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NPM Bans Terminal Ads

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Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#341

Post by kortilla »

archgoon wrote: post #173
jalfresi wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ads show up regardless of funding. Cut the bullshit. Look at how many ads are on cable television and even pay for news websites.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#342

Post by koolba »

patcon wrote: post #338
koolba wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's clear as can be. He's asking the same question I am, how do we get sufficient funding for these projects. We don't. Only a fool would expect to make a living wage giving something away for free. From the beginning FOSS has been either interested individuals or employees at corporations with a vested interest. There's no reason we should expect that John Q Developer independently working on a bunch of NPM mod…

> There's no reason we should expect that John Q Developer independently working on a bunch of NPM modules to be compensated by the world at large. With all due respect, I feel this is a lack of imagination. We could have said the same thing about soup kitchens, or basic income, or social welfare, or anything else that doesn't cleanly draw profit. So yes, it doesn't work. At least not until we demand it does and dist…

> With all due respect, I feel this is a lack of imagination. We could have said the same thing about soup kitchens, or basic income, or social welfare, or anything else that doesn't cleanly draw profit.

Those are all driven by charity for the destitute. It’s not meant to be a patronage paid to starving artists. On the contrary the able bodied are expected to not draw from that well if they can provide for themselves so that more remains for the truly deserving.

> So yes, it doesn't work. At least not until we demand it does and distort the legal, social, and cultural frameworks around it. As one solitary example, what about a shift to using copyfarleft licensing that only allows MIT-level freedom to nonprofits and co-operatives, while for-profit orgs pay fees instead of just leeching. This has the added bonus of shifting benefit to platform cooperatives, which governments are already starting to ideologically favour as we all see the gleaming metal edge of platform capitalism.

There’s no such thing as partial BSD style licensing. You’re either all the way there or you’re not. Favored status to non profits is no different than discriminating from “evil” usage.

I’m not saying one can’t do that, just that there’s no half measures. I make it a point to contribute to BSD style software that I actually use and explicitly do not contribute to “shared source” bullshit.

> There are a hundred more options if we believe building the commons is better than milking it dry.

I don’t see anything going dry. The system has worked fine till now. What’s changed is the unrealistic expectation of hand outs for something you’ve already agreed to give away for free.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#343

Post by chaostheory »

caniszczyk wrote: post #321
chaostheory wrote: post #57

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

donation's don't work well https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-...

It's a good article that highlights issues with Patreon like startups... but this was before Github got into the game, and it's definitely a different and much bigger animal.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#344

Post by bipolar_lisper »

mikl wrote: post #197

It’s a slippery slope. The first packages with ads just printed a single line of text. Then others started adding more lines, more aggressive colors, and now you have npm ads painting a half a screenful of empty lines with their ad in the middle. Once can imagine an arms race of ever worse ads. And considering that it’s not unusual to be installing hundreds of npm packages for a single project, the ads would soon ren…

they didn't limit ads. they banned them altogether. it's a charitable thought, but doesn't hold up.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#345

Post by knolax »

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.…

What about the agency of NPM to not accept packages that are objectively inferior because they contain ads? If I submit purposely crappy code to a public repository should I be outraged if it gets rejected?

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#346

Post by _fbpt »

fuball63 wrote: post #307
slang800 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a good article about this practice here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.en.html Usually you wouldn't use the MIT license to do it, but it's the same idea.

Fascinating article, is this common practice? Anyone know of companies successfully selling license exceptions?

Qt is primarily LGPL with some GPL modules, and sells commercial dual-licenses.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#347

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

koolba wrote: post #342
patcon wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no reason we should expect that John Q Developer independently working on a bunch of NPM modules to be compensated by the world at large. With all due respect, I feel this is a lack of imagination. We could have said the same thing about soup kitchens, or basic income, or social welfare, or anything else that doesn't cleanly draw profit. So yes, it doesn't work. At least not until we demand it does and dist…

> With all due respect, I feel this is a lack of imagination. We could have said the same thing about soup kitchens, or basic income, or social welfare, or anything else that doesn't cleanly draw profit. Those are all driven by charity for the destitute. It’s not meant to be a patronage paid to starving artists. On the contrary the able bodied are expected to not draw from that well if they can provide for themselves…

I would like to disagree with your point on basic income. It’s usually called _universal_ basic income. Precisely to clarify that it is not a “charity for the destitute”, it is absolutely meant to be for everyone.

