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Comment by phpnode | Hacker News Reader

It's definitely time for him to let this project go, working on it is a literally thankless task and the level of entitlement shown towards his work has been infuriating to watch. The outrage towards him daring to ask the community for help, something done in an act of desperation, is a real wake up call for open source maintainers - the community doesn't give a fuck about you, they want your code and they want it free.

The psychological burden of carrying such an important but relatively unknown project has trapped him in this state of desperation for years now. It's tunnel vision and sunk loss thinking, time to quit.

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Agreed, but I think it goes beyond tunnel vision and sunk costs. He clearly likes helping developers! He is a good-hearted person who will feel bad screwing over a bunch of people who depend upon him. The main thing that's getting him to shift is that now he has a spouse and a child who depend upon him much more directly, and so he's even less willing to disappoint them.

The guy literally went to prison when he didn't have to. Holy shit.

I definitely feel bad. He’s had a really tragic set of circumstances.

At least that's how he frames it

The court documents on that case are publicly available if you're willing to look for them (and can read Russian). I haven't read everything, but I didn't see anything contradicting his side of the story.

he said he was "driving home at 3am," you know, as one does, and two girls were "crawling on the highway." i am honestly not sure i've ever heard a less believable story

I can envision many ways that can happen in America.

I have a friend who went through almost exactly the same driving event as this guy. Hit a man wearing all black on a country road at 1AM. Could have driven away but called 911, rendered first aid, and stayed through the ordeal. He also ended up spending several years in US prison for it.

Really fucked up.

I have been driving home after midnight, coming from my where my parents live, a long distance away, and encountered a man who had climbed up into the elevated highway. It was straight and well-lit, but the best I could make out was that he was running at cars wielding a cardboard box (?). I began to decelerate and moved into the lane furthest from him, at the time, and after another car in front of me passed him, he moved into my lane. I'm still braking to slow down, and I change lanes to avoid him again, swerving and praying the lights in my rear view are slowing too and don't hit me as I try to avoid this man.

As I pass him, I manage to be one lane to his left, and he makes a lunge to try and jump in front of my vehicle. With some frequency, to this day I wonder how fucked I would have been if he succeeded in jumping in front of my car. The story I tell myself is that he was mentally unwell and thought he was heroically "tilting at windmills". It is more likely he was belligerently drunk, or was suicidal and wanted some help in it.

I don't know what makes something believable or unbelievable in your mind, but these are the details of an almost-incident that happened to me.

Drunk people lying down in the street is definitely something I've seen several times in my life.

I think the part he left out is that (if I recall correctly) he was allegedly speeding to some degree.

Russia does not have a "justice system" in the way that we would understand it in the West. Instead it has (and indeed, always had) a system of patronage and bribery, where your status within the system determines your sentence. If you are an oligarch, or the son of an oligarch, you will walk free, unless you cross Putin. If you are a nobody, you pay off the right people or you go to prison or end up freezing to death in a foxhole in the Donbass (Wagner recruits directly from prison, just as Stalin emptied the gulags for his cannon-fodder in WWII).

That's just how Russia is and always has been, and unfortunately, very likely always will be.

Is Denis guilty? Perhaps, but he will not have had a fair trial by any Western standard, and so we have to presume innocence.

I mean, that part isn't really surprising or noteworthy. Lots of people in russian prison don't deserve to be there (the ones detained on protests, political cases etc).

> the community doesn't give a fuck about you, they want your code and they want it free

This is why I'm skeptical about non-free software licenses. Maybe we should all be applying AGPLv3 to our free software code instead of stuff like MIT or BSD. That way anyone who just wants to exploit people's work at their jobs to make a killing while simultaneously hating them for it will have to look elsewhere.

This old post's made a huge impression on me:

https://web.archive.org/web/20091210171517/https://zedshaw.c...

> “Hey your software is awesome! Can I get it for free so I can use it at work and make money or please my boss? That’d rock! (for me).”

> I want people to appreciate the work I’ve done and the value of what I’ve made.

> Not pass on by waving “sucker” as they drive their fancy cars.

> the community doesn't give a fuck about you, they want your code and they want it free

That's a pretty polarizing mindset. The community wants to be a community - you take, and give as you can. Nobody owes anyone else anything.

Pretty easy to say when you’re not the guy stressing out about paying bills while six-figure earners whose jobs are made significantly easier because of you trash you.

I generally agree with the idea that nobody owes anyone else anything, but in this case, I think he should’ve been let it all burn to the ground — maybe then the ingrates would be able to understand how critical his library is.

Babel has four paid developers, an almost $200k/year budget and hundreds of contributors. I'm sure that's enough to maintain the polyfills, if someone else wasn't already doing it for free - not to throw shade on them, but that's reality (not one I particularly like).

I do agree with that second statement. It is unfortunate that he got into this situation, but there is absolutely no reason to continue if it's not working out. He has the choice to go make six figures too, and doesn't owe anyone maintaining this library either.

If you would have read the article, you would have seen the image from a Babel maintainer saying they won't fork because they don't have the resources to maintain it.

If the coreJS maintainer stops working on it and it bitrots for a year or two, maybe the babel people will magically find the manpower to maintain it then. As it stands, why should they spend their time maintaining a fork of a project that is still maintained and in good shape?

Yeah, maybe. Or maybe the current subject matter expert that’s been pouring thousands of hours into this project should be funded by the billion dollar companies that rely on him, same as what’s happened to the projects at the top of the ecosystem.

> Or maybe the current subject matter expert that’s been pouring thousands of hours into this project should be funded by the billion dollar companies that rely on him

Ideally yes, but as we've seen time after time, charity as a business model doesn't work with corporations. I think the coreJS maintainer would be fully justified to take another job, and then work on coreJS as a hobby as much or as little as he likes. Nobody needs to martyr themselves so that a bunch of billion dollar advertising companies can save a buck.

Maybe in the future we decide to finance core open source projects as public infrastructure through taxes, or those billion dollar corps set up some kind of foundation to fund them, but for now the whole situation is highly dysfunctional and one cannot blame maintainers who put the financial interests of themselves and their family ahead of producing open source.

Yeah I don’t think we disagree. I think he should abandon the project, and should have a long time ago.

I recommend reviewing the HN guidelines here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Of course they won't volunteer to maintain a massive project that they depend on, when someone else is already doing the work.

But you can bet the minute core-js goes away, the community will pull together to maintain or create something new, purely out of necessity - that's the main motivator. Hopefully with a more distributed model that doesn't overload a single person.

Nobody actually follows the philosophy of "you take, and give as you can"

As the article mentions, nobody else contributed to corejs in a meaningful way. Everyone takes, but nobody gives. This is called tragedy of the commons, and it is a well-known problem in economics

Yeah, sure. Those top 1000 corporations were surely giving back at every opportunity.

> the community doesn't give a fuck

Well there are some backers out there:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/core-js

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