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Comment by bookofsand | Hacker News Reader

Something is wrong when we expect high quality libraries for free. The authors are highly skilled individuals with mortgages to pay and children to feed. Not sure what the answer is. If coupling Observable with d3 is such an answer, then more power to them. Related, I've stumbled upon this blurb from Codemirror6. Perhaps another answer.

If you are using CodeMirror commercially, there is a social expectation that you help fund its maintenance.

https://codemirror.net/6

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There are countless high quality libraries available for free.

There really aren’t. As soon as you need something t specific, which is literally all the time in software development, you generally have less than 5 useful implementations, and that’s being generous.

If you break up countless libraries in very small and specific categories, you can start to count them, yes.

d3 for example.

> Something is wrong when we expect high quality libraries for free.

Expecting free libraries is natural because the world is built on free libraries and free software. There's models to be paid within this of course (the largest by establishing expertise and then selling support). On the contrary, expecting everyone to pay for libraries is a model proven to have a much more limited lifespan (which also has implications on the developer's career).

My developer career has been great focusing mostly on software products that consumers care to pay for.

In fact, if I learned something from free beer libraries is that it was a mistake to fall down that rabbit hole.

Bait and switch is not acceptable. If they want to make money from D3, they should charge for D3. What they're doing is disingenuous and has strong similarities to the drug trade. I don't expect people to work for me for free but I do expect people to not tell me they're going to do something for me for free and then try to find a way to charge me for it later. If they want to make a living from D3, they should be upfront about it and charge accordingly.

> has strong similarities to the drug trade.

well that's a bit over the top.

> > has strong similarities to the drug trade.

> well that's a bit over the top.

“There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software.” — Edward Tufte

"Sadly many computer users become computer dealers in order to support their habit."

-- someone's .signature on Usenet around 1992

Creating tutorials is not bait and switch. Any competent web dev can learn from the documentation instead. The Observable tutorials are no different from e.g. Heroku tutorials on Rails, or the usual web tech blog spam Logrocket churns out.

This remark is really unkind. D3 precedes Observable, and the development path is exactly what someone would take if they wanted to make data visualization accessible - create a base library, and later opinionated tools to work with it.

The harshest way to interpret unavailability of regular JS tutorials should be that the primary authors don't have enough bandwidth or the inclination to work on it, and the community hasn't picked up the slack to make it more accessible to beginners. The authors deserve nothing other than gratitude.

Maybe they should not redirect users to observable when clicking on d3js examples.

Why? It’s free software and a free OSS library. Be thankful examples even exist at all.

That’s not really the spirit of open source. Sharing, not charity.

This is about taking something that already existed and repurposing it for a commercial venture.

I’ve done a lot of open source and don’t get where you’re going.

What was repurposed exactly? Blocks? A deprecated service that nobody volunteered to take over, despite messages asking for that?

Something else?

Was it free before? Is it still free?

I was answering to “you should be happy you’re getting anything at all”. That’s not a healthy perspective for anyone.

Okay. You misquoted me but that’s alright. If you’ll address the actual point:

What was repurposed? Was it free before? Is it free now?

What does free have to redirect to another project. At minimum it should redirect to github examples page.

It redirects to live d3 examples. Free documentation that you can interact with.

That’s like saying someone redirecting documentation to codepen is “redirecting to another project.”

“At minimum” - your entitlement is truly ridiculous. There is no “at minimum” - it’s all free ffs.

It does not need to redirect to observables. It could have lived in d3js itself. I am not sure if i can copy paste it to a html/js page and run.

“At minimum” - your entitlement is truly ridiculous. So just saying a link to github is now not tolerated!

Hey I’m not sure what you mean. E.g. “ It could have lived in d3js itself.” doesn’t make sense.

Documentation does exist on GitHub.

Everything in observable is bonus.

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