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So what’s next (personal news from developer of popular CoreJS polyfill)

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Re: So what’s next (personal news from developer of popular CoreJS polyfill)

#231

Post by mikl »

I understand it must be frustrating to have massive companies using your code without paying, while you struggle to make ends meet.

But that is the reality of open source. The very reason that all those BigCo’s are using your code is _because_ you offered it to them for free.

If you actually want payment for your code, but you’re not being up-front about it, then people are going to be annoyed with you when you show up asking for money, because they feel you’re pulling a “bait and switch” on them – because you kinda are.

The reality is that every one of us are relying on thousands of open source projects on a daily basis. Everything from glibc to our web browser itself are mostly if not completely open source. The number of open source projects involved in me writing this comment likely number in the thousands. I can’t practically support all of them directly.

Hard as it may be to hear, your open source project is not special. It’s just another among hundreds or thousands like it in the dependency stack. Only a tiny minority of the people who use it will even know it’s there, much less care that it exists. If you can’t accept that, you should probably get out of the open source business.

Re: So what’s next (personal news from developer of popular CoreJS polyfill)

#232

Post by schwartzworld »

yawboakye wrote: post #146

the problem, in my opinion, introduced by the so-called full-time open source developers (making money via contributions) is the distortion in how free & open source software should be organized. no one should have a full-time job maintaining an open source software, on their own. they should be doing in through a user-company. see the ruby and rails core team/structure for example. they all work full-time at compani…

What open source needs is to be completely owned by private companies?

Re: So what’s next (personal news from developer of popular CoreJS polyfill)

#233

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway290 wrote: post #215
sally_glance wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well. There is little doubt that he would be a good fit for at least a normal Engineer position in any of these companies. If they didn't hire him yet your guess as of why is as good as mine. Edit: This was not meant to be read in a negative kind of way. I'd try to hire him if I had an open position to fit.

Edited my comment since I saw this: > Now I cannot leave Russia, because after the accident I have outstanding lawsuits in the amount of tens of thousands of dollars and I am forbidden to leave the country until they are paid off. Interesting. I know a person who somehow emigrated from Russia last year with some debt and is paying it off. But perhaps there is some other condition I don't know about. But anyway it wou…

[deleted]

Re: So what’s next (personal news from developer of popular CoreJS polyfill)

#234

Post by thinkindie »

ebjaas_2022 wrote: post #136
EdwardDiego wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But no one owes him anything. I strongly disagree. Only because so many people feel that he owes them something.

It's the nature of most types of volunteering work. If you sign up to be the conductor of your local choir, you have the same thing. People start expecting you to do stuff. If you're going to be in that role, as ploxiln says, you need to be OK with that part of it. You have to be OK with the thanklessness of the task, and you have to seek your rewards elsewhere. Still, I feel very sorry for zloirock, and I hope that…

you can't really compare volunteering at a local choir / local homeless canteen to big corporations taking advantage of open source projects (which is perfectly legit) and never ever feel like they should contribute more to make open source financially sustainable. There is a reason why major open source projects are backed by companies selling products or services based on the open source project itself.

Re: So what’s next (personal news from developer of popular CoreJS polyfill)

#235

Post by jgerrish »

juliangmp wrote: post #177

The patience and resilience this man must have. I would have left Foss development way earlier if I was in his place. He has every right to just deprecate or remove the package from npm and give everyone the middle finger.

But he didn't.

He posted that classic XKCD comic about critical infrastructure.

So while thousands of principal engineers at companies around the world hold meetings today on what to do about this critical bus factor issue, I'm going to do something else.

I'm going to go outside, drop off some library books (i don 't always finish them, that's ok), and wonder what critical infrastructure component exists in my life that I'm responsible for. Is it a person? A pet? A future idea?

Or who's supporting me? The parents and all the rest.

I'm not naive about what happens in OSS projects. And I wouldn't want to be this critical in a project, but this can be a message of future hope even if the world is dark right now.

I dont know the immediate solution. Maybe the engineers scrambling today can slowly remove this stress bomb over the next couple months.

Re: So what’s next (personal news from developer of popular CoreJS polyfill)

#236

Post by bovermyer »

slowmotiony wrote: post #230
bovermyer wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your lack of empathy in favor of blind group hatred is a pretty solid example of one of humanity's worst traits. However, I'm not going to return the favor by ignoring your personal context. Is the reason you're denouncing core-js's maintainer because you, yourself, have been subject to particularly awful circumstances owing to Russia's war? Are you projecting on him because you've been hurt? What's your situation?

I'm just shocked at the reaction from the HN crowd in this post. The guy lives in the west but returns to Russia, then blames Ukraine for being invaded, actually kills a teen girl and writes shit about her in the very same post added to HN, and blames everyone around him for his situation. Yet HN loves him because he wrote a cool Javascript library. Blows my mind.

