from Hacker News

Standard JS: npm install funding

by ndrake on 8/24/19, 1:24 PM with 123 comments

  • by clappski on 8/24/19, 2:26 PM

    > The sponsorship pays directly for maintainer time. That is, writing new features, fixing bugs, answering user questions, and improving documentation.

    As far as I can tell, this project is literally just a 200 line configuration file for a linter. Not even editor integrations for the linter, just a configuration file for it.

    Is it truly something that requires funding to 'add new features'? How much time does it take out of your day to add a new line of JSON to a configuration file, or is the sponsorship there to pay for all the bikeshedding that's probably happening in the issues and comments on the project?

    What sort of bugs are there in a linter configuration file?

    I'm really confused by all of this.

    > The funds raised so far ($2,000) have paid for Feross's time to release Standard 14 which has taken around five days.

    Five days to do what? Five full 8 hour days? Does it take 5 days to cut a GitHub release and push it to NPM? What about the other contributors that give up their time for free, are their contributions worthless?

    Rather than feeling like a way to support FOSS developers or FOSS projects, it feels like a rather backhanded attempt at monetization by the maintainer where Standard was picked out because it was the his most popular project, and therefore would return the greatest advertising revenue.

    Do JavaScript developers, or people that use this project, have a more nuanced opinion than me? I do zero web development, is this type of stuff normal?

  • by csande17 on 8/24/19, 10:41 PM

    It's interesting to think about the different motivations people have for contributing to open source. You've got ideologues like Stallman who believe that source code ought to be free and are working to achieve that belief by writing software and giving away its source code.

    You've got people (and companies) who are essentially making a deal with the community: "I wrote this because it was useful to me. Maybe it'll be useful to you too. If I share the code with you and you contribute a change back, we'll both benefit."

    You've got the ones who do it for marketing reasons. Either companies trying to sell "Enterprise Edition" or support/hosting services, or developers trying to build their personal brand to get hired.

    You've got products that begrudgingly throw tarballs over the wall to satisfy licensing obligations, like the Nintendo Switch web browser and most of opensource.apple.com.

    ...And then there's this guy, who is seeking rent on a linter configuration file.

  • by Tobloy on 8/24/19, 8:01 PM

    In the issue the author uses the words "I" "me" and "we" 13 times, but refers to himself in the third person exactly once in this sentence:

    "The funds raised so far ($2,000) have paid for Feross's time to release Standard 14 which has taken around five days."

    Without the third person stuff that's

    "The funds raised so far ($2,000) have paid for my time to release Standard 14 which has taken around five days."

    I use dozens of development tools every day. Counting something as small as a transitive dependency on a configuration for another tool wrapped up as a package, it's probably hundreds, perhaps thousands.

    I would feel embarrassed to take $2000 for a single update to put third party advertising banners in to the channels those tools use to report their operational and diagnostic status.

  • by verisimilitudes on 8/24/19, 9:20 PM

    Essentially, we have a public good which is consumed by huge numbers of users, but which almost no one pays for. Fortunately, there exists a funding model that usually works for public goods like this – ads.

    I like how advertisements, which are inherently unethical, are now being billed as ethical because they lack the awful things piled on top of an already awful thing. I anticipate this going about as bad as it possibly can, and I'm going to find it amusing if and when it does.

    It's always these JavaScript projects I see doing this stupid shit. It's amusing to see these people, many of whom participate in shoving advertisements on others, not care for the same treatment.

    I write Free Software libraries and the only thing I'm currently asking for is that people share the work they base on my own, which is why it's under the GNU Affero General Public License version three.

    These JavaScript projects use a great deal of Free Software, but they act as if they're important or significant enough to warrant such things. I use GNU Emacs, GCC, various other compilers, various servers, and many other things, but these code artisans put advertisements in their drivel because they don't think they're making enough money from it, and this is an attitude many of these JavaScript people share. I intend to try to make money off my future projects by either selling documentation or being paid for writing the project to start with.

    I could go on a much longer rant, but why bother?

