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While I don't particularly like the idea of stuffing ads into npm logs, I don't have the same visceral negative reaction that many people have in these HN threa

• yebyen 7y ago
  I hadn't heard of Tidelift before until recently, and I don't see it mentioned here in the discussion. Is this the kind of thing you'd like to see? https://tidelift.com/ https://tidelift.com/ Something has to be done to ensure that Open Source which plays a vital role in our business ecosystems remains sustainable. There are real business implications if some package we all depend on is under-funded and implodes (we can all name well-known examples of this from recent history.) Some projects may be of critical importance to the future, but without a business model they may fizzle out and die. There's an argument that some culling must occur for the overall benefit of the collective, and I have no doubt there is a market-driven solution that we can live with. I don't know if Tidelift is it, but it is definitely an approach.
  • prepend 7y ago
    OSS is sustainable. I don’t like how tidelift seems to present a partial story. If there some OSS crisis that I’m not aware of? Separately, just because something is an approach doesn’t mean it’s worth talking about.
    • reaperducer 7y ago
      If there some OSS crisis that I’m not aware of? I think there might be. I'm not involved in OSS circles, and don't really pay attention to the issues much beyond what I see on HN, but recently in a survey I completed for a tech company there were a number of questions asking my opinion on whether OSS is still a sustainable model, and if I believed it would be around 5, 10, 15, 20 years in the future.
      • liability 7y ago
        So you admit you don't really know much about the matter, but consider your opinion qualified by virtue of somebody asking you for your opinion? You can ask me what I think about inflation but that wouldn't make me an economist, would it?
        • reaperducer 7y ago
          That seems an unnecessarily hostile response. So you admit you don't really know much about the matter, but consider your opinion qualified by virtue of somebody asking you for your opinion? Yes, I admit that I don't know much about OSS. But I did not state that I have a qualified opinion. In fact, I answered "Don't know/no opinion" on those questions. The reason I posted my reply was to indicate that there must be some people worried about the situation, or it wouldn't have appeared in a survey from a very large, frequently mentioned on HN, tech company. You can ask me what I think about inflation but that wouldn't make me an economist, would it? No, but you could relay the fact that somewhere there are people who are apparently concerned enough about inflation to ask you about it.
          • 7y ago
• liability 7y ago
  Adware is malware, categorically. I don't give a damn if it's open source. If being adware is the only way software can exist, I'd rather it not exist at all. When those redditor called it sleazy, they were being too gentle.
  • Hamuko 7y ago
    Adware (and malware for that matter) were actually already banned by npm. Just don't tell feross that. He deleted my comment mentioning that part of the Acceptable Content policy and blocked me from making any more comments on the repo.
  • icebraining 7y ago
    > Adware is malware This seems like an overreaction. Are HN ads (those links to YC company jobs) malware? According to feross, the ads were just static hardcoded messages. I find it distasteful, but I don't see how it's "malware".
    • liability 7y ago
      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?
      • Avamander 7y ago
        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?
• _jal 7y ago
  I get where you're coming from. But doing an annoying thing is always going to bring negative attention, and doing a novel annoying thing is going to get a lot of attention. That attempting to make money by spamming diagnostic mechanisms was going to annoy people was inevitable. > But instead of attacking the guy for trying, I really wish the discussion were I wish they guy had spent energy on "how the community... can contribute back", instead trying to get a payday by stripmining trust. I have a lower tolerance for this crap than others, but any code I catch doing things analogous to this gets banned from my environments and the author names noted. What else will they do to my machines if someone dangles a buck?
  • raesene9 7y ago
    Out of curiousity, does the organization you work for contribute money to the Open source libraries it uses via existing mechanisms (e.g. gratipay, Github sponsors)?
• benologist 7y ago
  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.
  • icebraining 7y ago
    > I think the best solution is FAANG pay it forward and support the entire opensource R&D pipeline That's not so much a solution, but a new problem: how to get FAANG to actually do that?
  • lacker 7y ago
    Google+Microsoft+Facebook contribute quite a lot to open source though. React, Angular, TypeScript, Kubernetes, TensorFlow, etc etc....
    • benologist 7y ago
      To write React Facebook needed 20 years of R&D done by open source... jquery, mootools, long list of dead stuff today we needed to learn from. If Facebook needs 1000 projects to show them how to produce the best React then they need to keep 1000 projects in the pipelines so they can build the best successor to current solutions too. That's why they need to fund open source.
