241–250 of 377 posts
OK and quite right, but how do we actually ensure funding for the stuff that needs it? It seems odd to me that people won't cough up even small amounts to support what F/OSS they rely on, but will pay for closed source stuff.
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 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 the problem - nobody treats being an independent OSS dev as a possible career, so we either get 1) extremely privileged people that have the significant amount of time and resources required to contribute substantially for no payment, 2) open source that serves to promote a corporate goal, and 3) less and lower quality hobby contributions because the rational people realize they're doing free work to get treated by garbage by people that feel entitled to free-as-in-beer software and choose not to do that.
Imagine how much worse any industry would be if nobody got paid for doing it. Now imagine how much better the OSS ecosystem would be if more people could make a living doing nothing but OSS on their terms. That's the goal here. We want to transform OSS from a starving artists realm for privileged people to a place where people can make careers. I'd be totally cool to see some dev-focused ads to make that happen.
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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.
Data-driven aspiring entrepreneurs would notice that companies attempting to create and sell distributed free software haven't historically done so well. Putting ads in free software doesn't make it analogous to the business of Google and Facebook.
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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?
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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.
Look, all I'm saying is if some javascript developer guilts me into donating to open source, the right thing for me to do (I feel) would be to start from the top of the open source chain.
* Operating system * Code versioning * Container system * CI/CD etc...
It's a long way down before I get to "standard - the javascript linter configuration file".
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.…
>, why is it so alarming to think that these maintainers might think of a clever idea like this to make a couple thousand bucks? [...] But instead of attacking the guy for trying, I really wish the discussion were focussed on how the community of open-source consumers can contribute back to the open source ecosystem You're (possibly unintentionally) distorting/diverting the issue. Nobody is criticizing open source ma…
I do think that instead of everyone putting in an "ad dependency" is not the best way to go about it, but to at least directly negotiate with cloud companies to do it would be awesome.
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I really don’t get it. 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.
If someone, for instance, takes control of their repo, then they can upload whatever they like. But that auth can be fairly securely guarded, and it's probably a very hard to do it quietly as packages are signed. But now they're hosting the ads and potentially allowing remote code execution. Now the attacker only needs to get on to a webserver to deploy a payload. That's why it opens a new vector of attack. Moreover,…
They’ve looked like echo “Hi please send me money”
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This makes no sense at all.
If the ad makes a remote call during execution (for an dynamic ad serve), it's an attack vector. There is always custom ad code for analytics that adserves use to fill (the ad placement space) and report back, called an admanager. As an advertiser, you can upload your own admanager (that that has your own custom code. Reading the code of the NPM package will not typically help with understanding what it's going to do…
Can you point out a real example of terminal advertising like this?
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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?
Those companies contribute back monumental open source projects that would simply never exist without the level of funding, organization, and real business knowledge that those companies provide. The amount of open-source code given away freely by FAANG and similar corporations is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to the wider community. Even much of the software itself is produced with open-source languages made…
It does not fund the tools that power their current open source projects.
It does not fund the tools their next open source projects will use.
It does not fund the brilliance their next open source projects will iterate on.
It does not fund the mistakes their next open source projects will know to avoid.
They need all of that stuff before they have even a clue what to make next, and they need the open source community to try everything a hundred different ways to see which is good.
We will still be arguing about this in twenty years as open source transitions into a mostly Indo-Chino-Russo-African dominated landscape because western developers can't afford to work on open source unless it's through their employing-FAANG company.
Long before that all the current FAANG open source we're supposed to be grateful to receive instead of funding will be obsoleted and tossed aside because only a handful of ideas in it actually mattered after all.