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Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps
631–640 of 1001 posts
Re: Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's fine, but then the downstream shouldn't complain either when the code breaks, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The contract on paper disclaims all liability after all. There is a social contract and then there is the literal contract. A lot of commenters here seem to be willfully obtuse or simply ignoring the former.
There's a difference between stopping to give away your stuff for free and acting maliciously. If I give away donuts for free and stop at some point, you have no right to complain. If I poison the donuts because you should've really thrown money at me for those donuts that I explicitly marked as free , I think you could complain after all.
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Re: Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps
#633AITA for thinking that if you develop open-source software and your license permits anyone to use it for free, then complaining about no compensation is not a valid complaint? I totally understand that billionaire corporations use software like this for free. But the software maintainer has explicitly allowed _anyone_ to use it for free. If you don't want them to use it for free, license it as such. What am I not see…
There are people who think its reasonable to take all the pennies from the "take a penny leave a penny" plate because "that's what it's there for."
OSS licenses generally don't have a "leave a penny" type of clause in them.
Writing software under some variety of a free license is essentially a donation. Authors shouldn't expect to get back anything: Imagine a person donated a ventilator machine to a hospital and it saved a few dozen lives and helped out hundreds more. It would seem strange to me if that person was later ranting that the combined net worth of the people helped by that machine was in the $millions and yet they never got any of that money.
That's how it sounds to me when when foss authors complain about not getting paid. It sounds like the subtext is, "If I had known how useful and popular this would be I would have charged for it." Which seems like a strange attitude to have when making something you give away for free in the hope that others found it useful.
Re: Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copyleft software isn’t free, it comes with a very hefty price tag. You don’t pay it forward by handing over all your IP. You pay it forward by contributing back. I have no moral qualms about using OSS in any project I’m working on, commercial or otherwise. Because I have published my own libraries for anybody to use, and contributed a huge amount of PRs to the software I use. When you publish something with a permis…
Working on someone's software that they make no money from isn't "paying" it forward or in any direction. > it stops being yours, but you benefit from having a huge number of people improve it for you It stops being yours, but somehow everyone who works on it can say they're helping you. This isn't fair. You don't have to pay for it, but fixing and adding features to the software that you use to make a living can't b…
FOSS has never been about getting paid to write software. It’s not a charity, it’s a contribution to a community. I contribute because I benefit from being part of a system that has contributors in it. The people who expect direct compensation for their contributions do not uphold those values, and are deteriorating the integrity of the FOSS system itself.
Re: Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps
#635I do free work for open source _a lot_. I have a rather controversial opinion on this. I don't think I should be paid for my work because the moment money comes in I have to be responsible for the work I was doing for fun. I enjoy building cool things others can use for free and I want to reserve the right to respond to feature requests with a simple "PRs are welcome! :)". I get my paycheck from my employer and I hav…
>I have always been successful convincing my employers that I do open source work on the side for my own interest. What do you need to convince your employers of?
Use my working hours contributing to Open Source.
Re: Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author didn’t write all of the code, though. The code has a long history (including in other languages) and many contributors. Why should this one developer collect payment but not everyone else who contributed it? Regardless, it’s ridiculous to give something away openly under a permissive license and then later get angry when people use it exactly as you license it.
> Why should this one developer collect payment but not everyone else who contributed it? Exactly, no one said _only_ the lead maintainer should be compensated. _All_ of the labor, not just the labor that happens to have a day job that benefits from it, should be compensated. That includes non-coding labor like support or community management, too.
That’s just a a software development business. Open source exchanges labor for conditions the use of the product of that labor. If you want to exchange labor for money then exchange labor for money
Re: Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
you love to see people indiscriminately pushing malware to random servers without knowing what the server even does?
You’re running mission critical software without thoroughly parsing your chain of dependencies and then automatically deploying updates on top of it? I don’t think the author is at fault here, just bad practices of whoever broke their application.
malware is malware. shoulda coulda doesn't matter its still a crime. "All those people I scammed out of their life saving should have known better". You probably shouldn't advertise that you work at crowd strike with crazy takes like that.
Re: Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps
#638So which corporations are leaching off of open source, without contributing back to open source?
Why punish the majority of developers who contribute back to open source with patches, bug reports, comments, answers on Stack Overflow, etc?
Re: Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about using dependencies but pinning the version and only updating if you know what the update contains? I'm still continually baffled that we ended up in a world where automatically accepting updates from every dev and their dog is not just the norm but recommended practice.
Yeah I also don’t understand. But then again.. the js ecosystem is one big pile of turds.. Tech cycles with people who reinvent the wheel and keep making the same mistakes All these problems have long been solved
The problem of new versions of dependencies breaking old code happens all the time in a variety of ecosystems. It's not exactly "solved," it's a continual problem similar to picking what you will eat for dinner. There are pros and cons to each approach, in this case the con is that every now and then you have to manually pin a version. If we did it the other way, we would have to manually upgrade versions to get obvious and easy improvements. As with most things people happily call "turds," it's actually a tradeoff and not as simple as just being bad.
As for reinventing the wheel, are wheels really settled science? As far as I know, new kinds of wheels are being created all the time. It's not just that new people are creating them, there are new things wheels need to do every day and new sets of requirements that the old existing wheel designs don't fulfill. Look at wheels from 50 years ago and they are nothing like the wheels of today. The wheels on cars are nothing like the wheels on aircraft, which in turn are nothing like the wheels on trains.
Re: Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crazy what happens when you decide to freeload off a stranger’s code who you have no contract or agreement with whatsoever, beyond a license you must accept to use the software which disclaims any warranty whatsoever, even fitness for any purpose. I have zero sympathy for anyone complaining they were hurt by this. I think Marak is teaching an important and principled lesson here.
> I think Marak is teaching an important and principled lesson here. What lesson is that?
Never rely on the Javascript community/ecosystem.