
On Funding Hapi.js Core Development - bricss
https://sideway.com/room/8j
======
aikah
It's a wider problem with open source in general. Starting a project to build
your career is great, but a lot of projects end up with the creator "not
having the time to maintain it anymore".

Sure, in the open source world nobody owes anybody anything. And it is the
responsibility of the user to choose carefully the libraries he is going to
use.

But when asked, creators often refuse to delegate, add contributors with merge
rights ... so the project is abandoned and of course the issues accumulate on
Github. Or someone forks the project and make it his own then the cycle
continue.

That's personally why I stopped using Coffee-script for instance. "J is busy"
was often used as an excuse to let things rot for 2 years... except it's a fn
programming language people depend on... so busy J needs to delegate or give
stewardship of the project to someone who has the time ...

It's obvious to me that a corporation backed or foundation backed opensource
project is always preferable to one lead by a single person that will sooner
or later abandon the whole thing.

~~~
jondubois
>> It's obvious to me that a corporation backed or foundation backed
opensource project is always preferable to one lead by a single person that
will sooner or later abandon the whole thing.

I've been working on a popular open source project for 3 years and I have no
plans of stopping. There are only three conditions which would cause me to
quit:

1\. People stop using it.

2\. I become physically/mentally incapacitated.

3\. I die.

Also, I'm sure someone from the community would step up and take over of the
project if I got hit by a bus.

I think that there is no correlation (single person vs corporation); there are
pros and cons in both cases. Hapi was backed by Walmart Labs (corporation).
SailsJS started running into issues with their community precisely when things
started to get commercial.

I think that a lot of popular 'single person' (started by a single person)
projects might actually last longer because the original authors tend to feel
more responsible to the people/companies who have entrusted them personally.
Also, in the single-person scenario, the author might perceive 100 users as
being a lot; while a corporation might think that 10K users is not a lot.

Small projects not backed by corporations are usually more tight-knit.

~~~
_pmf_
> 2\. I become physically/mentally incapacitated.

You're lucky if your job does not wear you down to the point at which this is
the case; most people are not.

~~~
ekryski
Sure, but it's about balance and setting expectations with the users of your
open source framework. Being transparent and delegating responsibility. Your
project can only scale as well as you can and that is limited by the number of
hours in the day. It's called "open source" for a reason and typically the
nature of open source is not money but shared knowledge and contributions. If
you're looking for money it probably should just be closed source.

------
rmason
Why doesn't he launch on Patreon? Evan You, the creator of Vue.js, is up to
$9K a month which is triple what he's asking to maintain Hapi.js.

~~~
dawnerd
I'd gladly pitch it on patreon. We use it for almost all of our client work
now so it's really the least I could do.

------
natrius
In the Ethereum ecosystem, we're experimenting with a model for building
decentralized foundations to fund open source software. When the Red Cross
asks for your money to help disaster victims, your money doesn't actually go
to that disaster. It goes to the next one. Similarly, we can build
organizations that use the volunteer work they're already doing as fundraising
campaigns so they can spend it to fund contract work once they've collected
enough.

Most work gets done within organizations because we know how to use them to
build economic power. If we want to get things done outside of formal
organizations, we need to figure out how to build economic power from scratch.
That's what Benefactory is about.

[https://blog.benefactory.cc/how-benefactory-groups-
tokenize-...](https://blog.benefactory.cc/how-benefactory-groups-tokenize-
movements-a5bea405229f)

------
erikb
One should not confuse "funding this project" with "funding my time spent on
the project because I'm the original author" or with "funding my attempt to
keep me in the head maintainer position of this project".

Part of "funding this project" is implementing structures that the effort of
all its user-developers is used to the projects improvement. That may mean to
add more maintainers if one doesn't have enough time. That may mean to include
other users in the search for investors. That may mean to stop public
engagement publicly to see who else is engaged in keeping it going.

With what I read in the article it looks like this project will either die in
a few months because the maintainer is drained of his energy, or if other
people are really engaged as well it will be forked and all but his best
clients will switch to the fork.

