
Standard JS: npm install funding - ndrake
https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381
======
clappski
> 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?

~~~
sequoia
Here's the changes between the last 13.x tag and the latest (at the moment)
14.x tag (14.0.2):
[https://github.com/standard/standard/compare/v13.1.0...v14.0...](https://github.com/standard/standard/compare/v13.1.0...v14.0.2)

Analyzing the changes I leave as an exercise to the reader.

Regardless of the effort etc. and whether or not these changes were primarily
functional or related to marketing, I personally support FOS maintainers doing
whatever they want with the software they offer for free. It would be trivial
to make a fork of Standard without the adware if you wanted, and the MIT
license explicitly allows it. So more power to feross for his free offerings!
And complainers: put your fork where your mouth is.

~~~
hobofan
For a more complete look at the changes, this should also include the diffs of
the project-internal dependencies that were bumped.

[https://github.com/standard/eslint-config-
standard/compare/v...](https://github.com/standard/eslint-config-
standard/compare/v13.0.1...v14.0.1)

[https://github.com/standard/eslint-config-standard-
jsx/compa...](https://github.com/standard/eslint-config-standard-
jsx/compare/v7.0.0...v8.0.1)

[https://github.com/standard/standard-
engine/compare/v11.0.1....](https://github.com/standard/standard-
engine/compare/v11.0.1...v12.0.0)

~~~
duncan-donuts
This honestly makes it worse. I'm not even sure how you could call this stuff
major version bumps.

~~~
csande17
The main repo has a testing script to make sure changes that cause previously-
passing code to fail lint checks only happen in new major versions. Like
SemVer, but for linter configuration files.

This would be an admirable commitment to stability if the project wasn't on
its fourteenth major version.

------
csande17
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.

~~~
Klathmon
To put this as civily as I can, if you don't find any value in this tool, then
don't use it. If you think it's trivial enough to not deserve funding, don't
fund it.

If you really think it's just a config file and nothing more, then just ignore
it and move on. It doesn't hurt you with it's existence.

There are no network effects here, this is about as far from a zero sum game
as you can get.

Some of us do get value out of this "config file", quite a lot. This project
handles edge cases, enforces backwards compatable changes and improvements,
fixes bugs and config issues, and works on documentation to help it work with
other tools and systems.

That has value, and it makes my blood boil that many people are completely
disregarding the work that goes into making this project run smoothly for as
many people as possible in an area that is saturated with an insane number of
choices and a cost to switching which is about as close to zero as possible.

Please just go look at the repo, look at the changelog, look at the insane
number of downloads, issues, PRs, look at the care taken with breaking
changes, and look at how much time and effort it looks like feross puts into
this.

Please look at it, because I can't possibly imagine someone seeing all the
effort, time, and care that goes into this project and concluding that it's
just rent seeking...

~~~
csande17
> [...] many people are completely disregarding the work that goes into making
> this project run smoothly for as many people as possible in an area that is
> saturated with an insane number of choices and a cost to switching which is
> about as close to zero as possible.

It seems like you're simultaneously arguing that this project is important and
valuable and a lot of work, but also there are a million other options for
what it does and it's trivial to create new ones.

And even if I don't personally use this linter configuration file, it can hurt
me in two ways:

1\. If it's a transitive dependency of some other project I use

2\. By normalizing rent-seeking behaviors like putting advertisements in a
package's installation output

~~~
Klathmon
I'm not saying it's trivial, but that it's one of many options.

I can't make a TV myself, and I find the ability to make a TV valuable enough
that I'm willing to pay good money for one, but there are literally thousands
of options to choose from if I went to buy a TV.

As for the other parts, this is a linter, it offers no value as a transitive
dependency and it's existence in one is a mistake in the vast majority of
cases.

And I don't actually like how they are funding this. I don't like the idea of
polluting the CLI output with this stuff, especially at install time. But the
idea that the package is somehow undeserving of funding because it's trivial
or because you personally don't see the value in it is infuriating to me.

~~~
csande17
> this is a linter

ESLint is a linter. This is a configuration file for ESLint.

------
Tobloy
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.

~~~
Hamuko
How much of that money will ESLint developers get, seeing as how heavily
standard relies on it? Any guesses?

