Jekyll etc static site generators are harmful to free open source movement
jeremyscheff.com
jeremyscheff.com
It's not Jekyll et al. that are harmful to FOSS. The author talks about Disqus being a closed system, which is true.
However, assuming that I'm using Disqus just because I'm running a blog on Jekyll isn't a fair claim.
The same could be said for those of us who use posterous to power our blogs. I think what the author of the article really wanted is to suggest a free/open commenting platform similar to disqus. I wonder how long until we see a "Comment.js" type post now? Could be cool.
From TFA:
> So I guess what I’m saying is that we need an open source (preferably AGPL) Disqus.
Assuming every jekyll user also uses Disqus? Not fair. Assuming a significant correlation? Very fair.
What motivated my choice was security. My blog is very low-traffic, I post to it only a handful of times every year. It is not worth my time to worry about keeping WordPress updated and pruning spam from a comment list that ends up being 98% spam. Jekyll solves this so long as I'm willing to give up comments. Fair trade. If I want comments, the only way to get similar peace of mind is farming out comments to a third-party service which I do not control. (Because I do not want it to be something I have to maintain on a weekly basis.)
The web is very generational. One day such and such is the greatest thing. Then the next day another thing is the new hottness.
Static site generators are becoming very popular for a very good reason. Most sites simply don't NEED all of the crud that comes with dynamic sites. I think we'll be seeing a bit of a minimalization of a lot of websites now that static site generators are becoming more popular. This isn't a bad thing, it's almost like a reboot in a sense.
We'll likely see a large category of ways to combat the comment issue the link is discussing. But that's just one of the things that's so wrong about the article. The writer is worried about... comments?
Fact is Disqus provides a great service for people and it just so happens it works great with static sites. I know in the nanoc irc channel there was minor discussion about finding a way to use nanoc + something like couchdb to regenerate pages with new comments.
Point being, there are ways around using services like Disqus. They won't be going away and new services will pop up. The benefit here is that there's going to be a lot of changes because of static site generators. That's a good thing, it will hopefully make a lot of website generation tools a lot better.
The article however is kind of lacking any deep thought and relevent reasoning.
I happen to agree with the author. I think that it's very important that all "platform" portions of the web are open source, and disqus is becoming a very important part of the web platform. But it's not so easy to create an open source disqus. The software is one thing -- but disqus is about the service as much as it is about the platform.
If GNU/FSF are so serious about non-AGPL web services being so awful, why are they not stepping up to re-implement them? That's what they did with the previous incarnation of proprietary software.