Companies using lots of OSS packages without ever giving back a dime. The argument is always that this helps developers get a job, but often enough the jobs don't allow the developers to work full time on those packages, but they are still somehow expected to continue the work in their past-time.
The guy posted the results of his call for funding, he got to $50 a month on patreon! For maintaining a package that likely 100s or 1000s of companies depend on for the work.
I firmly believe that Linux had not used GPL it would not be anywhere as big as it is today
It happened to a few maintainers I know. These companies save millions in development cost on the back of a few developers in developed countries. This is open source, I get it, but this isn't fair either.
Look at that comment:
> ....yikes. Sounds like a fork needs to happen. And github should really look to provide a 'risk' rating to projects from a maintenance PoV... a project depended on by 4.5m users with 1 maintainer should visualise as a high-risk dependency.
It's not up to GitHub to do that, it's up to the individual or the company to audit a project and its dependencies and be prepared to be able to maintain it themselves. Or pay the only developer to do exactly that.
Another comment (quoted by another guy):
> Babel maintainer here We are probably not going to fork core-js because we don't have enough resources to maintain it.
And people expect a single developer to have the resources to do exactly that? look at babel and the list of sponsors, yet they don't have the resources:
FOSS became entitlement for big companies to demand free work from third world country developers while making millions...
Then, once you're hired and they're paying you, they certainly don't want you wasting their resources (paid time, IP) contributing free software.
The entire tech industry is morphing more and more into a dumpster fire itself.
Show me where anyone said they where entitled to his labour. It was him who felt entitled to advertise.
He can ask for all the dimes he wants, He just can't add such adverts to the codebase.
I'm curios why do you think that. If the codebase is a fruit of his efforts, why shouldn't he do as he wants with it?
I would understand that in cases where a maintainer adds malicious code - but that's not the case here. Author asks for donations, the only negative effect of it is NPM logs getting longer. I think he's well within his moral rights here.
Who decides who can, and cannot advertise? There are many ways to solicit donations - the problem here is he chose to go against convention and put those ads in a common space. Does every other contributor of JS packages not have this right to advertise?
Perhaps NPM requires specific rules against advertisement, but the moral aspect wrt is "this is why we can't have nice things", or in this case, why we need explicit rules.
Misrepresenting the argument, and name-calling, also don't help.
There is also the fact that not including ads would require less labour than including them, even if removing them requires further labour. being "entitled" to correct behaviour isn't unreasonable. IS it OK for me to spam you, because I don't owe you shit either. morality is a society/community-level contract. It doesn't matter what is owed at a labour level, quid-pro-quo is you don't put adds in npm, we all don't put ads in npm. Breaking a social convention should require community consensus.
Why should an individual contributor not be allowed to partake in that, when the people who are using his work are making money off it?
A social convention, who put you in charge of that? There are plenty of bad conventions in this world, no one should be obligated to follow them.
Despite the fact that big tech makes money selling ads - none of those companies exhibited such trashy behavior.
Asking for a piece is not the problem. If I asked you if I could marry your daughter - no problem asking that right? But if I asked you while I was banging her right in front of you that would be a bit trashy. See the difference?
Personally, I've used this piece of software - but if it didn't exist, there are many, many other options for me and I wouldn't lose one wink of sleep over it.
Not the same thing at all.
No one "put me in charge" of social convention, they are established naturally, And this one was not a bad one.