~~~
brianpgordon
That question seriously resonated with me when I saw it raised in the GitHub
thread.
([https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381#issuecommen...](https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381#issuecomment-524577750))

Any package which transitively includes `standard/standard` also inherits the
advertisement. That would seem to suggest a kind of logic like "if people are
going to use my work to help make their thing successful, it's only fair that
I'm rewarded too." And that _really does_ make sense. I could totally nerd out
over the idea of a graph-based incentive structure, maybe implemented with a
new crypto token for extra gee-whiz spiciness. If his prototype
`feross/funding` package had been launched with a built-in technical mechanism
for transitive profit-sharing I think the idea might just have been intriguing
enough to distract from some of the appalling terribleness of embedding ads in
package post-install messages.

~~~
jwalton
> Any package which transitively includes `standard/standard` also inherits
> the advertisement.

Fortunately there should not be too many of those. If you're using
`standard/standard` to format your code, it _should_ be in your
devDependencies, so if your project relies on it, and I rely on your project,
I will never see this ad.

If this model were to take off, and, say, `lodash` included an ad, that would
be a different story. You'd probably see the same ad a few times over in your
`npm install` because you probably have more than one version of lodash in
your dependency tree.

But, I can tell you right now, if you put an ad in your package, I'm going to
work pretty hard to remove your package from my dependency tree, and hopefully
there are enough people like me to stop this from taking off. :P

------
verisimilitudes
_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?

------
lacker
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.

------
Hamuko
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-...](https://www.npmjs.com/policies/open-source-
terms#acceptable-content)

~~~
jaytaylor
Actual language:

    
    
      Content containing malicious computer code,
      such as computer viruses, computer worms,
      rootkits, back doors, adware, or spyware.
      This includes content submitted for
      research purposes unless agreed to in
      advance by npm. Tools designed and documented
      explicitly to assist in security research are
      acceptable, but proof-of-concept exploits are
      not.
    

I'm not sure this form of advertising qualifies as the kind of adware which is
associated with rootkits and spyware.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
Definition of adware: "software that automatically displays or downloads
advertising material (often unwanted) when a user is online."

Sounds like adware to me. The messages are certainly unwanted. The messages
are automatically displayed be default. It meets all the criteria.

------
RyanCavanaugh
"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."

------
fooey
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...](https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381#issuecomment-524578926)

> 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

~~~
feross
Linode paid for the ad. I have the email thread, an invoice, and $1,000
sitting in my bank account to prove it. I expect this email was written by a
support agent who wasn't aware of all the details of the situation.

~~~
Tomte
Or, more probably: Linode paid for the ad, saw the backlash, and said please
remove the ad and keep the money.

In which case you're not making them any happier by disclosing this.

But I guess we'll see whether the ad comes back when the higher-ups have
realized the mistake the supporter made, right?

~~~
feross
I'm not denying that they asked for their ad to be removed. I'm just refuting
the claim that they never agreed to it in the first place.

------
gruez
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.

~~~
kemitchell
"Standard" was a joke.

The better you know Feross, the funnier it is.

~~~
naniwaduni
What a tragedy that the package has far more users than it's possible for a
human to know well!

------
nexuist
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?

~~~
traverseda
Perhaps people should stop making open source b2b tools, and focus on things
that they actually want to make for their own use.

------
westoque
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.

~~~
riffraff
from what I hear, it's not simple to get a sponsor or enough money from
patreons, even for somewhat popular projects. Open source funding is still an
unsolved problem, even if a ton of people have tried.

I don't particularly like the idea of ads in terminal either, but people can
decide not to use this, I suppose.

~~~
kemitchell
Last I attempted a systematic survey of open source developers on Patreon, I
could only find seven or so reported to be making >$1k USD per month.

Of those, many of the most successful weren't simply taking donations. It's
common to see substantial additional products of services as perks, like
access to security alerts, work prioritization, personal time, and so on.

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

~~~
empyrical
`funding` added support for suppressing the message if the env var
`OPEN_SOURCE_CONTRIBUTOR` is set - these should help quiet down a variety of
postinstall ads in CI envs and the like (the last two are used by core-js and
opencollective-postinstall)

    
    
        export OPEN_SOURCE_CONTRIBUTOR=true
        export ADBLOCK=true
        export DISABLE_OPENCOLLECTIVE=true

------
jsf01
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.

~~~
ricardobeat
I think the trend was started by Babel around a year ago. Thankfully it hasn't
picked up.

------
dictum
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.

------
thosakwe
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.)

------
mr_puzzled
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.

------
sequoia
Previously on CLI ads: [https://github.com/zloirock/core-
js/issues/548](https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/548)

------
ivanhoe
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...

~~~
brianpgordon
To me that's one of the icky aspects of this. He's parked on the very nice
`standard/standard` repo, with a project named "JavaScript Standard Style,"
emblazoned on the iconic JavaScript yellow... If you take the time to read the
readme it does say clearly about halfway down that the project isn't really a
standard at all, just one guy's idea of a helpful linter configuration. But if
you don't scroll down past all the company logos, it would be pretty easy to
get the wrong idea.

I'm not saying that a lot of work didn't go into it, or that the repo name
alone is a slam dunk for tricking tons of people. It's not like domain
squatting - this is a real project. But I do wonder if a fork would be able to
compete on equal footing without the advantage of the name. We like to think
that the availability of at least the _possibility_ of forking provides a sort
of guarantee that projects which make enough bad decisions will always be
leapfrogged by competitors and great software will rise to the top. I guess
I'm not surprised that it's raising eyebrows that this maintainer at least
seems to be deliberately pressing a marketing advantage which is just
inaccessible to potential forks.

I'm not sure what to suggest as the solution to the underlying problem of
coveted or potentially confusing package names. Namespacing library names
under user/project names was supposed to be the solution to this! Just
repeating the same word twice is a clever way around it. Maybe npm should step
in and eliminate this loophole.

