Comment by csande17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csande17 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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...

> [...] 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

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.

> this is a linter

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

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

Does the message not display if I pull in a dependency that depends on this? It's only an issues if I'm directly and willingly using it?

That is correct. StandardJS should be installed as a devDependency and therefore downstream users will never see a sponsor message. Just direct users.

Elsewhere on Github, you tell people who want to integrate your ads specifically to include it as a regular and not a devDependency in order to cause the ad to be shown to users who transitively depend on it.

https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-server/pull/685

"@mixmix, thanks for the support! It means a lot to me and I hope that having others join in will help shift the discussion on this topic, even if (like you said) we don't like sponsor messages as the ultimate funding model here.

Btw, I think you'll want to make this a dependency if you intend for end users to see the sponsor message. Otherwise, it will only be run for folks who are developing on ssb-server."

I am with you on this one. I am shocked at the outburst of negative attention this is getting.

I am sadden that so many people are judging this library on metrics like LOC instead of evaluating it based on the value it provides to the users.

It's also clear to me that the author considers this an experiment. At this point you can say it's a failed experiment, but the guy is getting way too much hate for simply trying...

I also don't understand the complete revulsion to ads. I hate ads too, but geez, people act like ads killed their grandmother or something.

I am just blown away at how this is being received. And I say this as someone who does not use this library. But I've used plenty of small, low effort, libraries that are derivatives of larger projects and I appreciate any effort put in by people to make my life easier.

> 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.

I think you're missunderstanding the reasoning behind the backlash. People are understandably angry at this, because they are afraid of this becoming the norm. Unlike places like the browser, the terminal is a tool that is used strictly for work reasons for most people. Not only that, but for CI logs, it's essential for day to day work.

It only takes one brave soul to try something, see if people put up with it, to become the norm.

Also, I'm really not sure of why you are calling it "config file" in quotations if we're downplaying his work, because that's literally all it really is. A thin wrapper around ESLint doesn't really count for much. And as FED, I'm not really necessary what all this "cost of running" you speak about is.

I'm sure Feross has put a lot of time and effort into his config file, but what about the developers behind ESLint? The actual tool Standard.js runs on? How much % of the funding earnings by Standard is passed to the ESLint team?

Plus, it's not like the community doesn't exactly have a bone to pick with an already controversial library already well known for deceiving beginners. Even people like Dan Abramov (Redux's creator) called out it's unfair to call this library "Standard" when it enforces coding practices well known to have many gotchas for beginners and that are far from the norm. But of course, the creator couldn't care less about this, as he is well aware that calling it "Standard" brings lots of traffic to his library.

Rent seeking is commonly defined as seeking to extract economic gain without contributing back a benefit. Whether you like the project/funding approach or not, it doesn't seem to fit the accusation of "rent seeking".

the maintainer uses rent seeking as intention himself. [0]

[0] https://github.com/feross/funding/issues/7#issuecomment-5245...

The maintainer says they have to pay for rent. Whether advertising in your open source project is good or not, wanting money to pay your landlord for rent isn't rent-seeking just because you saw the word rent in it. I'm assuming you hadn't heard of the term rent-seeking before and just read the two words and decided it must mean "looking for money to pay your rent".

Rent-seeking is a term with a specific definition [0] and "I need to pay my rent" isn't it. In simple terms, rent-seeking refers to the behavior of the landlord, not the behavior of a tenant. It may even be a term that applies to this situation, but the dev saying they need to pay their rent is entirely unrelated.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Note that even the landlord is not "rent seeking" in the economics sense, even though they do literally "seek rent" as an essential element of their job.

A landlord is seeking compensation for a mutually beneficial transaction ("you get shelter; I get money") and is providing value to the tenant.

If I block off a river and charge you a toll to pass, I'm rent seeking. If I dig the Panama Canal and charge you a toll to pass, I'm not rent seeking.

Thanks for the link, I was indeed unaware of the term.

By looking through the ongoing discussion, it was interesting to find a reference to the core-js issue [0] from earlier this year. Its maintainer, with his established position in the npm community, makes use of a similar post-install script to open up a discussion and communicate his situation. This gives him a more direct communication channel to its users without directly helping his situation.

What I assume can be understood as a rent-seeking practice, is how fooreys intention, with the same political power in maintaining a popular package, seems not to be solely to raise awareness to his situation. But instead he's forced a solution to his problem by advertising unrelated 3rd party products. Whereas he interestingly also uses the term experiment, it did already render npm as a space for advertisement.

[0] https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/548

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