> I am no longer developing JSON Formatter as an open source project. I'm moving to a closed-source, commercial model in order to build a more comprehensive API-browsing tool with premium features.
Well, all the big tech corps done the same. Nothing to see here. OSS needs proper funding infrastructure. Which all the big players shit on. So, I can't judge him on that. His work, his time.
At the end of the day the small amounts are the real thank you and biggest driver for the work you put into something.
I wouldn't say it's the biggest driver but it did have an unexpectedly big effect.
Once upon a time, I decided to set up sponsorship on my GitHub repositories just because I had nothing to lose by doing so. Went about doing my thing, then someone posted it here and suddenly I had a sponsor.
It's not even close to paying my bills, and looking up the top projects in sponsorship revenue quickly disabused me of any notions of sponsored full time work. It still felt really nice that someone out there cared enough about my work to send me money.
This distills down to: "I don't want to be honourable." They signaled right from the beginning.
> FWIW, and since a few of you probably use it… I own the JSON Formatter extension [0], which I created and open-sourced 12 years ago and have maintained [1] ever since, with 2 million users today. And I solemnly swear that I will never add any code that sends any data anywhere, nor let it fall into the hands of anyone else who would. I’ve been emailed several tempting cash offers from shady people who presumably want to steal everyone’s data or worse. I sometimes wish I had never put my name on it so I could just take the money without harming my reputation, but I did, so I’m stuck with being honourable. On the plus side I will always be able to say that I never sold out.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37067908