On Funding Hapi.js Core Development
sideway.com
sideway.com
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.
In this post he mentions, "Since I am no longer employed by a major corporation generous to pay me a salary to work on hapi,". That "major corporation" was Walmart.
edit: You can see it's old URL at walmart labs via archive.org
https://web.archive.org/web/20150101071959/http://walmartlab...
Once he left they probably felt like they had a team that could contribute to Hapi core themselves if needed, and had no desire to sponsor continued work on the project other than having employees spend time on features/fixes they required. I could be way off -- just a guess at their reasoning.
Despite the blog post, hapi.js has only 8 open issues, 2 of which are bugs. Seems like they've done a good job maintaining a stable framework.
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.
You're lucky if your job does not wear you down to the point at which this is the case; most people are not.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
Or rather, how do you get to be able to charge so much (and obviously being valued so much by so many companies)
This isn't SV specific, I've had quotes in that range from DC, NYC, and the UK.
Long story short: you have to be an expert and be able to get known as an expert in your field enough to be able to justify charging that much. It's easier when you're part of a consulting firm - who obviously takes their cut out of that rate first.
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.
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.