17 ms·

Open-source is broken: the sad story of Denis Pushkarev (core-JS)

26 points by AkshatJ27 4y ago

robertlagrant 4y ago
Open Source is broken if you think you should be able to make money from it when you need to. I don't think it's broken for its stated aims. I feel bad the chap, but I don't think Open Source is to blame. It is fundamentally hard to charge tiny amounts of money to millions of people, which is all he really has to do to survive, because receiving money, especially with all the different tax rules from countries, make micro/nanotransactions difficult. It would be good to have some sort of marketplace for this sort of thing, that has the scale to wade through country regulations and still transmit enough money to makers to be useful.
- bombolo 4y ago
  As the developer stated. It doesn't matter if the system is in place. People will mostly not donate.
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    Those with the most ability to pay are simply benefiting from free labor. How many multi-billion dollar companies are shipping products where core-js is an essential component?
    - rezo2 4y ago
      It is strange to count on payment for code distributed under a free license. You can use a license that would prohibit the use of code for free in commercial products, but then spread of project will also be reduced.
      - bombolo 4y ago
        I've always only used GPL on my projects, and I'm now moving to use AGPL. For me adoption is not important if that means freeloaders taking and giving nothing back.
        dogma1138 4y ago
        The problem is that often there isn’t even an easy way to give back sure there are donations but ironically for a non person entity making donation payments like this isn’t something that is possible because laws often don’t account for this model as the projects are often not registered charities or other statutory non for profit organizations. When a company makes a payment to an individual or an incorporated entity that is not a donation. It’s very difficult to near impossible to even properly classify them which means you are at very serious risk of violating either employment laws or tax laws or both. And a lot of projects that have a restrictive license don’t dual license or do it properly and don’t really support commercial channels. So whilst it’s easy to blame freeloaders more often than not the project maintainers are at fault.
        bombolo 4y ago
        Seems you haven't read the horror stories from Daniel Stenberg's (curl's main author) website.
        dogma1138 4y ago
        There will always be idiotic compliance departments that don’t understand it also doesn’t help when SAM teams don’t differentiate between open source software and commercial software either in practice or logistically e.g. you have to register a vendor in some ERP/CRM system for every software even if it’s open source. It still doesn’t change the fact that companies big and small can’t donate money to projects easily unless those projects are well organized behind an incorporated entity.
        bombolo 4y ago
        Not the latest NASA one. The others.
  - bentobean 4y ago
    Then don’t spend countless hours on that project. Simple.
- pointlessone 4y ago
  I agree that Open Source (and Free Software, so let's go with FOSS) works as designed. However, charging is not an option FOSS supports. At best it's accepting and no one's paying. OpenSSL, for instance, had accepted money for a long time yet the whole internet had to be scared for the money to actually start trickling in and still laughable amounts. Where I don't agree is that FOSS is not to blame. It absolutely is. FOSS is the entrenched default. And FOSS is incompatible with requiring a payment. To require a payment one has to run a tangential business (provide support, integration services, etc.) and all the options are in conflict with the quality of the main FOSS product one way or another. FOSS makes it hard to switch to any other model and it's harder the longer the project lives. The issue of funding is not going to be solved by FOSS because it is not the foal. We need to look past FOSS to find a solution. A good start would be to chose a different license when one starts a project. Like one of PolyForm Licenses [1] or BTPL [2]. These are not FOSS compatible but they align much better with the funding goal. And if one figures it doesn't work for the project it's easy to switch to FOSS. Much easier than the other way around, anyway. [1]: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ [2]: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/26/Big-Time-2.0.0 https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/26/Big-Time-2.0.0
