Comment by akudha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akudha | Hacker News Reader

In one of my previous jobs, my CTO asked me who I thought was the most important person in the company was. I wasn’t sure. He pointed to the lady who was responsible for entering and maintaining data, on which the entire business was built upon.

She was a quiet person, who did her job exceptionally well. Yet, most people didn’t know her or didn’t realize her importance. I am certain she wasn’t paid that well either.

Point being, nobody is going to reward you, unless you ask for it. I once spent 4 years at a job, I did my job well. Didn’t get a single dollar raise. I didn’t ask, nobody cared either. Most I got was some praise in team meetings once in a while.

The most disgusting part of the story is all hate and vitriol thrown at him. By people using his software for free, by people who are likely not even a tenth as good as he is - both as a person and as a programmer. All this in an industry with plenty of money. This is super depressing. I genuinely hope he gets to spend his future happy

But the thing is he DID ask for help, quite a few times and was only met with the hate and vitriol you mentioned. Depressing indeed.

Honestly, after seeing the message in the NPM logs I kind of figured he’d have a job soon.

You have to ask to the appropriate forum though, and that's what he got completely wrong. Getting npm to scream for help when a developer installs your package is equivalent to asking your peer for a raise.

I'd say that over 99.999% of the people who saw that message, created memes about it, etc.. did not have a corporate credit card and the power to use it at their discretion. If you want money from corps, THOSE are the guys you need to find and ask money from.

How do you even ask a corporation for money? Cold emailing?

> I'd say that over 99.999% of the people who saw that message, created memes about it, etc.. did not have a corporate credit card and the power to use it at their discretion. If you want money from corps, THOSE are the guys you need to find and ask money from.

So he should be cold emailing netflix, airbnb, linkedin purchasing managers?

Maybe yeah. I'm not sure how relicensing works. But you might

1. relicense it for paid commercial use, and communicate that, I imagine you would go through a version change.

2. Save some important features/bugs for the license change

3. Email politely explaining, they are breaking the license.

4. Come to terms on price. So long as we detect you are using core-js on your Top 10000 site, please pay $$ per year.

If you look at “real” non-profits, there are a couple of key things that are largely missing from Open Source fundraising today.

First is capital campaigns. A capital campaign is a campaign to raise a large amount of money towards a goal. E.g. “we need 3 million dollars by the end of the year for our building renovations.” Having a concrete target is more motivating that just asking for “whatever you can give” to “keep the lights on.”

Second is cultivating relationships with (large) individual donors. It makes sense to track people who have donated to you, send them thank you cards, and take the biggest donors out to lunch. Then when you need money and you’re running your capital campaign, you can ask previous donors for larger contributions. It’s not cold-emailing, because you have a previous relationship with your donors.

Today, open source funding looks more like begging with a sign—sitting in a prominent place and asking for a small amount of money from a lot of people. Nothing wrong with that, you can get enough to eat, but I’d like to see free and open source software try more sustainable and effective strategies.

I did some work like this back in the day, on the side while doing my normal software dev day job.

It's another acquired skill that you don't get just because you're an excellent programmer. On that basis, adding a donation prompt when installing the package is I think a valid attempt at solving the problem, but it's a solution coming from a developer mindset not a fundraiser mindset; if you code it they will come, all that.

If you had the capital you'd hire someone to help with this or find a suitable volunteer with a goal to making it paid.

yes

I literally do not even read that stuff. I wait for the success message or if it fails I start googling why it failed.

What I'm really struggling with is how much this contrasts with the story for the developers of Dwarf Fortress, who don't get that same hate and vitro piled on them, and in fact, people throw money at them because they want the developers to have money. To the tune of like $9 million or something! Whereas this guy, pouring his heart into something useful and not for fun, gets all this hate shoveled his way?

I really don't understand people.

one touches people's emotions, the other doesn't.

If you look at the xkcd image again, he's near the bottom of the house of cards, whereas Dwarf fortress are at the surface

https://xkcd.com/2347/ for any readers that didn't get the reference

This was in the OP, the article we're commenting on.

Also, I never saw it as a house of cards, since the blocks have varying sizes they just look like abstract blocks to me. Interesting.

I think the idea is that pulling out that one tiny support can cause all the layers above it to fall apart.

At the very least, it would destabilize them.

Kind of like a house of cards

I guarantee they got all kinds of hate and weirdness sent their way, too. Any game with a notable userbase does, including the commercial ones. Like, weird, personal, abusive shit from people who demonstrably (it's pretty clear from their "ideas") have no idea what they're talking about and evidently have unfortunate (for everyone else, anyway) amounts of free time on their hands.

And I don't just mean "you monetized this in a way I dislike" or "boo, DRM" or "you had dozens of game-breaking bugs at launch" or whatever, which, maybe don't be a dick about it, but at least I get why those things upset people and, especially in the last case, why they might get a bit entitled-seeming about it, since they did part with money—no, it's over the tiniest, most trivial stuff, including, often, things that are the way they are for a very good reason and would piss off 100x as many people if the abusive jerk got his (or her, I guess... but realistically, it's just about always a "his") way. But no, this minor thing is wrong so you're incompetent and any idiot could do better and [some names they somehow came up with, sometimes with disturbing accuracy] who worked on that part should be fired immediately. JFC. They'll spam you with this crap, on every channel they can.

And that's if you're not a woman prominent in the project. Then you get the creeper shit, too.

There's no possible way the DF devs haven't seen their fair share of that.

(though, sure, they were ultimately able to monetize it in a way that very few passion projects of that sort ever can, and certainly not utility open source libraries—that part of the story's way different)

I think about this a lot.

My personal bias is that open source authors and maintainers don't owe anyone anything. They're making their code available to anyone for free, and it's on you if there's something you don't like about it. You can always fork it if you need to. Heck, you don't even have to use it. Write your own thing if something fundamentally bothers you about it.

And yet there's a large group of people who think they're somehow doing you a favor by using your open-source code, as opposed to the other way around. I've tried to talk to some of them, to try to get some idea of it. It typically boils down to either

1. I used and advocated for the project, making it more popular, and therefore they owe me.

2. Using an open-source library is an investment. I'm making a compromise by not writing it myself exactly how I want it. I'm attempting to do things their way, which in some ways is mentally harder than writing it to begin with, so when it changes radically or goes away, or they ask me for support, they have done me dirty. I deserve better.

3. #2, except they recognize that the author/maintainer doesn't owe them anything and hasn't acted maliciously, but they're still bummed that they either have to change things or fork the project and maintain it themselves. It's emotional rather than logical.

Of the three, I can kinda understand the last one, but I'll never agree with it.

> 1. I used and advocated for the project, making it more popular, and therefore they owe me.

Sounds like the OSS equivalent of being paid in exposure

People playing the game (Dwarf Fortress) chose to play it and likely enjoy it. Those who use core-js likely need to use it to solve some weird problems, likely occuring while they're working on something else.

Myself i hate working in JavaScript ecosystem and every few months, when i need to update one of my packages, something is broken. I appreciate every person that worked on libs that i use but i hate everyone of those packages.

people get emotional attachments to games, no one cares about infrastructure

There's an old story I fail to remember well.

One dog asks another why do you sleep inside on the rug in the warm, while I live outside in the doghouse on a chain?

The inside dog answers, because I entertain and you serve.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com