  • by lacker on 8/25/19, 2:04 AM

    I appreciate the struggle Feross has trying to get paid for his work. simple-peer and webtorrent are both pretty nice libraries and it is a real contribution to the world that he wrote them.

    But, I don’t think this is going to work. npm install ads are like popup ads; they appear when you don’t want to see them and annoy your customers. Like popups, I think they will prove to be ineffective. Does Linode even want this ad? I think respectable companies would rather not annoy their customers like this.

    I also think npm will ban this practice if it becomes widespread enough for them to bother - by my reading of npm’s rules they ban it already because they ban “adware”. If console.log becomes full of ads and useless during an npm install, it is pretty simple to disallow packages from displaying messages at install time. (Many or most package managers for other languages already do this.)

    While it is possible to get paid for open source work, I think this project is just not quite valuable enough to get paid for maintaining it. If you maintain something like Vue it’s a different story.

  • by Hamuko on 8/24/19, 8:59 PM

    Fun fact: adware is one of the listed types of content that is considered unacceptable by npm's Terms of Service.

    https://www.npmjs.com/policies/open-source-terms#acceptable-...

  • by RyanCavanaugh on 8/24/19, 5:19 PM

    "This command barely outputs any text; if we display a sponsorship message here it'll get noticed - great idea! Can't believe no one thought of this before."

    "The city park has tons of grass, but no one is having their cattle eat it. Missed opportunity! I'm bringing my herd over to get some sweet public grazing in."

  • by fooey on 8/24/19, 11:17 PM

    There's a response from Linode copied to the issue now saying "This ad was not paid for or solicited by Linode"

    https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381#issuecommen...

    > I just recieved this response.

    > Hello,

    > We definitely understand your objection to an advertisement of this nature. This ad was not paid for or solicited by Linode. There is an open issue/thread regarding this advertisement on the package's Github repository.

    > We appreciate you voicing your concerns about this ad, and I've passed along your feedback to our team who will be investigating this matter. If you have any other questions or concerns please let us know.

    > Best Regards,

    > ### #.

    > Linode Senior Support

  • by gruez on 8/25/19, 1:17 AM

    off-topic:

    Does anyone else hate the naming of this package, which is essentially a coding style? It's made to sound authoritative, like it's drafted by a standards committee and ratified by a large proportion of the programming population, but nope. It's yet another opinionated eslint config with some controversial parts (eg. no semicolons). Call it Feross' standard or something, don't try to make it sound like it's the standard style.

  • by nexuist on 8/25/19, 7:50 AM

    Friends, you cannot have your cake and eat it too. The amount of people second guessing whether a "configuration file" is worth $2,000 is exactly why even the most popular open source packages rely on corporate buy in to justify development time.

    Where do we set the fence posts? "It's just a CSS file" for Bootstrap? "It's just a packaging system" for Webpack?

    Who cares? If it saves you hundreds of hours of development time, then it's a net benefit for you, and you should pay it back. The fact that nobody has asked you to do so until now does not mean you weren't supposed to do it before. You should, but you didn't, so now OSS maintainers have to put ads in your donation's place.

    If you do already donate to open source - great! Set the OPEN_SOURCE_CONTRIBUTOR flag to true and be on with your day.

    If we ignore `standard` and the controversy behind its "simplicity" - would you be mad if Vue came out with this model? Bootstrap? What about Webpack or ESLint itself?

    Would you trade ads in the CLI in exchange for no corporate chokehold on your favorite packages? How about funding many thousands of solo developers who don't have corporate backing but can theoretically justify working on their useful packages if they were able to afford monthly expenses from it?

  • by westoque on 8/24/19, 6:18 PM

    I like the idea of funding an open source project so it's maintained. However, I don't like the choice that feross made here, which is ads. It's very intrusive to get shown ads while I'm working and focusing on a task, even if it's just installing a package. Output and errors are already hard to read in the terminal, and having ads contribute to it makes it even harder.

    I believe the correct way to solve the problem of open source funding is through sponsors and their names shown through the README or through a patreon or similar platform.