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    FOSS isn't entrenched in any meaningful way. No one forces or even guides people to make FOSS. People choose to opt into FOSS, and choose to work on it for nothing. As an alternative, there are millions of commercial software vendors out there, and they predate FOSS. They weren't forced into some FOSS hegemony, because that doesn't happen. If people don't want to work on FOSS, they can do what everyone else does and start a company, and charge for their work. The thing to avoid is starting something that's totally free, watching people pick it up because it's free, keep using it because it's decent, and then assume that those people owe you money. They may well have done something else if they'd known they were making a purchasing decision from day 1. I do think there's an opportunity somewhere for GitHub, that owns most of the infrastructure for Javascript OSS development, to do something for JS developers. For example, they could do what YouTube does with paid accounts and distribute some of the monthly fee to creators proportionally based on watch time. (Note: that wouldn't be righting an injustice, although I'm sure their marketing would make the most of that instinct in people. It would just be adding a proprietary marketplace to monetise OSS creators. But it might also alleviate the problem.)
bombolo 4y ago
He quit his main job to work full time relying on donations! People are assholes, but I don't think he had a sound plan. I think he should have found an employer that was ok with him dedicating some % of time to maintaining core-js. Personally I'd like to work full time on my own projects, but I'd make sure it made financial sense before just quitting my job and hoping that the universe will sort it out.
kimixa 4y ago
I'm not sure if Open Source is broken, so much as the expectation to monetize anything is guaranteed. Most new businesses fail too. Just because you've created something doesn't mean it'll always be monetizable. I'd argue that if income was the expectation, grinding year after year at the same thing with repeated failure is a mistake. Doesn't matter if it's writing software, or selling widgets on a street corner, not every possible idea will succeed in that way.
- basch 4y ago
  It’s a failure of stakeholders to be good stewards. This sort of on the fly patching service should be a part of browser maintenance. There should be a collaborative polyfill.js service like Dennis described or The Financial Times has, maintained by Microsoft, google, safari, Mozilla, and web standards orgs. Any website that needs to call or should be able to for free. Legacy support has become atrocious and it shouldn’t fall to web developers to deal with, because the end result is what Bloomberg does, and a shitty experience for the consumer. His work also ended up being so good, it effectively eliminated completion and the need for businesses on either end of the web (browser/site) to take it upon themselves to make things better.
hakre 4y ago
This is an interesting story. Millions of users, but you catch fire when you ask for money when you need it - on your very own channels. And this is a project which highly depends on maintenance so you need to have personnel that does it with love and dedication. Oh how much happier do I feel now, that once when someone in our community came up asking for help we didn't have such problems to arrange a fundraiser. Don't let hate win.
hypfer 4y ago
I do wonder if the author asked zloirock if they're allowed to use the Github profile picture for that blog entry
- izoukhai 4y ago
  You're totally right, didn't think of that so I removed it Thank you !
the_gipsy 4y ago
It's not broken. Publishing and sharing something for free under free terms, and then attempting to pull the rug after two years of gaining popularity is.
- basch 4y ago
  He’s threatening pulling continued maintenance. The product can exist in its state, but it’s main use case is someone always keeping it up to date. It’s more a service than a program.
karmicthreat 4y ago
Really, if the project is of no benefit to him he should just drop it. Maybe it will cause some turmoil for developers. If its an important project then people and more importantly companies can contract with him for feature and bug fixes. Just walk away, don't feel you owe anyone anything with open source. If they value the work they can open their wallet if they absolutely need something done.
t344344 4y ago
For me (as opensource dev) his biggest mistake was to make a library that "just worked" and was completely invisible. I think we will see way more "advertising" on a log messages. I am also not going to publish unit tests and some core know how...
bentobean 4y ago
I myself am the beneficiary of many open-source projects. I readily acknowledge this. That said, where my mind keeps going to is that open-source software is in many ways similar to communism. And communism failed for a reason. If you want to freely give away your work, then by all means - do so. But do so with the understanding that you are promised absolutely nothing in return. No one owes you anything. This man would have been better off had he pursued a paying career and spent a reasonable amount of his free time working on this.
- sebastien_b 4y ago
  I fully agree with your statements that nobody is owed anything if they give their work/time to a cause. But it doesn’t give a free pass to others to demand work/fixes/time, or have a sense of entitlement, to that work, and become belligerent towards those that are giving their work to them.
  - bentobean 4y ago
    Absolutely agree.
- izoukhai 4y ago
  Totally agree! It's really a shame he missed the opportunity to gain popularity from this project. He just built and released it, without doing any sort of promotion or whatsoever.
