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Comment by stevesimmons | Hacker News Reader

Same for me...

I had been tracking Datastar for months, waiting for the 1.0.0 release.

But my enthusiasm for Datastar has now evaporated. I've been bitten by the open-source-but-not-really bait and switch too many times before.

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As someone who wants to write open source but needs to be able to capture some financial value from doing that to be able to make it sustainable, what model do you prefer?

My current thoughts lean towards a fully functional open source product with a HashiCorp style BSL and commercial licensing for teams above a size threshold.

I think the open core model is fine, and the most financially sustainable. Just be up front about it from day 1. I don't think the honor system for licensing will get you the results you're wanting.

it depends strongly on why you want to write open source. if you like the idea of putting source code out into the world for other people to use and benefit from then go ahead and use whatever mix of open source and proprietary code you like, just be up front that that's what you are doing.

if you want to promise open source software simply to attract the mindshare and users who habitually ignore anything that isn't open source, trying to capture financial value may well be infeasible unless some rare confluence of stars lines up for you. the key is in the word "capture" - capturing the value implies making sure it goes to you rather than to someone else, and that means imposing restrictions that will simply piss those same users off.

Sell support.

I can't imagine that works very well for relatively small, simple, functional or intuitive projects though. Incentives wise, is it possible to sell reverse support: extracting payment for all the times the product works so well that support isn't needed?

Selling support can be rough. I talked with the developer of PyMol.

Many corporations wouldn't buy licenses and those that would pay for support wanted support for hardware that was 2 or 3 generations old.

Gentle reminder: please encourage your corporation to pay for open source support whenever possible.

That doesn't work. My day job is at scenario working on NATS and I can tell you 99.9% of people don't pay for support

As a NATS user, I can say that's mostly because it just works and when it doesn't it's pretty easy to figure out :)

yep, and you'd think someone that has seen that would pick a different model... idk, ngmi

Some solo dev projects are used as a platform to sell books, training, ads, speaking engagement, consulting, and development.

Maintainers need a way to maintain during the day - not just evenings and weekends. Otherwise it eventually dies.

Does HTMX have a pro version? Is it dead?

Far from dead. Usage is growing.

HTMX is a single htmx.js file with like 4000 lines of pretty clearly written code.

It purports to - and I think succeeds - in adding a couple of missing hypermedia features to HTML.

It's not a "framework" - good

It's not serverside - good

Need to add a feature? Just edit htmx.js

Some people will get a fit once they find out it's JS, and not TypeScript.

No body is preventing them to write a layer of ts definition on top of the js. Check out postgres.js

It will be, eventually, unless a maintainer is able to maintain during the day. It doesn't matter what the source of free time is however: retired, rich, runs a company from their open source project, paid by somebody else, etc., but full time job + open source maintainer = dead project, eventually.

htmx isn't dead, but, from a semantic stand point, it's pretty done:

https://htmx.org/essays/future/

there are bugs, but we have to trade off fixes against potentially breaking users sites that depend on (sometimes implicitly) the current behavior

this makes me very hesitant to make changes and accept PRs, but i also feel bad closing old issues without really diving deep into them

such is life in open source

Yes look at the active issues on GitHub. There's hundreds and some going back years with no traction.

I don't think open issues is a fair way to judge project liveness. TypeScript also has hundreds of open issues going back years with no traction. Is TypeScript dead?

Yes, issues that are years old show me the commitment level. Not a knock against HTMX but a clear sign of priorities. Carson is free to meme all day and talk about other projects. It's very clear where he stands and that's fine

this year I created and released fixi.js, created the montana mini computer (https://mtmc.cs.montana.edu), published an paper on hypermedia via the ACM, got hyperscript to 1.0, released 3 versions of htmx, reworked all the classes that I teach at montana state and am planning on releasing a java-based take on rails that I'm building for my web programming class

i am also the president of the local youth baseball program and helped get BigSkyDevCon over the hump

i think you'd be surprised at how little time i actually spend on twitter

as always, my issue is never with how you spend your time. you are a giver of gifts and I wish more people that relied on HTMX stepped up to make it better. in no way should anything be expected of you. How you spend your time is obviously your call. MIT is MIT

It was a rhetorical question; the answer is no, old issues with no updates don't necessarily indicate anything about the health of the project. Different people have different project management styles. You use your style for your project, and Carson uses his for htmx. There's no one correct way to manage an issue backlog.

My project is really healthy then, as I summarily close issues as “not planned” rather than leave them open.

source is MIT, do what you want. The team found certain plugins to be anti-patterns and support burdens. You can find the old plugins in the repo source, feel free to fork from there!

Wait so you pay to use the anti patterns? That’s a new one.

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