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Comment by ArchOversight | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like libxslt needs more than just a small number of fixes, and it sounds like Google could be paying someone, like you, to help provide the necessary guidance and feedback to increase the usability and capabilities of the library and evolve it for the better.

Instead Google and others just use it, and expect that any issues that come up to be immediately fixed by the one or two open source maintainers that happen to work on it in their spare time. The power imbalance must not be lost on you here...

If you wanted to dive into what [3] does, you could do so, you could then document it, or refactor it so that it is more obvious, or remove the compile time flag entirely. There is institutional knowledge everywhere...

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or, the downstream users who use it and benefit directly from it could step up, but websites and their users are extremely good at expecting things to just magically keep working especially if they don't pay for it. it was free, so it should be free forever, and someone set it up many moons ago, so it should keep working for many more magically!

// of course we know that, as end-users became the product, Big Tech [sic?] started making sure that users remain dumb.

Website operators are fine with how libxslt works now. It's browser vendors that want change.

You mean they are fine with expecting it to be maintained by browser vendors indefinitely for free.

Browser vendors aren't maintaining the web for fee, they are for profit corporations that have chosen to take on that role for the benefits it provides to them. It's only fair that we demand that they also respect the responsibilities that come with it. And we can also point out the hollowness about complaints of hardship due to having to maintain the web's legacy when they keep making it harder for independent browser developers by adding tons on new complexity.

Sure, of course, but unless funding is coming from users the economics won't change, because:

The vendors cite an aspect of said responsibility (security!) to get rid of an other aspect (costly maintenance of a low-revenue feature).

The web is evolving, there's a ton of things that developers (and website product people, and end-users) want. Of course it comes with a lot of "frivolous" innovation, but that's part of finding the right abstractions/APIs.

(And just to make it clear, I think it's terrible for the web and vendors that ~100% of the funding comes from a shady oligopoly that makes money by selling users - but IMHO this doesn't invalidate the aforementioned resource allocation trade off.)

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