- rini17 4y ago
  > had he pursued a paying career and spent a reasonable amount of his free time working on this Please refrain from such unsolicited advice. Everyone has different values and alignment you don't know about. There are so many cases where idealists followed your advice, were in turn drained by mismanagement and burned out of IT completely.
  - bentobean 4y ago
    Please refrain from such unsolicited advice.
ipaddr 4y ago
Interesting story he made more success of out it compared to most projects but it wasn't enough to support his lifestyle and debt. The Russian war pushed him over the edge. The new model will provide him some additional money. Will it be enough for his lifestyle? Will his criminal record and location employment? The fact that people rely on this project gives him some power. Attempting to use this power has gotten backlash and threats to remove that power. The sad story demands for money break unwritten rules. The pivot to closed license is a familiar story we've seen time and again and what happens is the free popularity boost of open source disappears and the project barely makes any money. A lot people do open source so they can leverage that popularity into expert status rather then trying to profit directly. He has already built up that credibility (perhaps lost some here) but he should stop working on the project and attempt to find employment. The projects who rely on this will need to support this and will creating jobs in this area where he would have an excellent chance of landing this type of position. He created the market now he needs to stop serving it for free and profit.
greenyoda 4y ago
Related: Denis' original statement about this, discussed on HN a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34780859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34780859
throwawaysalome 4y ago
If you're good at something, don't do it for free. -- Fictional Character
rektide 4y ago
We should have better institutions that can fund & support these vibrant world-bettering projects. Leaving support up to free market, making folks spend time fund-raising is a huge waste. This planet could be so much better eith such a small amount of coordinated effort. NLnet grants are the only example that comes to mind. But these are short term, not sustaining.
toastercat 4y ago
I know of three open-source projects in recent times that have made it to the frontpage of HN for reasons concerning funding (Babel, Faker, and now Core-JS). Coincidentally, they are all JS/Node projects. I wonder if many maintainers who end up feeling this way about open-source were ever good fits for open-source to begin with. At the same time, it's hard to say I wouldn't feel the same way as Denis if I maintained a project as popular as core-js thanklessly. I would like to think I'd have the power to just walk away once I realized it was unhealthy for me.
- basch 4y ago
  Think about what this project really is too. He’s single handedly maintaining IE and adding new features. It’s extra thankless because he’s not contributing a product feature to the person using it, but a compatibility layer to the system developers are targeting. He puts systems into a state they should already be in.
karaterobot 4y ago
If somebody asks for charity, many people give them charity, because we owe that much to our fellow human beings. If the same person works for thousands of hours, and then says "hey, remember me? I gave you this thing that took thousands of hours to make, and I desperately need money, can I have some?" a large percentage of people will say "fuck you, how dare you try to shake me down for money!" A slightly more nuanced but equally confounding position is: "I'd give you money, sure, but your license doesn't require it, so go piss up a rope buddy".
- pointlessone 4y ago
  This is a great argument not to choose a FOSS license next time.
sgammon 4y ago
There is no browser today at 1% market share or greater that needs a polyfill to support ES6+. I am honestly just left wondering why core JS is still around? What am I missing?
MattPalmer1086 4y ago
I can relate to the thankless grind of something you love becoming a burden. Back in the 90s I wrote a window docking system library for Delphi. It was shareware, not open source, and it brought in about £1000 a month. It was the support that killed me. So many people doing really weird things with it I had never thought about. Was it my bug or theirs? The bottom line is that one person can't maintain something in their spare time that a lot of other people rely on.
congac 4y ago
The actual details of the killings Denis Pushkarev committed are different to what he claims. The girls were on a pedestrian crossing and he ploughed through them anyway. I have no sympathy for this guy and I hope he gets what is coming to him. Reminds me of that other guy, Steven Degutis or whatever, who flashed his penis at children multiple times over many years and then expected us all to feel sorry for him and give him advice and $100k+ job leads. You are all being scammed by false sob stories from evil criminal men. Wake up HNeeple.
- maxloh 4y ago
  Any sources for what you claim?