  • by kethinov on 8/24/19, 5:21 PM

    I made an ad blocker for this: https://github.com/kethinov/no-cli-ads

  • by jsf01 on 8/24/19, 6:15 PM

    This is pretty scummy. If it becomes acceptable to display ads in the terminal, through popularization by usage in heavily relied upon packages like Standard, I imagine this will balloon fairly quickly into a common practice.

    Thankfully this is all open source and standard doesn’t add much on top of eslint outside of rapid setup and a preset config, so I expect that the community will just make an ad-free version.

  • by dictum on 8/24/19, 6:55 PM

    Of ads in documentation and installation messages, I have the same opinion as ads in websites: performance, resource usage (network, computing, memory) and tracking are what bother me; subtle, non-misleading, generic ads don't.

    I'm more concerned about overeager telemetry in software. If these ads don't come with performance/network/privacy baggage, I'm OK with them.

    That leaves open the chance of libraries implementing some third party library to display ads, which then starts tracking users, etc. as happened with ads on the web, but that's another debate.

    And from looking at donation pages for many well-known projects, outrage outweighs donation volume.

  • by thosakwe on 8/24/19, 10:05 PM

    In my own view, as an open source maintainer, aiming to gain revenue from open-source is kind of a fool’s errand, as it’s not really compatible with FOSS. It’s just not.

    At the end of the day, the best way for a single developer to extract revenue from a software project is to sell licenses, which is nothing new.

    Obviously, it’s just my two cents, but I’ve long realized that I will probably never see a dime from my open source work, and that’s fine by me. That’s not my goal in producing free software, to begin with, and I don’t know of many cases where that’s worked out without starting a complementary company/foundation (RedHat, MongoDB, etc.)

  • by mr_puzzled on 8/25/19, 5:44 AM

    While I agree that ads are not a good way to fund foss development, what I find disgusting is the hate directed towards the maintainer for trying out this experiment and towards the project itself. This sort of hate is what pushes good people away from foss projects and I've seen this play out many times over the years. Please let your disagreement known to the authour with good reasoning, do not hate on his project or make personal attacks on the author.

  • by sequoia on 8/24/19, 6:57 PM

  • by ivanhoe on 8/24/19, 9:17 PM

    On one hand it sounds as a totally crappy move, but on the other hand if we don't like it we're free to fork it and try to maintain our own ads free version - which most of us will not do ever, because frankly we're all lazy bastards used to someone else do that shit for us...

  • by roryrjb on 8/24/19, 8:38 PM

    I noticed this the other day. I think, at least to me it's pretty simple; open source should be funded but the terminal is not the place to display ads.

  • by why-oh-why on 8/24/19, 6:02 PM

    Regardless of Feross’ choice, it’s hard to believe how bullish are many of the commenters there. It’s saddening. Manners are dead and people feel entitled.

  • by s_Hogg on 8/25/19, 4:01 AM

    from memory GNU parallel has been advertising on the command line for ages, specifically:

    " This helps funding further development; AND IT WON'T COST YOU A CENT. If you pay 10000 EUR you should feel free to use GNU Parallel without citing."

    Or words to that effect.

    I haven't really been bothered about that, but I could see myself joining a riot if everyone decided that was a good idea. This guy is just bringing that closer.

  • by lewiscollard on 8/24/19, 10:48 PM

    The GitHub issue is now limited to contributors only, and perhaps rightly so as they tend to turn into total shitshows, won by the "clever" one-liner and emoji counts. This was a good reminder to send Feross $50 as a token of my appreciation for his work. Which I just did!

    But please, please, Feross: NPM package installs are noisy enough as it is as every package seems to think it has VERY IMPORTANT things to say which are actually noise I could live without. Please do not add to the number of steamers that are being shat onto my terminal any time I do npm install/yarn. :( I understand that you should be rewarded for your work, but this isn't at all the way to go. And given that even on one of my own tiny personal projects, when you factor in the dependencies, there are like five hundred packages this just will not scale :/

  • by tracker1 on 8/24/19, 11:55 PM

    I think the biggest issue for me, if I saw this, is that it isn't entirely clear where it is coming from... A final line with maybe a different bgcolor (dark gray or black, with light gray test) "[Ad] Thank you (sponser) for supporting standard development." Or similar.

