingh wrote: post #184
NobodyNada wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You're describing a commercial licensing agreement. Why would you use MIT at all in this case?

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#223

Post by saagarjha »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #202
saagarjha wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'd like to see that backed up, really. There are certainly criticisms to be made of how Apple has handled their open source projects (slow to update and push out new releases, not great at cooperating with upstream projects when Apple has forked them, typically cryptic Apple communication practices). But if Apple has taken open source projects, created closed-source forks of them, and hired original developers of an…

Apple certainly hires people from their open source projects and keeps closed-source forks. Most of the changes make their way back to their original projects, though, but the caveat is that this only seems to happen if the project is used heavily outside of Apple and after the feature has "shipped" (which may be a while after the code was actually written).

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#224

Post by grogenaut »

heyoni wrote: post #168
zelon88 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I release a ton of my work with open source licensing and I've never thought of it as a revenue stream. If people are financially burdened by making their project open-source; then don't make it open source. Donating something to the community and then getting offended when nobody reciprocates is disingenuous. It's part of the problem with "freemium" software these days where developers think I should be indebted to…

That’s a good point you bring up...where do we draw the line? Lots of projects use Debian and docker, etc...is it even ethical to donate to an npm package before donating to the dozens of free tech layers node sits on top of?

You can't live without a heart, but most people don't get cancer, is it ethical for me to donate to the American cancer society but not the American heart association because Cancer is built on the heart?

No it's my donation I'll donate where I want. If I find joy in donating to a small oss dev instead of a strategic donation to a well organized large one then that's what I do.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#225

Post by craigsmansion »

wvenable wrote: post #217
craigsmansion wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Has anyone considered that open source / free software is just fundamentally incompatible with capitalism? Legions, many of which have only recently become aware of Free Software or Open Source. As far as Free Software is concerned, there is no problem with capitalism. It's only about guarding the software freedoms of the users of software. "Free" as in "free market", not as in "free lunch".

I understand that Free Software is not concerned with capitalism but that doesn't address the question. Free Software can still be incompatible with capitalism even if it doesn't address it directly. If you release your software with a Free Software license do you really "own" it in a capitalistic sense? I'm thinking no. As a consequence it's actually hard to make money with Free Software. But that difficulty and lac…

Depends on one's definition of "capitalism" when applied to software I think.

Whereas I would not "own" the software, I would own the hours I'm willing to write software. As things are I can't freely sell those hours because of a monopoly on many programs, that is, no user can hire me to improve their proprietary software. I can only sell my hours to users of Free Software.

Now we have software "ownership" against the workings of a free market. Both of these are generally considered "capitalist", so it depends on your definition which is "more capitalist", but I hope it's clear that neither of them is strictly capitalist where the other is not.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#227

Post by benologist »

root_axis wrote: post #219
benologist wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To write React Facebook needed 20 years of R&D done by open source... jquery, mootools, long list of dead stuff today we needed to learn from. If Facebook needs 1000 projects to show them how to produce the best React then they need to keep 1000 projects in the pipelines so they can build the best successor to current solutions too. That's why they need to fund open source.

This is true of all software whether you're Facebook or a solo open-source developer; we all stand on the shoulders of giants, literally nobody doing work today can claim otherwise. > That's why they need to fund open source. They do. They pay employees to work on software they contribute to the open-source community. To build React, Facebook had to rely on "20 years of R&D" but also millions of dollars in engineerin…

Funding open source != paying thirty people a few hundred grand and the thousands they depend on nothing. It is an obvious resource allocation problem.

Why should the resources not come from the companies extracting the most cash value from open source?

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#228

Post by sequoia »

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/

> If even I – with my fortunate position – can’t make a comfortable living working on open source, then how is anyone else supposed to make it work?

If living comfortably is Feross's goal, why not get a job? This is a high profile programmer in one of the highest demand, highest-programmer-wage places in the world. What am I missing?

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#229

Post by NullPrefix »

jraph wrote: post #210
_greim_ wrote: post #139

NPM's move to ban the practice is unsurprising. Consider however that NPM has no qualms about showing various nag screens of their own, such as "a new version of NPM is available," etc. Perhaps they should consider taking leadership in the OSS funding space. "Hey, it looks like you're enjoying these packages x, y, and z! Click here to donate to your favorite OSS projects." Or something.

A software update notice cannot be considered as an ad, can it?

If the new version bundles crapware...

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#230

Post by ken »

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…

In other words, don't do what Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, or Yahoo did.

I appreciate the sentiment (and it's what I do with my own hilariously unsuccessful software), but you can't walk into a room full of data-driven aspiring entrepreneurs and tell them to do exactly what the market has shown it doesn't want, even though that would be better for all of us.

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