26 points by AkshatJ27 4y ago

Open Source is broken if you think you should be able to make money from it when you need to. I don't think it's broken for its stated aims. I feel bad the chap, but I don't think Open Source is to blame. It is fundamentally hard to charge tiny amounts of money to millions of people, which is all he really has to do to survive, because receiving money, especially with all the different tax rules from countries, make micro/nanotransactions difficult. It would be good to have some sort of marketplace for this sort of thing, that has the scale to wade through country regulations and still transmit enough money to makers to be useful.

bombolo 4y ago
As the developer stated. It doesn't matter if the system is in place. People will mostly not donate.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  Those with the most ability to pay are simply benefiting from free labor. How many multi-billion dollar companies are shipping products where core-js is an essential component?
  - rezo2 4y ago
    It is strange to count on payment for code distributed under a free license. You can use a license that would prohibit the use of code for free in commercial products, but then spread of project will also be reduced.
    - bombolo 4y ago
      I've always only used GPL on my projects, and I'm now moving to use AGPL. For me adoption is not important if that means freeloaders taking and giving nothing back.
      - dogma1138 4y ago
        The problem is that often there isn’t even an easy way to give back sure there are donations but ironically for a non person entity making donation payments like this isn’t something that is possible because laws often don’t account for this model as the projects are often not registered charities or other statutory non for profit organizations. When a company makes a payment to an individual or an incorporated entity that is not a donation. It’s very difficult to near impossible to even properly classify them which means you are at very serious risk of violating either employment laws or tax laws or both. And a lot of projects that have a restrictive license don’t dual license or do it properly and don’t really support commercial channels. So whilst it’s easy to blame freeloaders more often than not the project maintainers are at fault.
        bombolo 4y ago
        Seems you haven't read the horror stories from Daniel Stenberg's (curl's main author) website.
        dogma1138 4y ago
        There will always be idiotic compliance departments that don’t understand it also doesn’t help when SAM teams don’t differentiate between open source software and commercial software either in practice or logistically e.g. you have to register a vendor in some ERP/CRM system for every software even if it’s open source. It still doesn’t change the fact that companies big and small can’t donate money to projects easily unless those projects are well organized behind an incorporated entity.
        bombolo 4y ago
        Not the latest NASA one. The others.
- bentobean 4y ago
  Then don’t spend countless hours on that project. Simple.
pointlessone 4y ago
I agree that Open Source (and Free Software, so let's go with FOSS) works as designed. However, charging is not an option FOSS supports. At best it's accepting and no one's paying. OpenSSL, for instance, had accepted money for a long time yet the whole internet had to be scared for the money to actually start trickling in and still laughable amounts. Where I don't agree is that FOSS is not to blame. It absolutely is. FOSS is the entrenched default. And FOSS is incompatible with requiring a payment. To require a payment one has to run a tangential business (provide support, integration services, etc.) and all the options are in conflict with the quality of the main FOSS product one way or another. FOSS makes it hard to switch to any other model and it's harder the longer the project lives. The issue of funding is not going to be solved by FOSS because it is not the foal. We need to look past FOSS to find a solution. A good start would be to chose a different license when one starts a project. Like one of PolyForm Licenses [1] or BTPL [2]. These are not FOSS compatible but they align much better with the funding goal. And if one figures it doesn't work for the project it's easy to switch to FOSS. Much easier than the other way around, anyway. [1]: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ [2]: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/26/Big-Time-2.0.0 https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/26/Big-Time-2.0.0
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  FOSS isn't entrenched in any meaningful way. No one forces or even guides people to make FOSS. People choose to opt into FOSS, and choose to work on it for nothing. As an alternative, there are millions of commercial software vendors out there, and they predate FOSS. They weren't forced into some FOSS hegemony, because that doesn't happen. If people don't want to work on FOSS, they can do what everyone else does and start a company, and charge for their work. The thing to avoid is starting something that's totally free, watching people pick it up because it's free, keep using it because it's decent, and then assume that those people owe you money. They may well have done something else if they'd known they were making a purchasing decision from day 1. I do think there's an opportunity somewhere for GitHub, that owns most of the infrastructure for Javascript OSS development, to do something for JS developers. For example, they could do what YouTube does with paid accounts and distribute some of the monthly fee to creators proportionally based on watch time. (Note: that wouldn't be righting an injustice, although I'm sure their marketing would make the most of that instinct in people. It would just be adding a proprietary marketplace to monetise OSS creators. But it might also alleviate the problem.)