• jasode 7y ago
  >, why is it so alarming to think that these maintainers might think of a clever idea like this to make a couple thousand bucks? [...] But instead of attacking the guy for trying, I really wish the discussion were focussed on how the community of open-source consumers can contribute back to the open source ecosystem You're (possibly unintentionally) distorting/diverting the issue. Nobody is criticizing open source maintainers for trying to get funding in an abstract sense. (We can all agree open source maintainers need income.) However, if the concrete implementation of trying to get money is unwanted and unexpected ads, then the correct focus of discussion is the criticism of that ad delivery method. The succinct version of this is: "The ends do _not_ justify the means." As hypothetical examples... - If Pi-Hole maintainers get the "clever" idea to get funding by changing "doubleclick.net" from returning "127.0.0.1" to the ip address for "BuyPiholeTShirts.com", people are going to criticize that "ad". It doesn't matter if Pi-Hole volunteers "deserve" more money, the correct focus of criticism/discussion is the sneaky ip redirect. - If the maintainer of d3 Javascript library (https://github.com/d3/d3 https://github.com/d3/d3) decides to embed advertising such as "Try LINODE for 30 days!" in "README.md" and inside the source code comments of every js file, the correct focus of discussion is those ads and not whether the maintainer needs money. The methods of soliciting funds do matter. So far, socially acceptable ways seem to be Patreon, or getting hired by FAANG, or grants, etc. The "clever ideas" like NPM console ads are not socially acceptable.
  • cj 7y ago
    I agree with the sentiment that shady things shouldn't be excused because "I'm an open source developer and I need money". You have a point there. Although: > decides to embed advertising such as "Try LINODE for 30 days!" in "README.md" Are you trying to say that this is also not acceptable? Our company sponsors a few open source npm projects, and all of the projects we sponsor have our logo in the README.md - is that really not socially acceptable?
    • jasode 7y ago
      >we sponsor have our logo in the README.md - is that really not socially acceptable? In the d3 example I tried to exaggerate the hypothetical intrusiveness of ads by embedding it in all the js source files. In your specific case, if nobody is complaining about your ad inside of a single "README.md", I'm going to presume it's "acceptable".
• wvenable 7y ago
  If you are a software developer and you want to make money, sell your software. If you want give away your software for free, do that. Giving away software for free and then using adware to make up the difference is something else entirely. If someone wants to make money with developing software, they have many many ways of doing that. Framing this as poor starving software developers getting the shaft by for-profit companies is a huge mis-representation of the situation. No one is chained to their desk and forced to produce NPM packages.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Indeed. In particular, using a MIT or BSD license is a choice, and one that comes with forgoing expectation of profits, in exchange for boost in chances of adoption. Want to make money and open source software? Try GPL and dual-licensing.
  • mLuby 7y ago
    1. Sell 2. Gratis. 3. Gratis; donations welcome. #3 is barely adware. Sometimes people are extra appreciative of someone's work and want to express that through action; this just tells them how. On a personal level, I have no issue with an OSS author asking for donations. I draw the line at a company doing so. (An individual soliciting donations for something unrelated, like vim's "Help poor children in Uganda!" insert, isn't my favorite.)
  • CJefferson 7y ago
    Why not switch that around (honest question)? If you are a software developer and you want software without adverts, pay for it. If you want software for free, you accept whatever the author of that software chooses to do to pay their bills.
    • wvenable 7y ago
      Software that has ads is no longer free (gratis). You're just paying for it with annoyance and intrusion instead of money. And I think the collective opinion here is that we'd rather go without that software than to pay for it that way. In other words, we won't accept those terms and we won't use that software.
• johncoltrane 7y ago
  The people forcing those ads onto us "well-paid tech workers writing code for well-funded companies" are also "well-paid tech workers writing code for well-funded companies".
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• ToFab123 7y ago
  I work on Enterprise projects and we rarely (never) contribute back financially, because we cannot for practical reasons. It is simply not possible for us to add a "donation" cost to our projects. That will not get past accounting. A license, on the other hand, we would have no issues purchasing that. We purchase (expensive) licenses to proprietary software all the time. We could and would do the same for the open source software, we use, but without being able to purchase a license, there really isn't any practical way of doing that. Free for everyone, except for enterprise production environments, would work for us. As long as we get a license key and an invoice.
  • wfdctrl 7y ago
    What about a completely pointless "support the project" license? So you basically chip in for the maintenance, but don't get any additional rights?
    • kortilla 7y ago
      Doesn’t make it past accounting.
      • rwallace 7y ago
        What if it's a support contract that entitles you to a response to support requests on the basis of 'in less than twenty-four hours' as opposed to the usual 'I might respond on a best effort basis if I have time, but no promises'? Would that make it past accounting?