------
misterbowfinger
_I doubt I am going to pass it on to someone else as long as I am an end user
of the framework. You get a great free framework and I get a framework that
works exactly the way I want it to with the ability to jump into the code at
any time and make adjustments that improve it for me. That 's the open source
deal._

He can totally find another maintainer, or a group of maintainers that would
do a great job. Kind of selfish of him to hang onto it, tbh.

~~~
olingern
He could, but I agree with his logic that overall quality of the codebase
could degrade without his attention to core. The core project is a result of
his ideas and vision, so having others jump in and take over would be
difficult.

Parse is in a similar state. Stable, maintained by the community, but no
longer under a company umbrella. It had a lot of promise, and it's unfortunate
Facebook decided to spin it down.

A lot of these tools will fall to the wayside as other more efficient, shiny
tools replace them, i.e. Angular 1.

In general, tool turnover is quite high in the Javascript community. I would
expect Hapi to share the same fate as every other Javascript framework that
stopped being actively maintained.

------
Illniyar
Unrelated but 250$ an hour sounds to me to be really high (though I'm not from
SV so maybe there it isn't?) , anyone know what kind of clients he has or what
type of consulting does he do? (it's obviously programming from the blog, but
what kind of programming freelance work gets 250$/h)

Or rather, how do you get to be able to charge so much (and obviously being
valued so much by so many companies)

~~~
jondubois
It's about knowing the right people and maintaining a reputation. Also, I
suppose that since he maintains Hapi, he would understand it really well and
would be extremely efficient when using it for his clients.

------
kabes
He explains it as if the project only costs him money. However, it also helps
build his resime/image, which may contribute to him being able to ask such a
high rate ($250/hour).

~~~
dmitri1981
Opportunity cost is still a cost. If he was not working on the project he
could be billing clients for that time

~~~
Anasufovic
Yes, but the point being is that if he wasn't the core maintainer would he
still get that same rate?

------
mildavw
Could a "pro" version work like it did here?
[https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq)

~~~
bdcravens
Is it possible to run a private npm registry and to pull from multiple
registries? (How Sidekiq works)

~~~
bhanu421
You can use [https://github.com/dickeyxxx/npm-
register](https://github.com/dickeyxxx/npm-register) which is an actively
maintained private npm registry used in production and maintained by Heroku.

------
simlevesque
Hapi is so good. I don't have any problems with it. Eran does a great job
maintaining it.

------
bricss
[https://www.patreon.com/eranhammer](https://www.patreon.com/eranhammer)

------
gotofritz
Am I the only one who think this kind of goes against the spirit of open
source? I thought the idea is to allow everyone to contribute to shared
solutions for the common good. Here instead one engineer has convinced his
employer to share some of the code they invested on, so that he could then
quit the company and go and charge a fortune working as a consultant.

The obvious solution would be to pass on the torch, or at least share the
burden. But he's unwilling to do so. I guess being the main maintainer of Hapi
is what allows him to charge $2k per day to his clients.

------
srikz
I was just listening to a podcast interview with the creator of sqlite [1] and
how they manage funding despite the product being in the public domain with a
completely unrestricted license. SQLite is used everywhere, therefore they
probably could find sponsors easily. It's amazing that hapi.js is so stable in
the rapidly changing world of web (I'm a webdev noob so probably don't
understand how it works)

[1]:[https://changelog.com/podcast/201](https://changelog.com/podcast/201)

------
siscia
What I am trying to do with rediSQL[1] (a redis module that embedded sqlite)
is to sell commercial software that add values to the OS version... In this
way small companies or projects can take advantage of my work, but if they
need more performance or features they will have to contribute to the project.

[1]: [https://github.com/siscia/rediSql](https://github.com/siscia/rediSql)

------
merb
what actually is hapi.js?

it looks like a http/web framework for server-side js?

> A rich framework for building applications and services

is really nonsense. from the example's it really looks like a http framework
for server-side js but it's really unclear from the description.

~~~
gotofritz
Yes it's a node server side framework