bombolo 4y ago

He quit his main job to work full time relying on donations! People are assholes, but I don't think he had a sound plan. I think he should have found an employer that was ok with him dedicating some % of time to maintaining core-js. Personally I'd like to work full time on my own projects, but I'd make sure it made financial sense before just quitting my job and hoping that the universe will sort it out.

kimixa 4y ago

I'm not sure if Open Source is broken, so much as the expectation to monetize anything is guaranteed. Most new businesses fail too. Just because you've created something doesn't mean it'll always be monetizable. I'd argue that if income was the expectation, grinding year after year at the same thing with repeated failure is a mistake. Doesn't matter if it's writing software, or selling widgets on a street corner, not every possible idea will succeed in that way.

basch 4y ago
It’s a failure of stakeholders to be good stewards. This sort of on the fly patching service should be a part of browser maintenance. There should be a collaborative polyfill.js service like Dennis described or The Financial Times has, maintained by Microsoft, google, safari, Mozilla, and web standards orgs. Any website that needs to call or should be able to for free. Legacy support has become atrocious and it shouldn’t fall to web developers to deal with, because the end result is what Bloomberg does, and a shitty experience for the consumer. His work also ended up being so good, it effectively eliminated completion and the need for businesses on either end of the web (browser/site) to take it upon themselves to make things better.

hakre 4y ago

This is an interesting story. Millions of users, but you catch fire when you ask for money when you need it - on your very own channels. And this is a project which highly depends on maintenance so you need to have personnel that does it with love and dedication. Oh how much happier do I feel now, that once when someone in our community came up asking for help we didn't have such problems to arrange a fundraiser. Don't let hate win.

hypfer 4y ago

I do wonder if the author asked zloirock if they're allowed to use the Github profile picture for that blog entry

izoukhai 4y ago
You're totally right, didn't think of that so I removed it Thank you !

the_gipsy 4y ago

It's not broken. Publishing and sharing something for free under free terms, and then attempting to pull the rug after two years of gaining popularity is.

basch 4y ago
He’s threatening pulling continued maintenance. The product can exist in its state, but it’s main use case is someone always keeping it up to date. It’s more a service than a program.

karmicthreat 4y ago

Really, if the project is of no benefit to him he should just drop it. Maybe it will cause some turmoil for developers. If its an important project then people and more importantly companies can contract with him for feature and bug fixes. Just walk away, don't feel you owe anyone anything with open source. If they value the work they can open their wallet if they absolutely need something done.

t344344 4y ago

For me (as opensource dev) his biggest mistake was to make a library that "just worked" and was completely invisible. I think we will see way more "advertising" on a log messages. I am also not going to publish unit tests and some core know how...

bentobean 4y ago

I myself am the beneficiary of many open-source projects. I readily acknowledge this. That said, where my mind keeps going to is that open-source software is in many ways similar to communism. And communism failed for a reason. If you want to freely give away your work, then by all means - do so. But do so with the understanding that you are promised absolutely nothing in return. No one owes you anything. This man would have been better off had he pursued a paying career and spent a reasonable amount of his free time working on this.

sebastien_b 4y ago
I fully agree with your statements that nobody is owed anything if they give their work/time to a cause. But it doesn’t give a free pass to others to demand work/fixes/time, or have a sense of entitlement, to that work, and become belligerent towards those that are giving their work to them.
- bentobean 4y ago
  Absolutely agree.
izoukhai 4y ago
Totally agree! It's really a shame he missed the opportunity to gain popularity from this project. He just built and released it, without doing any sort of promotion or whatsoever.
rini17 4y ago
> had he pursued a paying career and spent a reasonable amount of his free time working on this Please refrain from such unsolicited advice. Everyone has different values and alignment you don't know about. There are so many cases where idealists followed your advice, were in turn drained by mismanagement and burned out of IT completely.
- bentobean 4y ago
  Please refrain from such unsolicited advice.