        • Macha 7y ago
          Yes, but: 1. Do open source maintainers actually want to commit to that? 2. What if the response is "Yes, we don't support that and don't plan to?" and the company feels this doesn't qualify as enough support and causes a headache. 3. If the purchaser knows what they're getting into, what's to say their successor also does?
  • bogdanoff_2 7y ago
• make3 7y ago
  no one has forced them to do this if they didn't want to. they are breaking the expectations and goal behind open source. They're more than welcome to do something else if they want to make money.
• zelon88 7y ago
  I release a ton of my work with open source licensing and I've never thought of it as a revenue stream. If people are financially burdened by making their project open-source; then don't make it open source. Donating something to the community and then getting offended when nobody reciprocates is disingenuous. It's part of the problem with "freemium" software these days where developers think I should be indebted to them for eternity because they did something with no ROI in sight. That's not my problem! There were 100,000,000 developers before you who had to write the ISA, the compiler/interpreter, the OS, the firmware in every device... If I gave each one a nickle I'd be in worse shape than you are. Sure, it's possible to turn a profit making open-source software. If that's a goal you have then buckle up because it's not a smooth ride. I liken it to being a starving artist. It's not for everyone, so if you already bitch about being hungry all the time maybe you should just look into a day job instead.
  • pixelbath 7y ago
    >If people are financially burdened by making their project open-source; then don't make it open source. This is largely my position. I view contributing code to open source projects almost as altruism. I don't expect compensation or reward, and I do it out of a general feeling of wanting to contribute something unselfish to the world. The fact that some open source projects are important is a secondary concern; I know I don't consider any of my FOSS code to be important to many people other than myself. That said, my primary income comes from working on proprietary closed-source software. I don't think I've ever interviewed for a position with a company that contributes most of its code to FOSS, so I've really never seen that model work in-person.
  • heyoni 7y ago
    That’s a good point you bring up...where do we draw the line? Lots of projects use Debian and docker, etc...is it even ethical to donate to an npm package before donating to the dozens of free tech layers node sits on top of?
    • grogenaut 7y ago
      You can't live without a heart, but most people don't get cancer, is it ethical for me to donate to the American cancer society but not the American heart association because Cancer is built on the heart? No it's my donation I'll donate where I want. If I find joy in donating to a small oss dev instead of a strategic donation to a well organized large one then that's what I do.
• nnnmnten 7y ago
  >You have people working mostly for free I think citation is needed here. Many big open source projects are created and maintained by the paid employees of big corporations.
  • shagie 7y ago
    This is an important point to consider. For large corporations, it is easier to hire a developer to work on a critical piece of open source software than it is to go through the approval process of sending money (no strings attached) to a particular individual.
    • jsty 7y ago
      Which is quite something considering the dog and pony show that is the recruiting process of most large orgs. One suspects that if OSS developers routinely offered to invoice for "software support" rather than requesting a donation, this would be a vastly superior option from the company's viewpoint compared to having to go through the expensive palaver of hiring.
• jeoeo929 7y ago
  This says more about the state of society than anything else Profits are up, inequality is up. That’s by design. We should be working on making it so people can eat and be healthy, and not have to be reduced to such bottom feeding tactics. But everyone thinks it’s mean and petty to tell kids of dead rich people they don’t get to inherit all the power. If I learned anything getting an MS in mathematical linguistics: economics is not physics and mass delusions infect smart people’s limbic systems too.
  • chessturk 7y ago
    I'll second this downvoted opinion. The mismatch between economic good created by and economic incentive to create OSS is just tragic from a hard numbers perspective. How do you fix it though? A large funding program? If the state or private industry were the backer, how do you prevent manipulation? The only viable models (that spring to my mind) are Spanish-Anarchist type stuff of generally funded unions of technical workers, but that doesn't feel likely.
    • keoor9 7y ago
      We already have a large funding program called taxes. We seem to enjoy giving it to private interests instead of state and local governments directly. Kind of wondering how, given that direct pipeline of transfer payments from the fed to private companies we can ever believe the “our economics is a free system of ideas.” Prevent manipulation of the state by prioritizing policing of state acts, not average folks on the street. Absolutely none of these ideas are new. It’s a fact of our biology that sees us favoring the mental model we know versus the unknown of a new social hierarchy. A reasonable “how to” is well detailed though. The public must engage the political system directly and not through the business sector administrators inserted in the middle of the process via manipulation of the financial systems flow of capital. Look what happens when there’s a half assed effort to get something like Obamacare. Imagine if the effort wasn’t so half assed?
