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I recently read this: https://drshapeless.com/blog/posts/htmx,-datastar,-greedy-developer.html https://drshapeless.com/blog/posts/htmx,-datastar,-greedy-de...
by rubenvanwyk 1y ago
I recently read this: https://drshapeless.com/blog/posts/htmx,-datastar,-greedy-developer.html https://drshapeless.com/blog/posts/htmx,-datastar,-greedy-de...
Which states some of the basic (great) functionality of Datastar has been moved to the Datastar Pro product (?!).
I’m eager to support an open source product financially and think the framework author is great, but the precedent this establishes isn’t great.
- grim_io 1y agoI find it much more interesting to read from people who do programming as a hobby. They focus on the practical solutions much more than on the typical bikeshedding.
- kreetx 1y ago"Bikeshedding" means debating over aspects that don't matter (much; i.e, color of the bike shed), the linked blog post isn't about asthetic changes.
- grim_io 1y agoNor was my intent to label any of the linked blogs as such. My intent was to say that hobbyists have a different, refreshing approach to programming and it's technologies that I appreciate.
- stevesimmons 1y agoSame for me... I had been tracking Datastar for months, waiting for the 1.0.0 release. But my enthusiasm for Datastar has now evaporated. I've been bitten by the open-source-but-not-really bait and switch too many times before.
- osigurdson 1y agoMaintainers need a way to maintain during the day - not just evenings and weekends. Otherwise it eventually dies.
- imjonse 1y agoDoes HTMX have a pro version? Is it dead?
- intrasight 1y agoFar from dead. Usage is growing. HTMX is a single htmx.js file with like 4000 lines of pretty clearly written code. It purports to - and I think succeeds - in adding a couple of missing hypermedia features to HTML. It's not a "framework" - good It's not serverside - good Need to add a feature? Just edit htmx.js
- sudodevnull 1y agoYes look at the active issues on GitHub. There's hundreds and some going back years with no traction.
- yawaramin 1y agoI don't think open issues is a fair way to judge project liveness. TypeScript also has hundreds of open issues going back years with no traction. Is TypeScript dead?
- sudodevnull 1y agoYes, issues that are years old show me the commitment level. Not a knock against HTMX but a clear sign of priorities. Carson is free to meme all day and talk about other projects. It's very clear where he stands and that's fine
- CuriouslyC 1y agoAs someone who wants to write open source but needs to be able to capture some financial value from doing that to be able to make it sustainable, what model do you prefer? My current thoughts lean towards a fully functional open source product with a HashiCorp style BSL and commercial licensing for teams above a size threshold.
- danryan 1y agoSell support.
- 1dom 1y agoI can't imagine that works very well for relatively small, simple, functional or intuitive projects though. Incentives wise, is it possible to sell reverse support: extracting payment for all the times the product works so well that support isn't needed?
- sudodevnull 1y agoThat doesn't work. My day job is at scenario working on NATS and I can tell you 99.9% of people don't pay for support
- CuriouslyC 1y agoAs a NATS user, I can say that's mostly because it just works and when it doesn't it's pretty easy to figure out :)
- sudodevnull 1y agoyep, and you'd think someone that has seen that would pick a different model... idk, ngmi
- abirch 1y agoSelling support can be rough. I talked with the developer of PyMol. Many corporations wouldn't buy licenses and those that would pay for support wanted support for hardware that was 2 or 3 generations old. Gentle reminder: please encourage your corporation to pay for open source support whenever possible.
- hmans 1y ago[dead]
- sudodevnull 1y agosource is MIT, do what you want. The team found certain plugins to be anti-patterns and support burdens. You can find the old plugins in the repo source, feel free to fork from there!
- agos 1y agoWait so you pay to use the anti patterns? That’s a new one.
- danso 1y agoI know the projects/specifics are completely different but this immediately reminded me of Meteor.js from back in the day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569799
- sudodevnull 1y agoTechnically very different but emotionally yes very the same but a lot simpler
- sgt 1y agoSo let's say you wanted to use data-animate but on the free edition, would you just add some JS/CSS glue logic to make it work?
- hide_on_bush 1y agoyup, why not. css animations go brrrr. and anime.js is a great library.
- leg100 1y agoIt's also pretty shady that no mention is made of Datastar Pro on the home page [1]. You might well be well on the way to integrating Datastar into your website before you stumble across the Pro edition, which is only mentioned on the side bar of the reference page [2]. [1]: https://data-star.dev/ https://data-star.dev/ [2]: https://data-star.dev/reference/datastar_pro#attributes https://data-star.dev/reference/datastar_pro#attributes
- lmz 1y agoIsn't that only a problem if it advertised pro features there without mentioning the fact that they're paid? If it didn't then you could just be happy with the free features, no?