ipaddr 4y ago

Interesting story he made more success of out it compared to most projects but it wasn't enough to support his lifestyle and debt. The Russian war pushed him over the edge. The new model will provide him some additional money. Will it be enough for his lifestyle? Will his criminal record and location employment? The fact that people rely on this project gives him some power. Attempting to use this power has gotten backlash and threats to remove that power. The sad story demands for money break unwritten rules. The pivot to closed license is a familiar story we've seen time and again and what happens is the free popularity boost of open source disappears and the project barely makes any money. A lot people do open source so they can leverage that popularity into expert status rather then trying to profit directly. He has already built up that credibility (perhaps lost some here) but he should stop working on the project and attempt to find employment. The projects who rely on this will need to support this and will creating jobs in this area where he would have an excellent chance of landing this type of position. He created the market now he needs to stop serving it for free and profit.

greenyoda 4y ago

Related: Denis' original statement about this, discussed on HN a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34780859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34780859

throwawaysalome 4y ago

If you're good at something, don't do it for free. -- Fictional Character

rektide 4y ago

We should have better institutions that can fund & support these vibrant world-bettering projects. Leaving support up to free market, making folks spend time fund-raising is a huge waste. This planet could be so much better eith such a small amount of coordinated effort. NLnet grants are the only example that comes to mind. But these are short term, not sustaining.

toastercat 4y ago

I know of three open-source projects in recent times that have made it to the frontpage of HN for reasons concerning funding (Babel, Faker, and now Core-JS). Coincidentally, they are all JS/Node projects. I wonder if many maintainers who end up feeling this way about open-source were ever good fits for open-source to begin with. At the same time, it's hard to say I wouldn't feel the same way as Denis if I maintained a project as popular as core-js thanklessly. I would like to think I'd have the power to just walk away once I realized it was unhealthy for me.

basch 4y ago
Think about what this project really is too. He’s single handedly maintaining IE and adding new features. It’s extra thankless because he’s not contributing a product feature to the person using it, but a compatibility layer to the system developers are targeting. He puts systems into a state they should already be in.

karaterobot 4y ago

If somebody asks for charity, many people give them charity, because we owe that much to our fellow human beings. If the same person works for thousands of hours, and then says "hey, remember me? I gave you this thing that took thousands of hours to make, and I desperately need money, can I have some?" a large percentage of people will say "fuck you, how dare you try to shake me down for money!" A slightly more nuanced but equally confounding position is: "I'd give you money, sure, but your license doesn't require it, so go piss up a rope buddy".

pointlessone 4y ago
This is a great argument not to choose a FOSS license next time.

sgammon 4y ago

There is no browser today at 1% market share or greater that needs a polyfill to support ES6+. I am honestly just left wondering why core JS is still around? What am I missing?

MattPalmer1086 4y ago

I can relate to the thankless grind of something you love becoming a burden. Back in the 90s I wrote a window docking system library for Delphi. It was shareware, not open source, and it brought in about £1000 a month. It was the support that killed me. So many people doing really weird things with it I had never thought about. Was it my bug or theirs? The bottom line is that one person can't maintain something in their spare time that a lot of other people rely on.

congac 4y ago

The actual details of the killings Denis Pushkarev committed are different to what he claims. The girls were on a pedestrian crossing and he ploughed through them anyway. I have no sympathy for this guy and I hope he gets what is coming to him. Reminds me of that other guy, Steven Degutis or whatever, who flashed his penis at children multiple times over many years and then expected us all to feel sorry for him and give him advice and $100k+ job leads. You are all being scammed by false sob stories from evil criminal men. Wake up HNeeple.

maxloh 4y ago
Any sources for what you claim?