I didn't see any part of the post where he blamed Ukraine for being invaded. There was a passage where he stated he can't publicly support either side because he has friends (family?) on both sides, but that's all I read.

The manslaughter came as a shock, yes, and I think there's more to that story than he's telling us. He probably isn't a great human being.

None of that, however, is relevant to the fact that maintaining core-js in particular and FOSS in general is a thankless and awful job.

It's possible to support FOSS, and support remuneration for FOSS, without supporting specific individuals.

Re: So what’s next (personal news from developer of popular CoreJS polyfill)

#237

Post by webknjaz »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #134
SergeAx wrote: post #69

I do understand that not a lot of people here really understand the sheer direness of his situation. He stuck in Russia because of unsettled problems regarding his conviction. He almost certainly cannot immigrate into most of the countries because of said conviction - to have a work permit one have to provide a certificate of good conduct. He is cut off most options to receive money from abroad and several means to r…

HN is a little bit more “filtered” place: on Reddit and Twitter there are enough people who hate him just for the sake of hatred. He is Russian - they call him “fascist”. He has a road accident - they are intentionally omitting a little detail that a victim was crawling the road at night. I didn't know about the memes and Twitter jokes. Even after that post, people still try to blame him. I’m pretty sure this situati…

It's a misconception that people hate him for being rssian. It's more like people dislike finding a consistent genocide apologist who has been publicly supporting the mass murderers for many years. This is a systemic position of his. In his late post he suggests that the murdered Ukrainians are somehow the same as the ruscist rapists who killed them. In the past he was shifting the blame for the rssian fascist ethnical cleansing to Ukraine as well: https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1625276917363646465. This does correlate with the color of his passport but it's just that — a correlation. His actions speak louder than words. Encouraging people to send him money equals indirectly funding the genocidal maniacs. Don't fund the terrorists, it's as simple as that.

Re: So what’s next (personal news from developer of popular CoreJS polyfill)

#238

Post by mromanuk »

This guy should approach the OpenJS Foundation [0] (previously it was the JQuery Foundation). It's sponsored by the big guys. There are a few more Open Source Foundation he can approach.

Could be that successfully funded OS projects are being maintained/leaded by charismatic guys? Those that can do marketing and get the project known and eventually get fundings. e.g.: tailwind, jquery, vue, sveltekit

0: https://openjsf.org

Re: So what’s next (personal news from developer of popular CoreJS polyfill)

#239

Post by webknjaz »

Urgh.. It's so unsettling how easy people fall for the "innocent act" of the person who routinely supports genocide. And it's a known systemic consistent behavior in the public statements — he's been supporting the mass murderers for many years. In his late post he suggests that the murdered Ukrainians are somehow the same as the ruscist rapists who killed them. In the past he was shifting the blame for the rssian fascist ethnical cleansing to Ukraine as well: https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1625276917363646465. He'd probably also blame black people for being enslaved, and rape victims too. This does correlate with the color of his passport but it's just that — a correlation. His actions* speak louder than words. Encouraging people to send him money equals indirectly funding the genocidal maniacs. Don't fund the terrorists, it's as simple as that.

Re: So what’s next (personal news from developer of popular CoreJS polyfill)

#240

Post by MatthiasPortzel »

maccard wrote: post #195
kilburn wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to ask to the appropriate forum though, and that's what he got completely wrong. Getting npm to scream for help when a developer installs your package is equivalent to asking your peer for a raise. I'd say that over 99.999% of the people who saw that message, created memes about it, etc.. did not have a corporate credit card and the power to use it at their discretion. If you want money from corps, THOSE are…

> I'd say that over 99.999% of the people who saw that message, created memes about it, etc.. did not have a corporate credit card and the power to use it at their discretion. If you want money from corps, THOSE are the guys you need to find and ask money from. So he should be cold emailing netflix, airbnb, linkedin purchasing managers?

If you look at “real” non-profits, there are a couple of key things that are largely missing from Open Source fundraising today.

First is capital campaigns. A capital campaign is a campaign to raise a large amount of money towards a goal. E.g. “we need 3 million dollars by the end of the year for our building renovations.” Having a concrete target is more motivating that just asking for “whatever you can give” to “keep the lights on.”

Second is cultivating relationships with (large) individual donors. It makes sense to track people who have donated to you, send them thank you cards, and take the biggest donors out to lunch. Then when you need money and you’re running your capital campaign, you can ask previous donors for larger contributions. It’s not cold-emailing, because you have a previous relationship with your donors.

Today, open source funding looks more like begging with a sign—sitting in a prominent place and asking for a small amount of money from a lot of people. Nothing wrong with that, you can get enough to eat, but I’d like to see free and open source software try more sustainable and effective strategies.

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