- leg100 1y agoI'd expect it to make it explicit this is a freemium product, with free features and paid features. Nothing is given on the home page to indicate as such.
- sarchertech 1y agoIf they aren’t leading to expect that they have the paid features for free, how is offering them for money any different from just not offering those features at all? It’s not like your exiting use cases stop working past 10 users or something.
- scragz 1y agoif a feature I want is in the paid product then I assume there's less chance of it being added to the free version. every feature has to go through a process to decide if it's paid or free.
- sarchertech 1y agoIf there's money to be made the possibility that the feature will ever exist at all goes way up. I'd rather have the ability to pay for a feature if I decide I need it than to hope some maintainer gets around to building it for free. They've said that the feature they put in the premium product are the features they don't want to build or maintain without being paid to do so.
- gwd 1y agoIt's good to know -- having replace-url functionality behind the paywall is likely to be a deal-killer; I can't help but think that this "freemium" model is really going to kill datastar's prospects for taking off; at best it's likely to result in a fork which ends up subsuming the original project. That said, the attitude of the guy in the article is really messed up. Saying "fuck you" to someone who gave you something amazing for free, because he's not giving you as much as you want for free -- it's entitled to a toxic degree, and poisons the well for anyone else who may want to do something open-source.
- chownie 1y agoOn the latter point, couldn't disagree more. He's saying "fuck you" to the product, not the person, and unilaterally removing extant features to paywall them imo is poisoning the well far more than a simple FU to a developer ever could?
- jgalt212 1y agoFair enough, but the use of coarse language can also impair the underlying point. i.e. the shock value can derail the reader. For such reasons, The Economist style guide advises against using fancy language when simpler language will suffice.
- librasteve 1y agoerr, fuck is simple
- chownie 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing I don't really have much of a response beyond this.
- sudodevnull 1y agoWe didn't remove the features, if you want to use the old ones they're still there in the repo. We just didn't want to support the old way of doing them when we actively tell people not to use them. If you're going to be a support burden going forward we want you to have skin in the game if not cool do it yourself no one's going to get mad at you
- sudodevnull 1y ago[flagged]
- Aeolos 1y agoYeah, but as the HTMX author said, HTMX sucks! Definitely should use Datastar!
- sudodevnull 1y ago[flagged]
- imiric 1y agoHah, I downvoted you, without realizing you're the guy. Thanks for your work, and keep fighting the good fight!
- nchmy 1y ago[flagged]
- croisillon 1y agoi'm afraid this is rather the quality of a non native writer, sorry we are not all from the mother US of A
- nchmy 1y agoI'm not referring to the language barrier - I live in a place where I write and speak at a juvenile level. I'm referring to the very low quality of thinking on display in the article, and in this reply (english is not from the US of A. And, moreover, the level of literacy in that country is nothing to envy) Here's a HN post from today for a coherent article about the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45536000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45536000
- andersmurphy 1y agoIt gets worse. I payed the one off 299$ for a pro license but have yet to find a reason to use any of the pro features. I was hoping to need them for the google sheets clone [1] I was building but I seem to be able to do it without PRO features. - [1] https://cells.andersmurphy.com/ https://cells.andersmurphy.com/
- sgt 1y agoArguably that's good though - for the project. It means it's not a bait and switch like many have claimed. You can build pretty much anything with regular Datastar.
- Tepix 1y agoI don't understand. Why is it a problem with Datastar if you buy their Pro license without needing it?
- aquariusDue 1y agoThe comment is tongue in cheek. On the discord it was discussed at length and some of the plugins in the Pro version were actually considered anti-patterns, it actually is kinda easy to complicate things needlessly when getting used to D* and I know I did this too in the beginning. As was said by the commenter in another reply, the inspector is actually the bit that makes the Pro version much more appealing but most people wouldn't know from the sidelines.
- nchmy 1y agoI, also, was swindled by those cultists. I thought the devs' emphatic assertions in their Discord NOT to buy Datastar Pro was a psyop dark pattern. I bought it to spite them, and barely use any of it. I want my css-in-js back!
- sudodevnull 1y agohe is out of line but he is right
- 1y ago
- rcakebread 1y agoOdd statement from a doctor using this at his practice: "It is not like $299 is much for me, but I am just a hobbist."
- simlevesque 1y agoIt's one of the worst blog post I've ever read. They kind of have a point but everything around it is ridiculous.
