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NPM Bans Terminal Ads

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271–280 of 377 posts

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open source maintainers need income to fund their work. lol if you need to make income from your work, don't give it away for free. Should everyone demand getting paid now for working on hobby projects?

Well, obviously selling paid software is a well known way to make money. However, it would be really cool if we could give away software for free and make money off it at the same time.

Red Hat, Canonical, Docker, Suse, and many others give software away for free, and make money from that same software.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#272
post #209

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…

> These developers chose to volunteer their time to corporations. Not so, these developers chose to volunteer their time to benefit the commons, and corporations occupy the same spaces once in a while. Whether or not there are abusive companies who stake out those projects for rent-seeking, to build walled gardens of their own, looting the commons making money for themselves and giving nothing back, is really not a f…

> Not so, these developers chose to volunteer their time to benefit the commons, and corporations occupy the same spaces once in a while. Whether or not there are abusive companies who stake out those projects for rent-seeking, to build walled gardens of their own, looting the commons making money for themselves and giving nothing back, is really not a function of the person who did something good for everyone's benefit.

It actually is, that's my point. The developers knew there were licensing arrangements that guarded against that possibility, and they chose licenses specifically designed to allow such looting.

Reciprocity is great. But if you license your code in a way that says "Feel free to take this and make money off it and give nothing back" when there are other options, then you made that decision and there is no obvious fairness argument that somebody should be punished for doing what you granted them license to do.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the ad makes a remote call during execution (for an dynamic ad serve), it's an attack vector. There is always custom ad code for analytics that adserves use to fill (the ad placement space) and report back, called an admanager. As an advertiser, you can upload your own admanager (that that has your own custom code. Reading the code of the NPM package will not typically help with understanding what it's going to do…

>If the ad makes a remote call during execution (for an dynamic ad serve), it's an attack vector. There is always custom ad code for analytics that adserves use to fill (the ad placement space) and report back, called an admanager. As an advertiser, you can upload your own admanager (that that has your own custom code Can you point out a real example of terminal advertising like this?

No. I haven't looked through many js packages.

I could make it without any effort via:

> https://github.com/feross/funding/blob/master/messages.json

Currently it's "manually curated" which is a fancy way of saying, it's my own custom ad-tag that doesn't call an adserver. Replacing one field with a function that is immediately called and getting your value out, is how most people would integrate an ad-tag.

Using DFP or whatever, you can plug in an adtag call and parse values and you're in business. Ad platforms don't usually support plaintext tags, but I have seen them still supported by some of the older "native ad" platforms who started as platforms that served HTML strings (Taboola, etc).

The takeaway is that NPM nipped it in the bud because it's trivial to abuse.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#274
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for engaging me on this, genuinely appreciate it amidst the torrent of downvotes (would be interested to hear more of the opinions of those who downvoted me). Yeah, good question and something I've been wrestling with a lot myself. I used to think "free" meant monetarily free, but lately (in the last few years, call it aging, I dunno), I've started to subscribe to the notion of "free" as championed by the Free…

Thing is, while the "Free" in "Free Software" is ambiguous, the "F" is FOSS has always meant "free as in freedom". It's not a new interpretation by feross (and I think the downvoters are reacting negatively to that suggestion).

Yeah, I think my wording in the original post is to blame here.

What I was trying to get across was that Feross has previously been vocal about his belief that his software was both FOSS and monetarily free. Now, he seems to be exploring the possibility that his code can still be FOSS, and monetarily free in concept, but perhaps walks the path Facebook, Google, et. al have that has lead to the much maligned cliche' "if you're not paying, you're the product." How far down that path does one have to go to lose the spirit of FOSS, if at all?

Interesting to think about.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the ad makes a remote call during execution (for an dynamic ad serve), it's an attack vector. There is always custom ad code for analytics that adserves use to fill (the ad placement space) and report back, called an admanager. As an advertiser, you can upload your own admanager (that that has your own custom code Can you point out a real example of terminal advertising like this?

No. I haven't looked through many js packages. I could make it without any effort via: > https://github.com/feross/funding/blob/master/messages.json Currently it's "manually curated" which is a fancy way of saying, it's my own custom ad-tag that doesn't call an adserver. Replacing one field with a function that is immediately called and getting your value out, is how most people would integrate an ad-tag. Using DFP o…

So you’re talking about software which doesn’t exist, right?

This seems like a silly slippery slope argument.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody is questioning that they give some software back but giving software back simply does not fund open source As I already stated, yes , it does fund open source. That's literally what they're doing: spending funds on developing and maintaining open source code. Did they fund every transient piece of software in the technology stack? Of course not. It does not fund the... Corporate money funds all of those thin…

You mentioned the wealthiest 0.000001% of open source projects in a discussion about how the other 99.999999% need funding as some kind of proof FAANG are pulling their weight. Just their cash savings weigh about 2,500 tonnes so they're obviously not pulling their weight at all. The so-what is software development evolution comes to a grinding halt while we wait for third-world and developing countries to hit the swe…

They don't need funding. Most open-source software is redundant, low quality, or extremely niche. It's ok if some open source software is simply never written.

