Please reread my reply to OP carefully and notice I did not say he endorsed NPM ads. Instead, I specifically disagreed with his suggestion to redirect the discussion away from the NPM ads to the general topic of open-source funding.

>He's asking the same question I am, how do we get sufficient funding for these projects.

To be clear, that's a different question and I wasn't even attempting to answer it. I mentioned funding like Patreon as examples of social acceptability and not as examples of income sustainability.

>Kind of defeats your point.

My point was a narrow one : others are criticizing the unwelcome ad solicitation and that's a correct area of focus.

The other question of how to get sustainable open-source funding is also an important topic -- but that doesn't mean it forbids discussion of unacceptable spam/ads. They can be 2 parallel discussions.

> However, if the concrete implementation of trying to get money is unwanted and unexpected ads, then the correct focus of discussion is the criticism of that ad delivery method

But he'd already said, prior to that

> I'm not arguing that npm install logs should be packed full of ads (it shouldn't).

He'd already said no to them; you're both in agreement. There's nothing to argue about.

Having agreed that nobody wants ads, the next step is to determine how to not have them (and their nastier big sibling, telemetry and malware, which will follow) by providing funding.

(edited for brevity)

This comment is not aimed at you specifically, but everyone in this comment thread who engages in this pointless arguing.

It doesn’t matter if they both agree that text ads are bad. It’s basically a “think of the children” derailment except it’s “think of the poor foss dev”.

Here everyone says they don't like ads; and then are shocked that people want to talk about why ads are showing up and what to do about that.

We don't. Only a fool would expect to make a living wage giving something away for free.

From the beginning FOSS has been either interested individuals or employees at corporations with a vested interest. There's no reason we should expect that John Q Developer independently working on a bunch of NPM modules to be compensated by the world at large.

With all due respect, I feel this is a lack of imagination. We could have said the same thing about soup kitchens, or basic income, or social welfare, or anything else that doesn't cleanly draw profit.

So yes, it doesn't work. At least not until we demand it does and distort the legal, social, and cultural frameworks around it.

As one solitary example, what about a shift to using copyfarleft licensing that only allows MIT-level freedom to nonprofits and co-operatives, while for-profit orgs pay fees instead of just leeching. This has the added bonus of shifting benefit to platform cooperatives, which governments are already starting to ideologically favour as we all see the gleaming metal edge of platform capitalism.

There are a hundred more options if we believe building the commons is better than milking it dry.

Those are all driven by charity for the destitute. It’s not meant to be a patronage paid to starving artists. On the contrary the able bodied are expected to not draw from that well if they can provide for themselves so that more remains for the truly deserving.

> So yes, it doesn't work. At least not until we demand it does and distort the legal, social, and cultural frameworks around it. As one solitary example, what about a shift to using copyfarleft licensing that only allows MIT-level freedom to nonprofits and co-operatives, while for-profit orgs pay fees instead of just leeching. This has the added bonus of shifting benefit to platform cooperatives, which governments are already starting to ideologically favour as we all see the gleaming metal edge of platform capitalism.

There’s no such thing as partial BSD style licensing. You’re either all the way there or you’re not. Favored status to non profits is no different than discriminating from “evil” usage.

I’m not saying one can’t do that, just that there’s no half measures. I make it a point to contribute to BSD style software that I actually use and explicitly do not contribute to “shared source” bullshit.

> There are a hundred more options if we believe building the commons is better than milking it dry.

I don’t see anything going dry. The system has worked fine till now. What’s changed is the unrealistic expectation of hand outs for something you’ve already agreed to give away for free.

And for the larger discussion on building the commons I happen to think UBI is an important component. Focusing on the amateur work being done by the civil society at least, an UBI could be precisely the thing needed to free up time for cultivating the commons.

Now, granted, most UBI proponents do argue from a solidarity angle, and do think of it as some kind of charity. But I’ll offer an alternative view point. To me UBI is the foundation from which private property can be justified. Locke argued that commons, such as land, can only be taken as property when there is no contention, which is clearly not the case for anything having a market value. The just way to solve that conflict could be for the owner to simply pay the market value in rent to the commons, as compensation for the exclusive rights. Such payments could be divided as as an UBI. And I suspect it would also result i a pretty handsome amount. Enough to fund a few open source projects at least.

In the credible UBI plans I've seen, the income is Universal in the sense that "everyone gets a check", but in practice that income is paid for by those with middle or higher incomes, such that for many earners that "income" is a net tax (or neutral). "Charity for the destitute" is a bit hyperbolic, but its absolutely income supplementation for the less well off at the expense of those better off.

There are examples of large corporations hiring maintainers to work on open source and keep those projects open source. I believe pypi is an example of that.

I don't want to mention them in a public website in case that gets them in trouble.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/08/jordan-hubbard/

You might be confused because they build on top of a Free foundation, and do contribute changes back to those layers. But the bulk of their activity is plainly closed, especially the software directly associated with their brands.