  • by z3t4 on 8/24/19, 6:55 PM

    I try to adapt to the style of the code I'm contributing to. While I do have arbitrary style preferences of my own, I think its mostly a waste of time to argue about and formatting your code like changing " to ' and vice versa. So I both hate and love these tools.

  • by m712 on 8/25/19, 7:31 AM

    I seriously don't want this to, well, become the standard. Shoving ads/sponsorships on my face will not make me more enthusiastic about the product that the advertiser is selling, but rather will make me more reluctant to install standard.

  • by z3t4 on 8/25/19, 11:45 AM

    When developing for Windows we paid for windows, windows server, msaccess, mssql, and when we needed a third party component/module we paid for that too, even when all it did was to put an email in the pickup folder. Developing for Linux and with the Node.JS ecosystem is quite a different experience.

  • by dandigangi on 8/24/19, 6:45 PM

    That's a lot of downvotes :X

    Agreed with the other comments that npm install will become a CLI version of annoying popups and banners that are EVERYWHERE on sites now.

    Plus - who controls it? The core package author? Can the dependencies log their own messages to?

  • by z3t4 on 8/24/19, 8:48 PM

    Another idea is a business model where you pay depending on your company's earning, like with taxes.

  • by VeejayRampay on 8/25/19, 5:36 AM

    strange to see so many people say that this doesn't look like a lot of work, that it's just a linter...

    Feross created webtorrent so maybe let's show some respect for the skills and commitment

  • by goatinaboat on 8/24/19, 9:16 PM

    I guess we all know to avoid Linode and LogRocket now

  • by artursapek on 8/24/19, 9:19 PM

    The balls on this guy!

  • by asimjalis on 8/25/19, 12:16 AM

    I love this. While there is model for funding web and mobile apps there is nothing comparable for software libraries. I like the spirit of experimentation of this project.

    People who disagree with this should propose alternatives that address their issues rather than shooting this down.

  • by ryanlol on 8/24/19, 5:05 PM

    What’s the deal with these people acting like their terminals are some sacred advertising-free spaces?

  • by JerryBerryDerry on 8/24/19, 7:38 PM

    Not sure where to begin. I'd love to see RMS weigh in on this.

    1.) Ads. If you choose to fund/compensate via selling ad space you are lazy (or lack the talent/skills to innovate); period. Can you generate income/revenue, sure. Selling ad space as a primary means of revenue is where innovation and alternative options go to die; you believe you are out of options (unless a rev kicker).

    2.) If you are having second thoughts about the time and/or contributions you (maintainer(s)) have been making to a F/OSS project then do exactly that...rethink what YOU (as a maintainer/project founder) want and do not want. If you need to step away..do it; I do not blame you. If you want to go "for profit"...go for it and good luck.

    3.) There is no shortage of historic precedence for projects that decided, after some time, to adopt/create a business/profit model. If the project was important enough, to the community, it forked and others took it the rest of the way.

    4.) Now, do I believe PEOPLE should be compensated, to a degree, for time they have donated to F/OSS; sure. People NOT project(s). The demarcation point should be very clear here. Do not drag the project/software into what is a people problem.

    Incentivize project consumers to "invest" in a contributor/maintainer/founder and they should be held to a contribution count and or release/feature schedule; these are not high fives and gifts, although I am happy to give high fives. If you want to be compensated you have to be held to some deliverable; we are not "bros".

    I love F/OSS and incredibly appreciate the efforts of the community. I do think it is unfortunate that contributors time is not "more valuable" (yet) in this world and am happy to support within a supplied innovative solution. I would continue to, and do currently, contribute to a number of F/OSS contributors via patreon. These maintainers are producing great libs and are VERY responsive to questions/issues/feature requests and release schedules.