I'm fucking tired. Free open-source software is fundamentally broken. I could stop working on this silently, but I want to give open-source one last chance.
I am somewhat shocked by how few people feel like they should pay for software. I see a lot of paid apps in the MacOS world, which I think is good, especially for more complex projects. I also see...
I am somewhat shocked by how few people feel like they should pay for software. I see a lot of paid apps in the MacOS world, which I think is good, especially for more complex projects. I also see a lot of split licensing where business pay and individuals can use an app for free.
Truth be told, I wish the open source software I would bug me for money more often. And, I hope this github text inspires a conversation of change in the relationship we have with open source devs. I hope this leads to normalizing paid open source software from the outset of a project and better respect for the people maintaining projects.
I kind of like the elementaryOS model, where they have a curated store of high quality open source apps. Many of them are pay-what-you-want, some with a set minimum.
I kind of like the elementaryOS model, where they have a curated store of high quality open source apps. Many of them are pay-what-you-want, some with a set minimum.
That is another agreeable model. It's kind of like Bandcamp's model for artists. You can usually pay more if you really like a record, but there's a fixed price floor. I'd like to see more 14-day...
That is another agreeable model. It's kind of like Bandcamp's model for artists. You can usually pay more if you really like a record, but there's a fixed price floor.
I'd like to see more 14-day trials, then a set minimum with the option to pay more. I think it helps a user fairly assess the value the software delivers to them. Plenty of open source apps should be paid software and the notion that useful tools should be free needs to go.
As one of the people he describes - vaguely aware of core-js as being necessary, but not of the scope or the fact it essentially depends on one guy - I've got some mixed and kind of conflicting...
As one of the people he describes - vaguely aware of core-js as being necessary, but not of the scope or the fact it essentially depends on one guy - I've got some mixed and kind of conflicting feelings from this. I spent the whole (long) article oscillating back and forth between:
Man, OSS incentives are fucked. Any big tech firm could throw him a six-figure job with a title like "JS compatibility engineer" and just leave him to do what he's doing now; it'd be a literal rounding error to them and a ludicrous bargain compared to not having the library available for their projects.
This guy seems terrible at marketing and advocating for himself, and doesn't seem to have a great understanding of how important that really is as a skill. I don't like that it's so important either, but reality doesn't much care whether we like it or not.
I'm genuinely surprised at the level of directed and personal vitriol he's seeing. I know people can be assholes to anyone with vague notoriety, but this seems unusually specific. Is there another side to this that may explain (but absolutely not justify) that? Or is it really just a case of people being shitheads and I need to stop victim blaming?
I'm deeply impressed with his dedication to the project and the community of users at large, and I think the world would be a better place if more people took a bit of that attitude.
Nobody demanded that he make those sacrifices, or take this level of responsibility. He actively offered. Much as I admire his sense of duty, much as I sympathise with his clearly difficult living situation, he's angry at the world for decisions he freely chose to make.
I understand his emotional investment in the project, and I recognise that some of my thoughts above are a bit contradictory, but I feel like he could have just posted the "Depending on your feedback..." section, alone, at the top of the readme in like 2019 or so. Set a 6 month ticking clock, give transparent and actionable criteria for what needs to be done for each outcome to happen, and stick to it - no need to make himself a martyr, and a fairly efficient way to figure out whether his current level of involvement is as necessary as he clearly believes it to be.
Overall his numbers look great at the moment:
$2500/month from Patreon
$2000/month from Open Collective
$160k in Bitcoin donations
X amount of one time donations
Then stop using MIT/BSD licensing? Use GPL varients exclusively. Beauty of GPL is that you don't have to provide your code to anyone other than your customers. Use AGPL and offer a seperate paid...
Then stop using MIT/BSD licensing?
Use GPL varients exclusively. Beauty of GPL is that you don't have to provide your code to anyone other than your customers.
Use AGPL and offer a seperate paid license terms. That'll make people put up or shut up real fast.