• root_axis 7y ago
  I don't agree with npm's ban, but open-source developers don't necessarily deserve payment for their work. I don't think there is much productive discussion to be had in the way of "how open-source consumers can contribute back". The reality is that the vast majority of consumers don't care about contributing back and never will; this is fundamental to the nature of open-source. Thus, if those developers want to get paid it's up to them to come up with a monetization strategy that works for them, whether that be the red-hat model, enterprise licensing, or even cli ads, let consumers decide if they can tolerate those terms.
• dspillett 7y ago
  > The overwhelming majority of the people complaining about this are well-paid tech workers writing code for well-funded companies I very much doubt that assertion is true. > But instead of attacking the guy for trying, I didn't see many attacks generally in the comments here, directed at the guy for trying generally (a few ad-hominems were thrown, but you could cure all forms of cancer and still attract some of those!). Most were criticising him for trying that way. "Bad idea, this is why I think so, please don't". Maybe the filtering here was sufficient to hide the worse reactions, and things were far less civil elsewhere. My tuppence worth? Adverts and other superfluous junk do not belong in build/install/other logs like that, for technical reasons rather than (or as well as) personal preference ones. The same defences of the idea ("I need to make ends meet somehow", "But I'm only sending a couple of lines to each person", ...) apply equally to spam email so the idea shows the same lack of empathy about potentially inconveniencing others which might be a source of more aggressive reactions. As the title of the article he quotes (in his reaction to those reactions) says: "Open Source is Not About You", it isn't just about him either. And with regard to the quoted text "and the scope of their entitlement extends only to their own projects": exactly, other people on other projects that have the code as a dependency are potentially affected by these adverts - his idea was itself stepping outside the scope he expects others to keep to. Of course he is free to go ahead anyway, though others are equally free to fork the codebase to remove the adverts. Again, this is not intended as a criticism for trying at all. This is just stating that I think this particular attempt is a pretty bad idea.
• ken 7y ago
  I disagree with the premise that companies don't contribute to open-source. It's a rare open-source library that I don't contribute back to in some way, and that was even more true when I worked at big or rich tech companies. All software has bugs. Half the point of using an open-source library is so I can fix them! It's also strange to use "maintainers" as the worthy recipient here, since in almost every case I've seen, these people were also working for a big rich tech company, and very well paid already. The programmer in question sold his last company to Yahoo. He's got a Patreon page (hundreds of dollars a month), a GitHub Sponsor page (at least hundreds of dollars a month, and possibly much more). The software in question is a "JavaScript style guide, linter, and formatter". I don't think any company is "generating massive amounts of revenue" from a JS style linter. The GitHub page has a "gold sponsor" ($500/month) advertisement, too. The problem with advertising is that (as someone here described it recently) it's an arms race. When anyone starts using them, everyone else will struggle unless they match, and that makes life worse for everyone. Is contributing bug fixes to open-source software, plus the occasional corporate sponsor, not sufficient contribution to the community and ecosystem? What exactly is the goal here? Are we upset that developers don't earn enough money?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• mindslight 7y ago
  Everyone agrees that Free and Open software needs better funding models. If it could somehow manage to obtain one hundredth the revenue stream of Surveillance Valley, projects could pay full time employees to polish up UX and compete for popular mindshare. The problem here is the showing an ad is working directly against the user, and working directly against the user violates a core expectation of open software. A thing cannot be supported by destroying the thing itself. It would also be unacceptable to backhaul system information for "market research", run a Bitcoin miner, add entries to authorized_keys, flash epileptic trigger patterns, etc. We would rightly call such additions security incidents, as is this attempt at psychologically manipulating users.
• nickjj 7y ago
  > You have people working mostly for free, developing open-source, FREE code that provides incredible value to the for-profit companies that use the open source code to generate (sometimes) massive amounts of revenue. But these open source contributions are being done by people with free will. They are not forced to release the code they write to the internet for free. They choose to do it because that's what they want to do. Instead of associating writing code with money, try to relate it to a hobby. I have 40 something repos on GitHub and posted 200+ blog posts on my site for free but I don't expect payment. I do it because it's fun and it helps me learn. I'm not sure where I stand with banning terminal ads. On one hand if someone wants to try and make money by spamming people with ads, I say let them do it because if it gets really obnoxious then ad blocking tools will remove them. On the other hand, if it becomes expected to have ads on every tool, I could get see that getting out of hand. And at the same time I don't think there's a clear enough line to constitute what an ad is. If I link back to my site without asking for anything (as a signature of some sort), is that an ad?
• jasonhansel 7y ago
  I find it particularly ironic that the tech boom is seen as a triumph of capitalism when it depends so much on the free labor of an army of volunteers.
