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Comment by cal85 | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, and since a few of you probably use it… I own the JSON Formatter extension [0], which I created and open-sourced 12 years ago and have maintained [1] ever since, with 2 million users today. And I solemnly swear that I will never add any code that sends any data anywhere, nor let it fall into the hands of anyone else who would.

I’ve been emailed several tempting cash offers from shady people who presumably want to steal everyone’s data or worse. I sometimes wish I had never put my name on it so I could just take the money without harming my reputation, but I did, so I’m stuck with being honourable. On the plus side I will always be able to say that I never sold out.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json-formatter/bcj...

[1] low effort tbh

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I used to have an extension that promised to never be sold or even updated beyond the initial release, since it was a one-liner that can't possibly ever need to change. The Chrome Web Store took it down after 5+ years, presumably because I never published an update so the the now-mandatory fields were empty.

Curious to know if they gave valid reasons or just "you don't update this enough and it's coming down" a la Apple's terrible 'policy'.

I've got a few set-and-forget extensions I haven't uploaded a new package for in 5+ years but I have periodically had to log in (per email warning) and check a new box e.g. assert I'm not collecting user data or pledge compliance with a new privacy directive.

They usually don't require code updates but as the platform changes, they might have changing requirements or new policies that need to be acknowledged. I don't do extension development but I have a few apps and over the years I've had to rebuild them to target newer API versions, add data privacy policies, add child safety policies, etc., that weren't there when I first released the app. I haven't had to change any of the code though.

The official rejection reason:

Violation reference ID: Yellow Zinc

Violation:

Description provided is insufficient to understand the functionality of the item.

I filled in all the new mandatory fields and had chatgpt rewrite the description about 10 times in increasingly simple language but it was rejected every time with the same reason. Since it only had like 20 installs I gave up trying to get it republished.

If cash offers scale linearly with the number of users, then yours would be pretty tempting indeed. Respect for not selling out! Would you like to start publishing these offers, like what I'm doing?

Yeah I’m definitely stealing this idea, I love it. Will add something to the repo soon.

I thought one of the interesting requests was the DNS error one. I'm guessing they want to find commonly visited websites that no longer exist and buy the domain names to run ads or malware on? Any other reasons anyone can think of?

This seems so weird to me. You're clearly providing value to the world, and according to my moral view, should be entitled to capturing some of that value without resorting to something shady.

I'm the founder of Streak where we directly monetize our extension (as do others like Grammarly). Have you tried directly asking your users for $ given the effort you put in?

Thank you for InboxSDK! Have had a pleasant experience using it.

I use several Firefox extensions that periodically nag me for money. I appreciate it because otherwise I would forget to donate. But now that I have monthly donations set up for several of them, I wish there was a way to turn it off.

> I wish there was a way to turn it off.

Most FOSS android apps asking for donations do that: Sometimes a button in the donation-nag "I already donated", but pretty much every time a setting "stop asking, I either already donated or won’t donate".

I can't speak for parent, but some (including myself) see writing free software as an act of charity, done just to make the world a little bit better.

In this view, trying to make money from it corrupts the noble mission.

> In this view, trying to make money from it corrupts the noble mission.

Agreed, making money from charity doesn’t make sense.

Business revolves around secrecy and restrictions.

Whereas open-source revolves around transparency and freedoms…

Why would money be the only value, that is a really sad view on life. The developer gets joy and gratitude, they can live a happy life. Why bring money into it. Money does not make happy.

> Why would money be the only value, that is a really sad view on life.

Good thing nobody said that.

> The developer gets joy and gratitude,

Your average free software doesn't get very much joy and gratitude back from users either.

> they can live a happy life. Why bring money into it. Money does not make happy.

If the implication was too subtle, the idea is that when you spend a lot of time making something valuable, it should go towards obtaining food and shelter and the other benefits of a living wage.

And those things do make happy.

The post I replied to clearly equals value with money.

It connects them, it doesn't say they're the same.

Money is an important type of value, especially the context of labor.

And, let me phrase this very precisely: there isn't an obvious non-monetary value they're getting back that comes close to the effort they put in.

You mentioned joy and gratitude but again I'm not sure how much of that they get back in this situation, plus there is the flip side of lots of complaints.

I believe in capitalism. I am 100% in favour of making money by offering something people are willing to pay for.

Some extensions are monetizable by honestly asking users to pay for access. Mine just isn’t. It’s only as popular as it is because it’s free and open source and promises total privacy.

Making 2 million people individually decide and record how much of their economic output a JSON formatting extension is entitled to is a non-negligible amount of mental effort and time, especially if we had to do it for all extensions and software we use.

As someone who uses your extension daily, I truly appreciate your strong will. It seems every day strong ethics become harder to maintain in our field.

If an extension I used got sold out … would it ask me if the permissions are changing? Or would it straight up sneak them in. Id hope id at least see a popup notice that would raise a red flag

Chrome and Firefox tell you the permissions of the extension changed and ask you to confirm or deny in a dialog box that doesn’t go away until you choose one.

I don't know how Chrome handles this but Firefox won't install the update without the user confirming it.

What size cash offers? Not that I want some of it, but then I do think there could be an industry re-scamming these people and want to know how much we're talking about.

Convincing offers to buy it for $10-40K. One offer said $250K but I doubt that one was serious, more likely just a straight up scam. I have often emailed them back feigning interest to see if I can get them to state what they plan to do with it, since I cannot see anything that could possibly be ethical, but they always just start talking mumbo jumbo about their innovative monetisation strategy.

Recently I’ve had a serious sounding offer to inject an ad, i.e. a one-off ad would open in a new tab when the extension updates, for $3K a pop, which I just ignored, then he emailed again saying $4K, then just yesterday he emailed again with a bunch of emoji and said what about $8K.

It’s tempting, but it would still be selling out my users, who may be ungrateful little brats but I could never do that to them, I value their approval too much.

Thank you very much for the very informative response. As with any offer I think it's crucial to know what's at stake. You're very admirable for turning down tens of thousands, but if it had been tens of millions I'd have been questioning your judgement, as morally odious as the buyer might be.

Many are weakly motivated by wealth and power. I work a modestly comfortable job, enjoy the company of friends and family who I love, and my sleep is excellent. Selling my integrity may buy the softest sheets, but my sleep will never be as good as it is now.

The dev for uBlock origin must have received million and maybe tens of millions dollar offers, yet they refuse so much as token donations.

You are doing some pretty decent market research here too. I think you said your app had ~2M users so that's 0.4c per user.

What is the ad for? If it is a US equivalent to Great Ormand Street Hospital or some other worthy thing, then why not! I suspect it isn't and you will be offered quite a lot more vapid dollars because your user demographic is ... nerdy and installs addons 8) That is worth a lot more than 0.4c per head.

It may be that the ad offers are not as unpleasant as we might make them out to be but you do need to live - up to you. However I suspect they are just as genuine as the crap that lands in my Inbox, sometimes.

I recommend not describing your users as brats - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner

I've used this extension for years. Thank you for your service. I agree open source users are the worst.

Most of them are lovely really, I was just kidding. I don’t even mind the ungrateful ones these days. The store reviews are like 95% people expressing gratitude, and the rest are people having a very bad day with the pixels and I feel for them

I had a JSON Formatter extension steal my browsing history earlier (on Firefox, no less) so this is bittersweet.

When you say "tempting", what's the ballpark of the offers?

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