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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)

#31

Post by nevernude »

akudha wrote: post #26

In one of my previous jobs, my CTO asked me who I thought was the most important person in the company was. I wasn’t sure. He pointed to the lady who was responsible for entering and maintaining data, on which the entire business was built upon. She was a quiet person, who did her job exceptionally well. Yet, most people didn’t know her or didn’t realize her importance. I am certain she wasn’t paid that well either.…

But the thing is he DID ask for help, quite a few times and was only met with the hate and vitriol you mentioned. Depressing indeed.

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

#32

Post by nextaccountic »

Dalewyn wrote: post #13

I wrote this sentiment earlier[1], but I'll repeat it here. If a dev wants money for his work, he should license his work as appropriate and demand payments. If a dev releases his work free-as-in-libre and/or free-as-in-beer, they don't get to complain if the donations are "insufficient". Or to put it another: Of course a company won't pay up if they don't have to. This guy seems to be considering making his work int…

> If a dev wants money for his work, he should license his work as appropriate and demand payments. If a dev releases his work free-as-in-libre and/or free-as-in-beer, they don't get to complain if the donations are "insufficient".

The author might still do it (it's one of his options) but please note that proprietary core libraries (and proprietary software in general) are immensely less useful than open source software. The value proposition of core-js is that it's a basic piece of infrastructure that other open source projects build upon, and if it were proprietary, no OSS could depend on it.

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

#33

Post by nevernude »

scrollaway wrote: post #25
imiric wrote: post #11

If you're working for a company that relies on OSS, please suggest establishing an OSS fund to specifically support projects like core-js. Have the company pledge some percentage of profits, where employees decide how the funds get appropriated. E.g. by popularity, relevance, love, or whatever other criteria feels right. Think of the Humble Bundle sliders, for example. It's heart breaking to know that the world's lar…

> employees decide how the funds get appropriated. E.g. by popularity, relevance, love, or whatever other criteria feels right FWIW this is not the way. Distributing based on these criteria means most of the funding will go to those who already receive most of the funding. It does not solve the XKCD/2347 problem, which is exactly what this guy is encountering : People who maintain unknown software, software you don't…

At this risk of some self promotion, we developed StackAid (https://stackaid.us) to help fund the long tail of open source because of the exact problems you mentioned. People only tend to remember the popular/direct dependencies.

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

#34

Post by Aeolun »

nevernude wrote: post #31
akudha wrote: post #26

In one of my previous jobs, my CTO asked me who I thought was the most important person in the company was. I wasn’t sure. He pointed to the lady who was responsible for entering and maintaining data, on which the entire business was built upon. She was a quiet person, who did her job exceptionally well. Yet, most people didn’t know her or didn’t realize her importance. I am certain she wasn’t paid that well either.…

But the thing is he DID ask for help, quite a few times and was only met with the hate and vitriol you mentioned. Depressing indeed.

Honestly, after seeing the message in the NPM logs I kind of figured he’d have a job soon.

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

#35

Post by mthoms »

BadRed wrote: post #27

I recognize his challenges, but not sure if I can look past his victim blaming and "both sides bad" war rhetoric.

He only said "I don't want to choose between two kinds of evil. I will not comment on this in more detail, since there are people close to me on both sides of the border who may suffer because of this."

I don't think "two kinds of evil" is meant to imply that both sides are equally bad. Just that there are no good options for him. After all, when we say "the lesser of two evils" we don't (usually) mean evil in the literal sense. We mean that we are being forced to pick the least-bad of two bad options.

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

#36

Post by wpietri »

phpnode wrote: post #16

It's definitely time for him to let this project go, working on it is a literally thankless task and the level of entitlement shown towards his work has been infuriating to watch. The outrage towards him daring to ask the community for help , something done in an act of desperation, is a real wake up call for open source maintainers - the community doesn't give a fuck about you, they want your code and they want it f…

Agreed, but I think it goes beyond tunnel vision and sunk costs. He clearly likes helping developers! He is a good-hearted person who will feel bad screwing over a bunch of people who depend upon him. The main thing that's getting him to shift is that now he has a spouse and a child who depend upon him much more directly, and so he's even less willing to disappoint them.

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

#38

Post by wpietri »

Dalewyn wrote: post #13

I wrote this sentiment earlier[1], but I'll repeat it here. If a dev wants money for his work, he should license his work as appropriate and demand payments. If a dev releases his work free-as-in-libre and/or free-as-in-beer, they don't get to complain if the donations are "insufficient". Or to put it another: Of course a company won't pay up if they don't have to. This guy seems to be considering making his work int…

Yeah, I saw that victim-blaming take last time and I still say it's bunk. They do get to complain.

It would be a better world if this guy could just be building his extremely useful package and making a modest living. We are not in that world yet, but we will never get there if people can't talk about problems. I understand this can be a shock to free-market fundamentalists, but not every issue is best solved through capitalism. Forcing an excellent developer to become a probably-mediocre startup CEO is not a clear step forward here.

So I'm grateful to him speaking up. If you don't want to hear it, maybe exercise your freedom to stop reading articles like this.

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

#39

Post by forevergreenyon »

karaterobot wrote: post #7

In my unasked-for opinion, he should absolutely give up on this project, and take a salaried job that'll let him support his family and not have to deal with the entitlement issues and lack of perspective the community evidently has. If half of what's in this post is true, he's shown admirable restraint: I'd have burned it all down the first time someone got pissy about a free thing I gave them.

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