• 3xblah 7y ago
  The parent comment seems to rely on the all-too-common assumption that the only means by which a software author can be paid is through internet advertising. With that assumption, the argument against advertising then can be shifted to arguments for or against paying software authors for their work. Of course, this was not the issue that triggered the action or resulting commentary. It was advertising. It is an evasive shift from one issue to another, a rhetorical trick. There is no debate for or against paying for software. There is a debate against advertising via internet. That debate has existed since the network opened to the public.
• westoque 7y ago
  > Given the amount of value open source provides to for-profit companies (with the open source maintainers rarely getting any reciprocal value from the companies that profit off them), why is it so alarming to think that these maintainers might think of a clever idea like this to make a couple thousand bucks? Because it's not a clever idea at all. First of all, open source software should stay true to what is is, which is free and open. If maintainers really wanted to profit off of this, they should have never made it free or at least offer some sort of pricing model that doesn't affect the essence of the project being open source (e.g., offering paid support), projects like Sidekiq having Sidekiq Pro. Users shouldn't be the one "paying" for open source software through the ads. This is making developers pay for the project indirectly. DHH latest keynote from Railsconf 2019 hits the nail in the coffin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBwWbFpkltg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBwWbFpkltg
• deogeo 7y ago
  Ads are a cancer upon the world, far worse than poor free software funding, and people are understandably dismayed at seeing that cancer spread, no matter how justifiable the reasons given. Paid software is increasingly filled with ads, and I would argue it is precisely the absence of a profit motive that has kept FOSS software so virtuous. See the effect it had on app stores.
• anigbrowl 7y ago
  Open source is good. I've been saying for years that OSS devs should be paid and the cheapskates who use OSS for commerce should put their hands int heir pocket instead of forcing devs into the humiliating position of begging. Ads are cancer though. The idea that the only reliable way to fund anything is turn it into a billboard needs to die.
• knolax 7y ago
  What about the agency of NPM to not accept packages that are objectively inferior because they contain ads? If I submit purposely crappy code to a public repository should I be outraged if it gets rejected?
• dragosbulugean 7y ago
  You are missing the point of open-source. They are working for FREE because they choose to. If companies are using the FREE software, they are not required morally or legally to contribute anything back.
• segmondy 7y ago
  Meh! Money has really corrupted free and open source. The entire idea of free software is that it's free, without any catch. People loved to create and would create and give it away, the reward was in the creating and seeing other's use it. If you didn't care about that, you charged for it. Sometimes, the idea was that a bunch of random people would show up and create a free alternative against a very expensive software. For photoshop, see gimp. For oracle see mysql & postgresql. It was not free so companies couldn't profit off them, it was free for anyone to use, students, people without money, bums, anyone, companies included. The idea of open source was you can be free to inspect the source, tweak and customize to your taste, fix a bug if you have it, share your knowledge so other's can also borrow. This was the ethos of the hackers spirit. Build shit, share shit. Not hackers vs for-profit companies. We have coexisted along side for profit companies companies for a long time, they have built some cool shit that an individual or a random bunch of individuals couldn't. iphone, gpu, cloud some of those profit companies were started by hackers, and we have built shit they couldn't imagine or dare build. napster, torrent, bitcoin, linux. So let's please stop this rhetroic about for-profit companies gaining value from open source. That was always the intent. Would it be nice if they gave back? Sure! But if they don't, no problem too. If they build cool stuff with open source that drives society forward, it's good for all. Case in point, see Linux or raspberry pi tons of amazing IOT devices out there that won't exist without it or worse running windows ce. Companies are also giving back, go to Github. Sometimes it's just a single line of code commit, sometimes it's finding a bug, sometimes it's a correction to documentation. Then some are giving massively, see go, dart, react, angular, ionic, tensorflow, kubernetes. The symbiotic relationship between hackers and for-profit companies are really strong and we are not enemies. The only real battle that's been fought since the beginning is that information must be free. It's never been about the battle of money. Want some money? Go get a job or start a business. Bill Gates did it, Jobs & Woz did it, Linus got a job. John Carmack has a job, Jeff Dean has a job, even Paul Graham works for his. If anything I'm very suspicious of those who want to get paid for working on open source.
• nabdab 7y ago
  > companies that profit off of open source code without providing any reciprocal value to the open source projects in return You mean follow the terms of the open source license? If the creator wants money all (s)he has to do is put it up under a different license. You can’t have it both ways. Promoting free usage and expecting money back as well.
• tripzilch 7y ago
  This isn't about funding open source, this is about ads. Very, very, very specifically about ads. > I really wish the discussion were focussed on how the community of open-source consumers can contribute back to the open source ecosystem in a way that promotes the sustainability of the projects and community. Then you should post an article about that and vote it to the front page.