Open Source is not a business model. It's a gift economy and/or user rights clause.
I'm not sure AGPL would work as zloirock seemingly does not want to break the web. The codebase itself would be fine, but the resulting polyfills would place your js under AGPL, which would...
I'm not sure AGPL would work as zloirock seemingly does not want to break the web.
The codebase itself would be fine, but the resulting polyfills would place your js under AGPL, which would conflict with non-gpl licenses. I might be mistaken, if you could explain how you're thinking that licensing would work I would really appreciate it!
Part of me wants to see zloirock break the web… I just feel so bad for him. People can be so cruel online and imagine the largest websites in the world going down because “we didn’t pay an...
Part of me wants to see zloirock break the web… I just feel so bad for him. People can be so cruel online and imagine the largest websites in the world going down because “we didn’t pay an overworked dev anything when they kindly asked.”
I feel bad for him too, but I do think the way he asked was one of his key mistakes - much as it frustrates me that food and shelter are gatekept by largely amoral profit maximisers, that's the...
I feel bad for him too, but I do think the way he asked was one of his key mistakes - much as it frustrates me that food and shelter are gatekept by largely amoral profit maximisers, that's the current status quo, and the only result of "please consider donating" is "OK, we considered it and did not see a financial upside compared to accepting it for free, as per your existing license". I imagine that there was an enormous bystander effect from blasting it out in the installation script, too - even a lot of the people/organisations who might have considered it just assumed that some of the however many million others would pick it up.
Quick reframing of the point to "Hey, Google, Apple, Meta, and Netflix: I've calculated that this project saves you $X million of dev time annually, but I'm not currently in a financial position to continue maintaining it. Who do I need to speak to in order for us to work together on figuring out how to make that viable, and mitigate the long-term risk that this project becoming defunct would pose to your products?" would have been a good start.
I'm not saying that would guarantee a positive outcome, nor that I'm happy about it being necessary, but I am saying that his approach seems to have all but guaranteed a negative one.
For a major version shift it'd be fine. Nobody should be ugrading majors without review anyhow, especially not anyone large enough to matter. Conflicting with the licenses is the point. AGPL...
For a major version shift it'd be fine. Nobody should be ugrading majors without review anyhow, especially not anyone large enough to matter.
Conflicting with the licenses is the point. AGPL forces everything it touches to be opened. So by having AGPL by default, it'll let GPL stuff through no problem, while giving a clear path for people to pay to get an alternative closable license instead. Not sure what off the shelf would work best, but you'd want something that is nontransferable with an expiration date. Me preferring open would want some clauses reverting paid license to a raw BSD if the paid license stops being sold, like if the company goes defunct or product abandoned.
A contributor agreement is needed for this, to insure all copywrite is ascribed to the project owner, in order to allow this relicensing. It isn't a problem for the first transition to AGPL, but that contribution agreement is neccessary to allow selling alternative licenses.
Due to everywhere core-js is used, I just don't see an AGPL license option accomplishing much. I guess if this was proposed as a way for him to still technically offer his future work open source...
Due to everywhere core-js is used, I just don't see an AGPL license option accomplishing much. I guess if this was proposed as a way for him to still technically offer his future work open source while driving users to pay for a different license. But I imaging nearly universally users will either stay on old versions or pay.
Kinda the point. Old version will break more and more, someone will need to take up reigns, freeing author of the burden. So anyone who upgrades pays up or releases their code as (A)GPL. Mission...
But I imaging nearly universally users will either stay on old versions or pay.
Kinda the point. Old version will break more and more, someone will need to take up reigns, freeing author of the burden.
So anyone who upgrades pays up or releases their code as (A)GPL. Mission accomplished.
It will get a lot larger uptake that way than going full paid/closed as proposed.
I feel like you've gotta be a little crazy to work on a project like this full time without much funding. The work's important so I can understand the drive but he doesn't owe anyone anything....
I feel like you've gotta be a little crazy to work on a project like this full time without much funding. The work's important so I can understand the drive but he doesn't owe anyone anything. Quitting now is the right move. Honestly I would have quit so long ago.
