NPM Bans Terminal Ads

Consider a world where the norm is not MIT/BSD but GPL dual licensed with MIT for a fee. This would give back control to maintainers of a library, and it would allow people without funds to use the software freely by contributing back to the community any changes they wish to further publish.

It puts the incentives in the right place, which is very important for a scalable, sustainable solution and to avoid tragedy of the commons!

It’s controversial because licensing has become a tribal issue, frustrating level headed debate. But I would argue that many people choose MIT without really thinking it through, “because it’s how everyone else does it”. You can see this in complaints from maintainers of code released under MIT, abuse which would never have been possible with the GPL.

I really think there is value in evaluating the community’s obsession with MIT, before we jump to pointing fingers at “companies”. Remember: if you get burned by the tragedy of the commons, ask yourself why did we set ourselves up to fail? It’s the hardest possible fight to win.

Again I’m not trying to derail this into MIT v GPL, I’m just saying: IF we all choose MIT, can we really complain now? This is what happens: people profit off your work and don’t contribute. If you feel so frustrated by that that you’re adding ads to your lib, maybe MIT wasn’t the right choice?

(MIT has merit and there are people out there using it for the right reasons. But they’re not the ones putting ads in their repos.)

(1) Most open source projects do not provide the outsized value impact that their creators seem to think they do. Most projects exist around the realm of "its 20% easier to install this than build it ourselves, so lets grab the dependency". That's nice, but lets be clear here: Standard.JS is not building Rails, or NodeJS, or Express, or React, or another seriously valuable project that saves companies thousands of dollars.

(2) Open source maintainers are deathly afraid of restrictive licensing. That could mean GPL, or it could mean a straight-up enterprise "pay for a key" licensing. I think these are fantastic ways to level the field between individual OSS devs and billion dollar companies, because most billion dollar companies take licensing very seriously. Where does this fear come from? I think a big part is that these OSS devs "want their cake and to eat it"; they want the ego and community of an altruist, but the income of a Capitalist. Another component is point (1); if you really tried to place a number on the value of their project, they'd be disappointed with the number customers would quote. They don't want to find out what that number is; they'd rather just ask for donations (of which they get very little, because, again, this software by-and-large does not provide outsized value).

(3) Its crazy to me that companies would pay for advertising space in an npm install script. I'd bet developers behind projects like StandardJS went to these companies and said "look we get millions of installs every month, that's millions of impressions", and I hope the companies are smart enough to know that (A) the vast majority of those installs are in unmonitored CI scripts, and (B) even if they are local, the text flies by so quick, and (C) even if they aren't quick, no one watches that progress anyway. Even if there's no deception today, one can easily see that monitoring "impressions" here is very difficult, and thus its very difficult to place a quantitative value on that ad space.

(4) The inability to sustain yourself on open-source development is about equivalent to "I can't sustain myself on volunteering time at a food kitchen for the homeless." If you're actually having funding problems to live your life, its time to reassess. Again, this sounds like some of these projects have some egotists behind them, or maybe they just feel like they can't leave (hint: you can. you're human. your priority is you. not the billion dollar companies who use your software without paying). Find help. Take a break. See if your full-time company can "sponsor" development by letting you work on it 5% of the time.

I'm not heavy on the "hell i'll just import anything" kinda thing so I often feel immune to some of the random "omg this package" panic.

But... Babel... that's some serious stuff once it hits there.