I think it's fair for developers to charge (or otherwise monetize, including ads) for their software, even if they open-source it, but they don't "need" funding any more than any other arbitrary piece of software that someone somewhere thinks should exist.

> software development evolution comes to a grinding halt

What's wrong with this? If "software development evolution comes to a grinding halt" then it means we didn't need any more new software and existing solutions have solved all problems.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, obviously selling paid software is a well known way to make money. However, it would be really cool if we could give away software for free and make money off it at the same time.

Red Hat, Canonical, Docker, Suse, and many others give software away for free, and make money from that same software.

They do that by selling support, or additional non-free features bundled into an "enterprise edition" (at least in the case of Docker). I don't think that's something Feross or other open source maintainers are interested in doing.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#278
post #69

I don't like terminal ads either, but I wouldn't mind them if they meant that the creators of popular libraries can keep maintaining their work without giving up their personal lives. Monetization is still a huge taboo in the open-source community and is badly viewed by many of it's biggest beneficiaries, developers who make their entire living out of skills that consist of knowing how to use these open source and fr…

> Monetization is still a huge taboo in the open-source community That's not true. Qt has managed to monetize fine, and it's no pariah. This is 100% about the way in which people are hijacking tools to promote monetization of their code.

Interesting, I was going through their landing pages and it's a bit overwhelming. It looks like a cross-platform development framework based on C++, but what is their business model?

Consulting, extra features, Saas, is it partially closed source, could you tell us how they did it?

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're too absolutist. How is advertising inherently contrary contrary to the interests of anybody subjected to it? How would you find about a single product people are trying to sell if they don't advertise? E.g. would we better off if we couldn't advertise that free software alternatives exist?

Advertising is not a charitable act done for the benifit of consumers, no matter what anybody in the industry tells you. The relationship between advertisers and consumers is inherently adversarial, and advertising professionals are well aware of this fact even when they pretend otherwise (pretending otherwise is just one aspect of their complex web of lies and deceit. Whenever they do it, they remind me of what utte…

> The relationship between advertisers and consumers is inherently adversarial

That is naive thinking. Advertising exists to reduce friction in the market. I'm a lot more likely to buy something if I know it exists. I won't go to the movies unless I've seen a trailer, for instance.

Maybe installing an adblocker doesn't super negatively impact your life but if we completely stop advertising as a practice then spending would slow and all of our lives would be worse off.

Re: NPM Bans Terminal Ads

#280
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These developers chose to volunteer their time to corporations. Not so, these developers chose to volunteer their time to benefit the commons, and corporations occupy the same spaces once in a while. Whether or not there are abusive companies who stake out those projects for rent-seeking, to build walled gardens of their own, looting the commons making money for themselves and giving nothing back, is really not a f…

> Not so, these developers chose to volunteer their time to benefit the commons, and corporations occupy the same spaces once in a while. Whether or not there are abusive companies who stake out those projects for rent-seeking, to build walled gardens of their own, looting the commons making money for themselves and giving nothing back, is really not a function of the person who did something good for everyone's bene…

The point of the linked video, at least the relevant part about the street scammers that hand you something and then ask for money, is that we actually banned that kind of behavior in public spaces because it was exploitative.

People have evolved to trust in reciprocity, because it's to our mutual benefit as a society that reciprocity remains a thing, and behaviors which are pathologically exploitative of this evolved trust in reciprocity are fully in the wrong. We decided it and made laws about it, something like 30 years ago. I learned this watching the keynote myself, and was surprised (as it actually hasn't stopped, in spite of legal protections which you might assume put a permanent end to the practice, to the contrary there are still monks handing out little plastic bracelets outside of the Smithsonian in DC, and no shortage of people who are not wise to it, with the $20 to spare.)

If the next generation of developers can't anymore trust in reciprocity and they have to decide on non-free licenses as a result of these companies which plainly don't understand reciprocity, we will all have lost something profoundly important. (And if we assume these companies and their behavior is purely exploitative now, what makes you think a legal machination like non-permissive licensing is going to have more success at getting them to stop doing that? You might have more avenues for recourse, but at what cost...)

It's not about fairness or punishment, it's about protection of our shared mutual benefit via social cues, and we can exile or something like exclude them from polite society if they are not well-behaved. From the receiving end it might look like a punishment, but I prefer to think of it more like as "corrective prodding" or "defensive posturing," and if it works the bad behavior will change, or if it doesn't, then hopefully at least the blast radius can be well-contained.

There are corporations which have learned to behave more thoughtfully and in harmony with OSS, who made a point to be aware of their community footprint, and sure plenty of such individuals too. Those who are not well-behaved can either hopefully see the light, or maybe there's no hope remaining, they will totally take over, and complete the tragedy of the commons. I submit humbly that we should not degrade the commons though as a response to their influence, because even with the bad actors around and their bad behavior, the facts show that our innate understanding of reciprocity is mostly still a beneficial trait, worthy of keeping around.

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