Open-source is broken: the sad story of Denis Pushkarev (core-JS)
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I feel bad the chap, but I don't think Open Source is to blame. It is fundamentally hard to charge tiny amounts of money to millions of people, which is all he really has to do to survive, because receiving money, especially with all the different tax rules from countries, make micro/nanotransactions difficult.
It would be good to have some sort of marketplace for this sort of thing, that has the scale to wade through country regulations and still transmit enough money to makers to be useful.
For me adoption is not important if that means freeloaders taking and giving nothing back.
When a company makes a payment to an individual or an incorporated entity that is not a donation. It’s very difficult to near impossible to even properly classify them which means you are at very serious risk of violating either employment laws or tax laws or both.
And a lot of projects that have a restrictive license don’t dual license or do it properly and don’t really support commercial channels.
So whilst it’s easy to blame freeloaders more often than not the project maintainers are at fault.
It still doesn’t change the fact that companies big and small can’t donate money to projects easily unless those projects are well organized behind an incorporated entity.
No one except butt-hurt OP is blaming anyone. If someone agrees to finish your basement for free, you accede and ask him to keep the noise down.
Where I don't agree is that FOSS is not to blame. It absolutely is. FOSS is the entrenched default. And FOSS is incompatible with requiring a payment. To require a payment one has to run a tangential business (provide support, integration services, etc.) and all the options are in conflict with the quality of the main FOSS product one way or another. FOSS makes it hard to switch to any other model and it's harder the longer the project lives.
The issue of funding is not going to be solved by FOSS because it is not the foal. We need to look past FOSS to find a solution. A good start would be to chose a different license when one starts a project. Like one of PolyForm Licenses [1] or BTPL [2]. These are not FOSS compatible but they align much better with the funding goal. And if one figures it doesn't work for the project it's easy to switch to FOSS. Much easier than the other way around, anyway.
[1]: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ [2]: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/26/Big-Time-2.0.0
As an alternative, there are millions of commercial software vendors out there, and they predate FOSS. They weren't forced into some FOSS hegemony, because that doesn't happen.
If people don't want to work on FOSS, they can do what everyone else does and start a company, and charge for their work.
The thing to avoid is starting something that's totally free, watching people pick it up because it's free, keep using it because it's decent, and then assume that those people owe you money. They may well have done something else if they'd known they were making a purchasing decision from day 1.
I do think there's an opportunity somewhere for GitHub, that owns most of the infrastructure for Javascript OSS development, to do something for JS developers. For example, they could do what YouTube does with paid accounts and distribute some of the monthly fee to creators proportionally based on watch time.
(Note: that wouldn't be righting an injustice, although I'm sure their marketing would make the most of that instinct in people. It would just be adding a proprietary marketplace to monetise OSS creators. But it might also alleviate the problem.)
I'm contemptuous of the feckless trust that unenforceable legalese can win over human nature. It already sounds ridiculous for Coca Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken to publish their secret recipes permitting the public to recreate them at home but not repackage and resell. And that's for a food product whose provenance is easy to trace, what with the issues of scalability, storage, transportation, government inspection, etc. Dissemination of software is frictionless and hard to trace.
Just because you've created something doesn't mean it'll always be monetizable. I'd argue that if income was the expectation, grinding year after year at the same thing with repeated failure is a mistake. Doesn't matter if it's writing software, or selling widgets on a street corner, not every possible idea will succeed in that way.
Legacy support has become atrocious and it shouldn’t fall to web developers to deal with, because the end result is what Bloomberg does, and a shitty experience for the consumer.
His work also ended up being so good, it effectively eliminated completion and the need for businesses on either end of the web (browser/site) to take it upon themselves to make things better.
And this is a project which highly depends on maintenance so you need to have personnel that does it with love and dedication.
Oh how much happier do I feel now, that once when someone in our community came up asking for help we didn't have such problems to arrange a fundraiser. Don't let hate win.
Just walk away, don't feel you owe anyone anything with open source. If they value the work they can open their wallet if they absolutely need something done.
The fact that people rely on this project gives him some power. Attempting to use this power has gotten backlash and threats to remove that power. The sad story demands for money break unwritten rules. The pivot to closed license is a familiar story we've seen time and again and what happens is the free popularity boost of open source disappears and the project barely makes any money.
A lot people do open source so they can leverage that popularity into expert status rather then trying to profit directly. He has already built up that credibility (perhaps lost some here) but he should stop working on the project and attempt to find employment. The projects who rely on this will need to support this and will creating jobs in this area where he would have an excellent chance of landing this type of position. He created the market now he needs to stop serving it for free and profit.
People are assholes, but I don't think he had a sound plan.
I think he should have found an employer that was ok with him dedicating some % of time to maintaining core-js.
Personally I'd like to work full time on my own projects, but I'd make sure it made financial sense before just quitting my job and hoping that the universe will sort it out.
A slightly more nuanced but equally confounding position is: "I'd give you money, sure, but your license doesn't require it, so go piss up a rope buddy".
I wonder if many maintainers who end up feeling this way about open-source were ever good fits for open-source to begin with. At the same time, it's hard to say I wouldn't feel the same way as Denis if I maintained a project as popular as core-js thanklessly. I would like to think I'd have the power to just walk away once I realized it was unhealthy for me.
He’s single handedly maintaining IE and adding new features. It’s extra thankless because he’s not contributing a product feature to the person using it, but a compatibility layer to the system developers are targeting. He puts systems into a state they should already be in.
Back in the 90s I wrote a window docking system library for Delphi. It was shareware, not open source, and it brought in about £1000 a month.
It was the support that killed me. So many people doing really weird things with it I had never thought about. Was it my bug or theirs?
The bottom line is that one person can't maintain something in their spare time that a lot of other people rely on.
NLnet grants are the only example that comes to mind. But these are short term, not sustaining.
I am honestly just left wondering why core JS is still around? What am I missing?
It’s more a service than a program.
Thank you !
That said, where my mind keeps going to is that open-source software is in many ways similar to communism. And communism failed for a reason.
If you want to freely give away your work, then by all means - do so. But do so with the understanding that you are promised absolutely nothing in return. No one owes you anything. This man would have been better off had he pursued a paying career and spent a reasonable amount of his free time working on this.
It's really a shame he missed the opportunity to gain popularity from this project. He just built and released it, without doing any sort of promotion or whatsoever.
Please refrain from such unsolicited advice. Everyone has different values and alignment you don't know about. There are so many cases where idealists followed your advice, were in turn drained by mismanagement and burned out of IT completely.
Reminds me of that other guy, Steven Degutis or whatever, who flashed his penis at children multiple times over many years and then expected us all to feel sorry for him and give him advice and $100k+ job leads.
You are all being scammed by false sob stories from evil criminal men. Wake up HNeeple.