It's surprising and too bad that he got both that so much hate and so little funding for putting the funding request message in the console output when you npm-installed the package. I guess the...
It's surprising and too bad that he got both that so much hate and so little funding for putting the funding request message in the console output when you npm-installed the package. I guess the big issue is that the message would show up if you were installing any package that transitively depended on core-js. Most people seeing the message didn't even understand what core-js was, and there were probably many library authors annoyed that users now saw a large message during install about one of their transitive dependencies.
I debugged and reported a few issues involving core-js back in 2015. Core-js was really great for enabling a work project to use modern JS features on all browsers (especially Safari which was pretty behind back then). Though coincidentally, a few days ago a coworker was talking to me about removing our use of core-js because we don't need any of its polyfills today because browsers are much better at implementing things. Core-js was extremely useful once but it's maybe getting less critical now.
I don’t wanna say many words about prison and I have no great desire remembering this. It was slave labor at a chemical factory where my health was significantly ruined and where I 24/7 had a great time in a company of drug dealers, thieves, and killers (from other regimes), without access to the Internet and computers.
I am somewhat shocked by how few people feel like they should pay for software. I see a lot of paid apps in the MacOS world, which I think is good, especially for more complex projects. I also see a lot of split licensing where business pay and individuals can use an app for free.
Truth be told, I wish the open source software I would bug me for money more often. And, I hope this github text inspires a conversation of change in the relationship we have with open source devs. I hope this leads to normalizing paid open source software from the outset of a project and better respect for the people maintaining projects.
I kind of like the elementaryOS model, where they have a curated store of high quality open source apps. Many of them are pay-what-you-want, some with a set minimum.
That is another agreeable model. It's kind of like Bandcamp's model for artists. You can usually pay more if you really like a record, but there's a fixed price floor.
I'd like to see more 14-day trials, then a set minimum with the option to pay more. I think it helps a user fairly assess the value the software delivers to them. Plenty of open source apps should be paid software and the notion that useful tools should be free needs to go.
As one of the people he describes - vaguely aware of
core-jsas being necessary, but not of the scope or the fact it essentially depends on one guy - I've got some mixed and kind of conflicting feelings from this. I spent the whole (long) article oscillating back and forth between:Man, OSS incentives are fucked. Any big tech firm could throw him a six-figure job with a title like "JS compatibility engineer" and just leave him to do what he's doing now; it'd be a literal rounding error to them and a ludicrous bargain compared to not having the library available for their projects.
This guy seems terrible at marketing and advocating for himself, and doesn't seem to have a great understanding of how important that really is as a skill. I don't like that it's so important either, but reality doesn't much care whether we like it or not.
I'm genuinely surprised at the level of directed and personal vitriol he's seeing. I know people can be assholes to anyone with vague notoriety, but this seems unusually specific. Is there another side to this that may explain (but absolutely not justify) that? Or is it really just a case of people being shitheads and I need to stop victim blaming?
I'm deeply impressed with his dedication to the project and the community of users at large, and I think the world would be a better place if more people took a bit of that attitude.
Nobody demanded that he make those sacrifices, or take this level of responsibility. He actively offered. Much as I admire his sense of duty, much as I sympathise with his clearly difficult living situation, he's angry at the world for decisions he freely chose to make.
I understand his emotional investment in the project, and I recognise that some of my thoughts above are a bit contradictory, but I feel like he could have just posted the "Depending on your feedback..." section, alone, at the top of the readme in like 2019 or so. Set a 6 month ticking clock, give transparent and actionable criteria for what needs to be done for each outcome to happen, and stick to it - no need to make himself a martyr, and a fairly efficient way to figure out whether his current level of involvement is as necessary as he clearly believes it to be.
According to a reddit comment it used to be:
And now:
So I guess he's doing fine now :)
The squeaky wheel gets the grease
Then stop using MIT/BSD licensing?
