21–30 of 43 posts
NLnet grants are the only example that comes to mind. But these are short term, not sustaining.
I myself am the beneficiary of many open-source projects. I readily acknowledge this. That said, where my mind keeps going to is that open-source software is in many ways similar to communism. And communism failed for a reason . If you want to freely give away your work, then by all means - do so. But do so with the understanding that you are promised absolutely nothing in return. No one owes you anything. This man w…
I fully agree with your statements that nobody is owed anything if they give their work/time to a cause. But it doesn’t give a free pass to others to demand work/fixes/time, or have a sense of entitlement, to that work, and become belligerent towards those that are giving their work to them.
I wonder if many maintainers who end up feeling this way about open-source were ever good fits for open-source to begin with. At the same time, it's hard to say I wouldn't feel the same way as Denis if I maintained a project as popular as core-js thanklessly. I would like to think I'd have the power to just walk away once I realized it was unhealthy for me.
I do wonder if the author asked zloirock if they're allowed to use the Github profile picture for that blog entry
Thank you !
I myself am the beneficiary of many open-source projects. I readily acknowledge this. That said, where my mind keeps going to is that open-source software is in many ways similar to communism. And communism failed for a reason . If you want to freely give away your work, then by all means - do so. But do so with the understanding that you are promised absolutely nothing in return. No one owes you anything. This man w…
It's really a shame he missed the opportunity to gain popularity from this project. He just built and released it, without doing any sort of promotion or whatsoever.
A slightly more nuanced but equally confounding position is: "I'd give you money, sure, but your license doesn't require it, so go piss up a rope buddy".
I am honestly just left wondering why core JS is still around? What am I missing?
Back in the 90s I wrote a window docking system library for Delphi. It was shareware, not open source, and it brought in about £1000 a month.
It was the support that killed me. So many people doing really weird things with it I had never thought about. Was it my bug or theirs?
The bottom line is that one person can't maintain something in their spare time that a lot of other people rely on.
I know of three open-source projects in recent times that have made it to the frontpage of HN for reasons concerning funding (Babel, Faker, and now Core-JS). Coincidentally, they are all JS/Node projects. I wonder if many maintainers who end up feeling this way about open-source were ever good fits for open-source to begin with. At the same time, it's hard to say I wouldn't feel the same way as Denis if I maintained…
He’s single handedly maintaining IE and adding new features. It’s extra thankless because he’s not contributing a product feature to the person using it, but a compatibility layer to the system developers are targeting. He puts systems into a state they should already be in.
It's not broken. Publishing and sharing something for free under free terms, and then attempting to pull the rug after two years of gaining popularity is.
It’s more a service than a program.