~~~
ivanhoe
If the ads are a real world problem and there's alternative we would know
about it, marketing or not. It's not a shower gel or mascara, it's a lib used
by a lot of people to do their work, so people will eventually converge into
using the one that does the job best (or the one that pisses them off the
least)

~~~
brianpgordon
I'm not as convinced as you are that people will simply converge to the better
alternative. Sheer inertia from npm activity and accumulated GitHub stars can
disadvantage new, better options from gaining traction because it's not easy
for developers to take a risk on a new project that could be abandoned at any
time, and because they have to be pretty comfortable with the technology to
confidently decide that the current crowd wisdom is wrong - something that may
not be the case if the developer is working outside of their area of
expertise. standard/standard is particularly interesting because someone who's
not completely in their element could easily see

    
    
      "devDependencies": {
        "standard": "*"
      }
    

in a package.json or

    
    
      npm install standard
    

in a script, either online or in another project at work, and copy it into a
new project along with the rest of the boilerplate common packages they need,
not realizing what they've signed up for. This would create the appearance of
continuing growth and support for the package even though these users are
totally oblivious. It's not clear to me that, with that kind of tailwind, an
objectively inferior package couldn't continue to be ubiquitous and never be
"converged" out of relevance.

Still, I have to agree that the view you describe is a plausible one. If
Feross does indeed think that way - which I have no reason to doubt - then
that means that he's acting at least in _better_ faith than some are giving
him credit for.

------
roryrjb
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.

------
why-oh-why
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.

------
s_Hogg
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.

~~~
mechanical_jane
If it is as easy to silence as GNU Parallel and tells you how to do it (like
GNU Parallel also does), I do not see a problem.

------
lewiscollard
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 :/

------
tracker1
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.

------
z3t4
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.

------
m712
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.

------
z3t4
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.

------
dandigangi
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?

------
z3t4
Another idea is a business model where you pay depending on your company's
earning, like with taxes.

------
VeejayRampay
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

------
goatinaboat
I guess we all know to avoid Linode and LogRocket now

~~~
fooey
Linode is now saying they had nothing to do with it, which makes this seem
even fishier

~~~
feross
Linode paid for this ad. I have the email thread, an invoice, and $1,000
sitting in my bank account to prove it. I expect this email was written by a
support agent who wasn't aware of all the details of the situation.

------
artursapek
The balls on this guy!

------
asimjalis
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.

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

~~~
saagarjha
I would rather not have to have my terminal go down the route that the web
did. Next thing you know, we'll be installing TTY adblockers to block
fingerprinting using the terminal window size…

------
JerryBerryDerry
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.

~~~
kemitchell
How many of the developers you support on Patreon take in meaningful money,
overall?

~~~
JerryBerryDerry
Is their contribution to an F/OSS project a "job" or guarantee of income? If
you do not want to "donate" your time anymore...stop; this isn't a difficult
concept. I contribute $500/year to 4 projects that are integral to
implementations I support. And I am not attempting to sound like a hero or
what I contribute is important...but I can assure you its MUCH more than most.

~~~
kemitchell
Last time I looked into it, I could count all the open software developers
making more than $1k per person per month on donation platforms like Patreon,
Liberapay, and Open Collective on less than two hands. Most of those weren't
actually just taking donations, but using the perks system as a store for add-
on products and services like ads, access to security alerts, and work
prioritization.

I don't know you and I don't have anything to say about you. My point is on
the funding mechanism. The evidence I've seen shows that donation-based
funding a la Patreon produces a few highly funded, highly visible outliers,
many of which would be far better off doing large-dollar deals with their
larger supporters off the platform. So far, I don't think the evidence
supports recommending the donation-platform approach as a general solution to
enabling more valuable contribution from developers, even those with
substantial online reputations. Supporter counts and supporter amounts don't
bear donations alone out as a meaningful support for individuals.

~~~
JerryBerryDerry
I think you are making my point and we would support the same things. I never
said I have the solution but I did say selling ad space is not it. And I am
sorry that patreon works for some and not others and that the “curve” is not
fair. My only point was that contributors should not make their issues the
communities or the projects; it’s developer specific not project unless all
agree to make it project based; then go for profit. All things are not equal
and each project has its own lifecycle/ecosystem. We are both in agreement
that we would like a method of rewarding efforts of contributors.

~~~
kemitchell
I don't know what you'd support, only what you oppose.