- ivape 1y agoYeah man. He’s a just a hobbit. But, aren’t we all just hobbits really?
- sorry_i_lisp 1y agoFinally someone is speaking truth to power. These registered non-profits that release their code for free and their leisure time for support need to be knocked down a notch. We all know they are evil. But you know the most evil thing? That code that was previously released under a free license? Still sneakily on display in the git history like the crown jewels in the Tower of London. Except of armed guard defending the code that wants to be free once more it's hidden behind arcane git commands. Name me a single person that knows how to navigate the git history. I'm waiting. Spoiler alert: I asked Claude and they don't exist.
- notpushkin 1y ago1. Open LICENSE on GitHub 2. Click on the commit ID 3. You’ll see something like “1 parent: fdsfgsd” – click through to that commit 4. Browse I mean, it’s a shitty move for sure, but eh.
- sritchie 1y ago(Parent was being sarcastic)
- notpushkin 1y agoHuh! I’m getting rusty.
- burneXXH 1y ago[dead]
- tclancy 1y agoSure, but this person is a doctor (or similar) who took time to learn to code this form up to better serve their patients. They are most likely blessedly ignorant of software licenses and version control.
- sudodevnull 1y agoYes, much power! Datastar is the worst, how dare they?
- johnald 1y agoI don't get why people get so worked up over Datastar's pro tier - you almost certainly don't need it.
- nchmy 1y agoyeah, but i WANT it
- andersmurphy 1y agoThe inspector is great, but it's too much work to swap out the free bundle for the pro bundle every time I want to use it.
- nchmy 1y agoI'm only working in local dev right now, so i've got the pro version and inspector going. When I get to prod, perhaps this will be a problem. Yet, surely, this could just be toggled with an env var or db setting or something? if dev, include pro and inspector component. If prod, use free version (or custom bundle that only has what you need)
- andersmurphy 1y agoYeah probably just haven't got round to it and don't use enough signals.
- croes 1y agoThat's how people tick. We aren't satisfied with what we have if there is more. Doesn't matter if we need it.
- cy_hauser 1y agoBecause the incentive is now there. Maybe they don't get enough paid customers and want more money. This puts a bit of pressure to move a new feature that is really handy into the paid level. Then another and another. Might not happen but it could. Most people using Datastar will not necessarily be smart enough to fork it and add their own changes. And when Datastar makes a new release of the base/free code people will want to keep up to date. That means individuals have to figure out how to integrate their already done changes into the new code and keep that going. It's not a matter of if something breaks your custom code but when. Finally, many people internalize time as money with projects like this. They're spending many hours learning to use the framework. They don't want to have the effort made useless when something (ex: costs or features) changes outside of their control. Their time learning to use the code is what they "paid" for the software. Doesn't matter if it's rational to you if it is to them.
- WD-42 1y agoDatastar always rubbed me the wrong way. The author was constantly pushing it in the HTMX discord, telling anyone who would listen that if they liked HTMX how great Datastar would be for them. Some pretty classy comments from them on reddit too: > It was a full rewrite. Use the beta release forever if it has all the tools you need. No one is stopping you. > Open source doesn't owe you anything and I expect the same back.
- nchmy 1y ago> The author was constantly pushing it in the HTMX discord, telling anyone who would listen that if they liked HTMX how great Datastar would be for them You know who else does that? THE DEVELOPER OF HTMX! https://htmx.org/essays/alternatives/ https://htmx.org/essays/alternatives/ > Some pretty classy comments from them on reddit too: What is unclassy about those comments? Seem sensible to me...
- infecto 1y agoAgree nothing unclassy. People have this strange expectation that an open source project is out there to serve every single person using it with total attention. It’s not, feel free to fork the beta and use it forever, make your own changes. The pro tier cost is a pittance for anyone using it for profit.
- burneXXH 1y agoReact and HTMX don't have a PRO tier.
- jlengrand 1y ago> I had a running service written in htmx for some time. It is a clinic opening hour service to inform my patients when I will be available in which clinic. (Yes, I am not a programmer, but a healthcare professional.) -> that was pretty freaking cool to read, loved it also chuckled at the idea of my website making, health professional going all "What the fuck." in front of his codebase.
- burneXXH 1y agoIf the developer rug pulled once they will probably do it again. Thx for the heads up.
- sudodevnull 1y agowhat was taken from you? point to the source history that's been removed please. It's funny that stuff like this means people won't ever develop in the open. Hope that makes y'all happy
- siliconc0w 1y agoI was looking for a tool to follow along with signal patches and was a bit disappointed to see the inspector is under "pro"- that and the query string sync are the two nice-to-haves.
