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

I definitely feel bad. He’s had a really tragic set of circumstances.

The open source community can be wild sometimes. Back when I was still maintainer and lead dev for Gaim (not Pidgin), I would occasionally get downright hateful people e-mailing me for not implementing whatever feature they thought needed to be implemented, or not getting it implemented quickly enough. One guy managed to get ahold of my cell phone number somehow and called me at 4am to discuss "his ideas" with me for the project. I ended up having to change my number.

Thankfully 95% of the people I interacted with in the community were great and were great, but that other 5% was rough.

Here's simple solution: create a product and sell it for money. Seriously. Stop giving stuff away for free.

EDIT: let me elaborate.

Writing open source is not a business strategy. At best, it's a gimmick, or outsourcing infrastructure maintenance to the public.

What you should do is the following:

1) Project authority.

This is easy. You are the creator and maintainer of a critical piece of infrastructure. You are THE EXPERT!

2) Project non-neediness

None of this "guys I'm struggling here". People should come to you because you have value to provide, not because they pity you.

3) Value proposition

Create a compelling value proposition where you get money in exchange for something.

That something could be a product, a subscription, a consultation service, or something else. The possibilities are endless.

You are a smart person. If you dedicate a week or two you can figure this out.

I don't know many people who are successfully making money from open source. I only know of Zig. Here's what Andrew Kelly did:

- He projects authority. You can watch him programming live. He has many live streams and talks.

- He does not project neediness. He talks frankly about his finances but none of this "omg you guys are so thankless for all my work". It's more like: hey guys, I'm working on this, if you are interested in this and would like it to continue, consider donating.

- He did the drudge work of setting up a non-profit foundation to receive the donations

- He got help from people: he doesn't run everything, he doesn't code everything. There are several people working in the Zig Foundation.

Now, I don't think you can do this with core-js. It's already pretty mature and any donation you get is basically going to come out of pity. You don't want to be in this situation.

That's why I think it's better for you to create a consultancy and provide some kind of service where people are compelled to pay you money because you are just so valuable.

My man, there are people out there making over $10k/mo from things like "copywriting" a few emails a month for a few high class clients.

You can do better.

> the community doesn't give a fuck about you, they want your code and they want it free

That's a pretty polarizing mindset. The community wants to be a community - you take, and give as you can. Nobody owes anyone else anything.

What I'm really struggling with is how much this contrasts with the story for the developers of Dwarf Fortress, who don't get that same hate and vitro piled on them, and in fact, people throw money at them because they want the developers to have money. To the tune of like $9 million or something! Whereas this guy, pouring his heart into something useful and not for fun, gets all this hate shoveled his way?

I really don't understand people.