NPM Bans Terminal Ads

I think we have got open source funding all wrong. The thing that makes open source great is that, in parallel, half a million projects are ticking along from which we are learning what is good, what is bad, what is the future of our art. It is education. It is research.

We look for 100,000 individual solutions to making rent while FAANG are just sitting there with a quarter trillion plus in cash waiting to benefit from the best everything that emerges from this massive, free R&D pipeline. Take the best ideas, hire the best programmers, copy the best software, adopt the best practices. From top to bottom you could probably find 10,000+ open source contributors across their stacks, and to enable that open source software required even more contributors, and influencing it all was the previous generations of contributors.

I think the best solution is FAANG pay it forward and support the entire opensource R&D pipeline that enables them to hoard so much money. Between them they hire more people than there are open source developers so it's ridiculous they cannot support them all. It's a security issue that they do not support them at all for the most part, like with OpenSSL, like with injecting ads into node modules, like with selling modules to be repurposed as malware. We haven't even found the stuff compromised by state agencies yet.

> I’ve spent over 3,000 unpaid hours over the last four years maintaining some popular open source packages.

> Maintainers do critical work which enables companies to create billions of dollars in value, yet we capture none of that value for ourselves.

From TFA, some Open Source contributors are burning themselves at both ends and they should not be reduced to selling paintings on street corners to make ends meet. I'm not arguing that just anyone should be able to earn a living by writing any code and licensing it permissively, but there are some utilities which should be funded that are not, and their ability to obtain funding on their own should perhaps not be the one deciding factor in whether they survive.

In my day job, I frequently insist that programmers are bad at estimating, but they persist in asking for fine-grained estimates and making their business decisions based on them. If the success of a programmer team or product team depends on each individual programmer on the team's capability to always make estimates correctly, then the effort is likely doomed. This is a foundational idea of Agile. You can prove this empirically with enough experience; programmers should focus on making their programming skills better, not on precision time accounting and making sure that to improve estimation to become more accurate. Those things have value, but working software is more valuable. A programmer skill level may be completely orthogonal to the programmer's estimation skills, and many of us may not have the capacity for improving both at the same time.

Similarly, the success or failure of an Open Source project may depend more on the maintainer team's ability to market the project as a product and derive revenue from it.

So, how can we make this easier and more efficient, without forcing everyone to become better at it, individually? (There may not be an answer, but you haven't really taken any time at all to explain what makes Tidelift "not even worth discussing" in your view.)

What I see in my day to day life is that OSS is generally behind paid systems. I use a bunch of software that I feel annoyed by because they are not as good and are not developing as fast as expensive proprietary alternatives.

Something that can really boost OSS community would be really good, but all I see in the market today are attacks on OSS. For example the recent amazon-mongodb debacle where a proprietary system is stealing money from an open project.

The entire advertising industry is scum. I worked in it for two years and wish I never did. That's a sin I now atone for by discouraging younger developers from making the same mistake, using the harshest language I think dang will permit.

It doesn't matter if there is no telemetry (and if this were to be normalized, there would eventually be telemetry. Such are the economic incentives in the ad industry. When it's possible for telemetry to exist, advertisers will desire it and some engineer will eventually decide to profit from implementing it) Advertising is propaganda inherently contrary to the interests of anybody subjected to it. It's rife with psychological manipulation. FM radio ads have no telemetry, but can anybody seriously deny that FM radio ads are sleazy as fuck?

For more context, in case anyone is wondering what I was trying to communicate amidst the torrent of downvotes.

Feross is a meaningful voice in open source. I've admired him for a long time, and still do. He's written some thoughtful posts in the past about FOSS specifically, hence the specificity of my comment (see his post from 2010 here: https://feross.org/stallman-stanford/).

Reading his justification for the "funding" experiment (here: https://feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/), I was struck by the fact that he didn't address an obvious slippery slope in his argument for what he was experimenting with, namely,

"For the record, funding had absolutely no tracking, no data collection, and no code from untrusted third parties. It was a console.log with some fancy formatting. Think of it like a newspaper classified ad. We just print it and hope that maybe some folks will see it."

I don't knock his attempt at experimentation with funding models for FOSS developers; however, there's an ongoing history lesson we're all living that serves as a cautionary tale for where ad-funded monetization models can go. Considering corporations are largely involved in FOSS today, could the normalization of monetization of FOSS with the wholly positive intentions of rewarding those who have dedicated their time to developing FOSS software, not evolve into a model wherein for-profit companies use this as a backdoor to monetize their FOSS contributions? For example, imagine compiling Kubernetes and getting an ad for Google Cloud services. Or compiling the Linux Kernel with features committed to the kernel source primarily by Google and getting an ad for a Chromebook as part of the boot sequence.

Sure this is all a bit dystopian, but I'm surprised someone as thoughtful as Feross didn't address the possible unintended consequences of his experiment, even if his original intentions were in no way nefarious.