- sudodevnull 1y agoso you want nothing to be useful in Pro? you are telling devs how to spend their time and effort?
- adlpz 1y agoI just come from writing a comment on the other Datastar post on the home page, literally saying that I don't see the point of it and that I don't like it. But I'm now here to defend Datastar. It's their code, which, up to now, they built and literally given away totally for free, under a MIT license. Everything (even what "they moved to the Pro tier") should still be free and under the MIT license that it was published under originally. You just decided to rely and freeload (as, as far as I can tell, you never contributed to the project). You decided to rely on a random third party that owns the framework. And now you're outraged because they've decided that from now on, future work will be paid. You know the three magic words: Just. Fork. It.
- chuckadams 1y agoI'll certainly defend d*'s right to do what they did, but the wisdom of doing so is going to come into question as soon as they reject a PR because it contains a feature that's in Pro. I don't think people who are concerned about that deserve to be called "freeloaders", but I guess a fork is a way out of such acidic rhetoric too.
- madeofpalk 1y agoWait - what's wrong with that? It's their project, they can merge whatever PRs they want!
- nchmy 1y agoD* has a core, which is open and will be set in stone soon when v1 is released, with the expectation that it'll barely, if ever, change again. The rest is plugins, which anyone can write or modify. There's no need for the plugins to get merged upstream - just use them in your project, and share them publicly if you want. You could even do the same with the pre-pro versions of the pro plugins - just make the (likely minor) modifications to make them compatible with the current datastar core. They're also going to be releasing a formal public plugin api in the next release. Presumably it'll be even easier to do all of this then.
- 1y ago
- username223 1y agoI tried to understand this, but it seems like a non-native English speaker met an LLM and used it to create a blog post. Can someone please explain why this exists?
- sudodevnull 1y agocause people hate how you give your own gifts to the world of open source. fuck 'em https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vagyIcmIGOQ&t=20017s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vagyIcmIGOQ&t=20017s
- devnull3 1y agoDHH is spot on like he is on many issues! There is a saying in my language which translates: give someone a hand and they'll take your whole arm.
- drshapeless 1y agoSorry for that. I am really a non-native English speaker. I did not use LLM, just bad English.
- BrouteMinou 1y agoIs the greedy developer in the title the one who wants the 3rd party for free without contributing, or the developer who wrote the said 3rd party and asking compensation? I am confused.
- benjiro 1y agoThe problem is that the developer of datastar did a bait and switch. Releasing the beta for free, and then removing features into a pro version with a price tag. Nothing wrong with people making money on their software but you need to make it clear from the start, that it will be paid software and what price range. Bait and switch is often used to get people to use your software, you spend time into it, and then if you need a Pro feature, well, fork up or rework your code again. So your paying with your time or money. This is why its nasty and gets people riled up. Its amazing how many people are defending this behavior.
- BrouteMinou 1y agoCorrect me if I am wrong here, but what you had for free, you still have it for free, since it's a MIT license, what you cloned initially is still "yours". Is the problem thar one needs to fork / maintain the code from now on? Is the problem that one wants free support on top of the free library?
- sudodevnull 1y agoMIT, source is still there, look at the tags and fork it. You have the same rites as me!
- benjiro 1y agoTake a chill pill sudodevnull ... As i stated before, turn down the rhetoric. Your not helping yourself with these "!" reactions.
- sudodevnull 1y agoYou keep accusing me of something that's a lie. Rhetoric indeed
- nchmy 1y ago> But the one that most inspired me was a web app that displayed data from every radar station in the United States. Anyone have a link for this?
- odie5533 1y agoHaving so many features behind a Pro gate makes this a non-starter for enterprise. How would anyone convince their company to adopt this?
- sudodevnull 1y agoEXACTLY which feature do you need?
- naasking 1y agoPeople can develop open source equivalents you know, you're not required to use the pro version to get a certain feature. From my understanding, datastar was designed to be entirely modular and extensible.
- the_gipsy 1y ago> But no, the datastar dev somehow move a portion of the freely available features behind a paywall. What the fuck. Bait & Switch. They're in their right to do it, but it's a bad move, and nobody should use their project^M^M^M^Mduct anymore.
- nchmy 1y agoand youre in your right to fork the pre-pro versions of the now-pro plugins, update them to be compatible with the current version of the open-source course (a surely trivial task) and share them with the world. You can call your plugin pack d-free
- the_gipsy 1y agoI'd rather not get spammed by Bait&Switch projects that turn into products, thank you.