And for the larger discussion on building the commons I happen to think UBI is an important component. Focusing on the amateur work being done by the civil society at least, an UBI could be precisely the thing needed to free up time for cultivating the commons.

Now, granted, most UBI proponents do argue from a solidarity angle, and do think of it as some kind of charity. But I’ll offer an alternative view point. To me UBI is the foundation from which private property can be justified. Locke argued that commons, such as land, can only be taken as property when there is no contention, which is clearly not the case for anything having a market value. The just way to solve that conflict could be for the owner to simply pay the market value in rent to the commons, as compensation for the exclusive rights. Such payments could be divided as as an UBI. And I suspect it would also result i a pretty handsome amount. Enough to fund a few open source projects at least.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#348

Post by segmondy »

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.…

Meh!

Money has really corrupted free and open source. The entire idea of free software is that it's free, without any catch. People loved to create and would create and give it away, the reward was in the creating and seeing other's use it. If you didn't care about that, you charged for it. Sometimes, the idea was that a bunch of random people would show up and create a free alternative against a very expensive software. For photoshop, see gimp. For oracle see mysql & postgresql. It was not free so companies couldn't profit off them, it was free for anyone to use, students, people without money, bums, anyone, companies included. The idea of open source was you can be free to inspect the source, tweak and customize to your taste, fix a bug if you have it, share your knowledge so other's can also borrow. This was the ethos of the hackers spirit. Build shit, share shit. Not hackers vs for-profit companies. We have coexisted along side for profit companies companies for a long time, they have built some cool shit that an individual or a random bunch of individuals couldn't. iphone, gpu, cloud some of those profit companies were started by hackers, and we have built shit they couldn't imagine or dare build. napster, torrent, bitcoin, linux.

So let's please stop this rhetroic about for-profit companies gaining value from open source. That was always the intent. Would it be nice if they gave back? Sure! But if they don't, no problem too. If they build cool stuff with open source that drives society forward, it's good for all. Case in point, see Linux or raspberry pi tons of amazing IOT devices out there that won't exist without it or worse running windows ce.

Companies are also giving back, go to Github. Sometimes it's just a single line of code commit, sometimes it's finding a bug, sometimes it's a correction to documentation. Then some are giving massively, see go, dart, react, angular, ionic, tensorflow, kubernetes. The symbiotic relationship between hackers and for-profit companies are really strong and we are not enemies. The only real battle that's been fought since the beginning is that information must be free. It's never been about the battle of money.

Want some money? Go get a job or start a business. Bill Gates did it, Jobs & Woz did it, Linus got a job. John Carmack has a job, Jeff Dean has a job, even Paul Graham works for his. If anything I'm very suspicious of those who want to get paid for working on open source.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#349

Post by ToFab123 »

bogdanoff_2 wrote: post #140
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…

What would such a license look like? Anyone know of examples?

WinRar, maybe. It is an example of a software when you dont really need a license, but you can buy one if you desire.

https://www.win-rar.com/winrarlicense.html?&L=0

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#350

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

moron4hire wrote: post #199
SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source project funding is a major open problem, which is something many people agree on. It can't sustain if we don't solve that. What I don't see is the fairness argument. Developers have legal means to restrict commercial use of their software. The community has for decades had a conversation about licensing and none of this is new territory. These developers chose to volunteer their time to corporations. If t…

Oh sure, but Industry has also browbeat people into believing the GPL is completely untenable. I've yet to see an original monetization suggestion in these threads. People have tried it all. Companies and devs prefer to wait for a poor sap to make a free-as-in-beer version and then stiff them on tips.

Not sure it’s a good one, but how about this:

A hub of software, like github or npm could acts as a general mediator of funding. A new license could be designed such that entitles above a certain size would have to donate a percentage of revenue to the hub, while also reporting which software they which to license (this only acts as a kind of voting for where to place investments, the donation size is fixed). The hub in question could then spend the income on the various projects taking popularity in account for prioritzation.

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