Use GPL varients exclusively. Beauty of GPL is that you don't have to provide your code to anyone other than your customers.
Use AGPL and offer a seperate paid license terms. That'll make people put up or shut up real fast.
Open Source is not a business model. It's a gift economy and/or user rights clause.
I'm not sure AGPL would work as zloirock seemingly does not want to break the web.
The codebase itself would be fine, but the resulting polyfills would place your js under AGPL, which would conflict with non-gpl licenses. I might be mistaken, if you could explain how you're thinking that licensing would work I would really appreciate it!
Part of me wants to see zloirock break the web… I just feel so bad for him. People can be so cruel online and imagine the largest websites in the world going down because “we didn’t pay an overworked dev anything when they kindly asked.”
I feel bad for him too, but I do think the way he asked was one of his key mistakes - much as it frustrates me that food and shelter are gatekept by largely amoral profit maximisers, that's the current status quo, and the only result of "please consider donating" is "OK, we considered it and did not see a financial upside compared to accepting it for free, as per your existing license". I imagine that there was an enormous bystander effect from blasting it out in the installation script, too - even a lot of the people/organisations who might have considered it just assumed that some of the however many million others would pick it up.
Quick reframing of the point to "Hey, Google, Apple, Meta, and Netflix: I've calculated that this project saves you $X million of dev time annually, but I'm not currently in a financial position to continue maintaining it. Who do I need to speak to in order for us to work together on figuring out how to make that viable, and mitigate the long-term risk that this project becoming defunct would pose to your products?" would have been a good start.
I'm not saying that would guarantee a positive outcome, nor that I'm happy about it being necessary, but I am saying that his approach seems to have all but guaranteed a negative one.
For a major version shift it'd be fine. Nobody should be ugrading majors without review anyhow, especially not anyone large enough to matter.
Conflicting with the licenses is the point. AGPL forces everything it touches to be opened. So by having AGPL by default, it'll let GPL stuff through no problem, while giving a clear path for people to pay to get an alternative closable license instead. Not sure what off the shelf would work best, but you'd want something that is nontransferable with an expiration date. Me preferring open would want some clauses reverting paid license to a raw BSD if the paid license stops being sold, like if the company goes defunct or product abandoned.
A contributor agreement is needed for this, to insure all copywrite is ascribed to the project owner, in order to allow this relicensing. It isn't a problem for the first transition to AGPL, but that contribution agreement is neccessary to allow selling alternative licenses.
Due to everywhere core-js is used, I just don't see an AGPL license option accomplishing much. I guess if this was proposed as a way for him to still technically offer his future work open source while driving users to pay for a different license. But I imaging nearly universally users will either stay on old versions or pay.
Kinda the point. Old version will break more and more, someone will need to take up reigns, freeing author of the burden.
So anyone who upgrades pays up or releases their code as (A)GPL. Mission accomplished.
It will get a lot larger uptake that way than going full paid/closed as proposed.
I feel like you've gotta be a little crazy to work on a project like this full time without much funding. The work's important so I can understand the drive but he doesn't owe anyone anything. Quitting now is the right move. Honestly I would have quit so long ago.
I feel like anyone dealing with js engine bugs full time has to be a little crazy regardless of money.
It's surprising and too bad that he got both that so much hate and so little funding for putting the funding request message in the console output when you npm-installed the package. I guess the big issue is that the message would show up if you were installing any package that transitively depended on core-js. Most people seeing the message didn't even understand what core-js was, and there were probably many library authors annoyed that users now saw a large message during install about one of their transitive dependencies.
I debugged and reported a few issues involving core-js back in 2015. Core-js was really great for enabling a work project to use modern JS features on all browsers (especially Safari which was pretty behind back then). Though coincidentally, a few days ago a coworker was talking to me about removing our use of core-js because we don't need any of its polyfills today because browsers are much better at implementing things. Core-js was extremely useful once but it's maybe getting less critical now.
So he's out of prison, then.
It's mentioned in the linked post.