- sudodevnull 1y agothat's just not true, the current ones are a complete rewrite. Use the old way to your heart's content. It's MIT
- ianbutler 1y agoYeah cool, I think this is the point. People want to get paid for the work they produce and the dynamic in open source is not even quietly known to be unsustainable. I like the communal aspect of open source, but I don’t like overly demanding and entitled free loaders. I’ve had enough of that in my well paid career over the last decade. This way of getting paid may or may not resonate, but I applaud the attempt to make it work.
- devnull3 1y agoA lot of PRO plugins can be self developed. An example: there is a poor-man's inspector plugin at [1]. The replace-url thing should be a simple JS code using history API no? [1] https://github.com/sudeep9/datastar-plugins?tab=readme-ov-file#datastar-signalsjs https://github.com/sudeep9/datastar-plugins?tab=readme-ov-fi...
- imiric 1y agoYikes. I'm not opposed to open source projects placing features that realistically only large/enterprise users would use behind a paywall, i.e. the open core model. When done fairly, I think this is the most sustainable way to build a business around OSS[1]. I even think that subscriptions to such features are a fair way of making the project viable long-term. But if the project already had features that people relied on, removing them and forcing them to pay to get them back is a shitty move. The right approach would've been to keep every existing feature free, and only commercialize additional features that meet the above criteria. Now, I can't say whether what they paywalled is a niche/pro feature or not. But I can understand why existing users wouldn't be happy about it. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45537750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45537750
- nchmy 1y agoif we're talking about something immense, like redis, you might have a point. But we're talking about a few hundred lines of simple javascript that are still available to fork and update to be compatible with the new API. The fact that no one has done such a simple thing yet means this is a non-issue
- imiric 1y agoThe thing is there's not much practical difference for users. They might not be aware that it's only a few hundred lines of code, and it really doesn't matter. The point is that they were depending on a software feature one day, and the next they were asked to pay for it. That's the very definition of a rugpull. Whether it's a few hundred lines of code, several thousand, or the entire product, the effect is the same. Forking is always an option, of course, but not many people have the skills nor desire to maintain a piece of software they previously didn't need to. In some cases, this causes a rift in the community, as is the case for Redis/Valkey, Terraform/OpenTofu, etc., which is confusing and risky for users. All of this could've been avoided by keeping all existing features freely available to everyone, and commercializing new value-add features for niche/enterprise users. Not doing that has understandably soured peoples' opinion of the project and tarnished their trust, as you can see from that blog post, and comments on here and on Reddit. It would be a mistake to ignore or dismiss them.
- drshapeless 1y agoBlog post author here. I never expect my blog post to get this much attention. I was emotional when I wrote that blog because I had spent a couple weeks to rewrite a service for self use. And the service was almost completely migrated to datastar from htmx. I was facing a situation where I either need to stuck with the beta, or paying a pro version, as I was using the replace-url function a lot. I was emotionally feeling betrayed. I went to the datastar reddit thread to raise my doubt that whether there would be more features that I rely on in the free version would be stripped out and be put behind the paywall. I was fine to convert my service to purely free tier features, when my service is stable and usable, I was very willing to buy a pro license. But you know what? The datastar author jumped out and stated two points. He said the release version of datastar is a full rewrite, if I am not paying, I could stay in beta or fork it. And in open source world, he owned me nothing. Very legit points. However, the real reason behind that fuck you statement is that I was attacked by the datastar discord members multiple times. In one of the humiliating replies I got, that guy said some one in the discord server told them to show support to datastar. Instead of supporting, they just mocked me and called me a troll as if I was an obstacle to their potential success, multiple people, multiple times. I noticed some comments in the thread said that I don't know how to use version control, or ignorant towards software license. Well, I do use version control and occasionally contribute to open source projects. I am a doctor, I may not be as skillful as you all, but I do know some basics in programming.
- sudodevnull 1y agoOur Discord is generally a friendly place, but not the nicest. If you can't backup your ideas or defend your code with metrics you are gonna have a bad time. We help those that help yourself. IIRC you were forcefully tell how things should work so it'd be more like HTMX. We tend to go tit for tat so go back and look if we were actively dissuading you from bad ideas.
- drshapeless 1y agoI did not propose anything or push any ideas. I have only asked two questions, one was about the best practice of using datastar with go templ, one was expressing my doubt that whether more features will be behind paywall. I got personal attacks, publicly or by DMs. A guy told me that they were told to defend the project. The only nice thing I got from them was an alternative method to imitate replace-url function using only free-tier features.