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Comment by gwd | Hacker News Reader

It's good to know -- having replace-url functionality behind the paywall is likely to be a deal-killer; I can't help but think that this "freemium" model is really going to kill datastar's prospects for taking off; at best it's likely to result in a fork which ends up subsuming the original project.

That said, the attitude of the guy in the article is really messed up. Saying "fuck you" to someone who gave you something amazing for free, because he's not giving you as much as you want for free -- it's entitled to a toxic degree, and poisons the well for anyone else who may want to do something open-source.

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It's more like the mouse saying fuck you to the trap holding the cheese. It's not that the mouse isn't grateful for the free cheese. It's just the mouse understands the surrounding context.

except the trap isnt actually set, and there's a mound of cheese next to it anyway

The freemium model of everything makes me skeptical and reluctant to buy too much into many things.

Bit like Pydantic. It's a JSON parsing library at the end of the day, and now suddenly that's got a corporate backer and they've built a new thing

Polars is similar. It's a faster Pandas and now suddenly it's no longer the same prospect.

FastAPI the same. That one I find even more egregious since it's effectively Starlette + Pydantic.

Edit: Add Plotly/Dash, SQLAlchemy, Streamlit to that list.

I am totally skeptic about freemium too. Are FastAPI and SQLAlchemy freemium too? I didn't know that. Can you share more info, please?

There's now a "FastAPI Cloud" product that the author is working on.

SQLAlchemy just has paid for support, I shouldn't have included it with the others, I must have confused it with something else.

Thanks for the information.

its a 501c3 with no shares. please tell me how its the same?

I referenced the article with hesitation for the same reason, don't think the position the critique takes is great.

Interestingly, this article pops up first page if you search "htmx vs datastar".

> Saying "fuck you" to someone who gave you something amazing for free, because he's not giving you as much as you want for free

I don't have a problem, on principle, with paywalling new features. I don't like it, but I don't think it's bad behaviour.

Putting up a paywall around features that were previously free, however, I do take issue with. It's deceptive and it's not common practice. It tricks people into becoming invested and then holds hostage the features that they've become invested in using. Frankly, fuck that.

On the latter point, couldn't disagree more. He's saying "fuck you" to the product, not the person, and unilaterally removing extant features to paywall them imo is poisoning the well far more than a simple FU to a developer ever could?

Fair enough, but the use of coarse language can also impair the underlying point. i.e. the shock value can derail the reader.

For such reasons, The Economist style guide advises against using fancy language when simpler language will suffice.

err, fuck is simple

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing

I don't really have much of a response beyond this.

We didn't remove the features, if you want to use the old ones they're still there in the repo. We just didn't want to support the old way of doing them when we actively tell people not to use them. If you're going to be a support burden going forward we want you to have skin in the game if not cool do it yourself no one's going to get mad at you

Deprecating a feature and replacing it with a paywalled version is imo a distinction without a difference.

You're of course free to do it, just as I'm free continue to use other products which do not do this.

In any hypothetical open source project I make from now on where I am the owner and sole director I'll just get rid of the features entirely if they cause an undue support burden (which the datastar dev has gone up and down both threads saying this is what happened) to avoid specifically your comment.

Seems to fit in with your world view better and then I can just leave those people high and dry with much less concern!

You're not owed these people's time.

Don't worry, I also won't use your product :)

If the point is good stewardship of the product, deleting features that users clearly need only to replace with a for-pay version stinks possibly only slightly less than deprecating features users clearly need and then replacing with nothing. Both of these things mean your product sucks.

That's fine, less entitled people is healthy for a projects ecosystem.

For a proper way this would work, you the user would contribute your time for those features so you don't overburden the maintainer, but people like you won't and so this is where we're at.

I'd rather avoid burnout (which will kill a project entirely) and lose a few folks like you.

> For a proper way this would work, you the user would contribute your time for those features so you don't overburden the maintainer, but people like you won't and so this is where we're at.

Sure, if you're up front and honest from the beginning then some users will do that, the majority are likely to go for other offerings which don't suffer this problem. Vanishingly few users are going to be cool with features disappearing and then reappearing later on with a price tag attached, which is the scenario we're talking about.

In reality, 99.9% of the users are going to be using whatever free thing is available and your project will live for just about as long as you personally care about it. Rightly or wrongly, the maintainer's work/life balance isn't on the forefront of your mind when you're looking at npm packages, no amount of grandstanding will change that.

Sure so the maintainers set the boundary themselves.

I dont know what world you live in where you can be entitled to something you dont pay or contribute to.

They can do whatever they want to ensure their project works and frankly once again the projects dont need people like you. You’re not that important or special at all, certainly less so than the people building things. Like I get that you really think you are it’s dripping from your comments, but you’re not.

And to be clear this was a discussion among their community it wasnt a sudden thing so your entire premise is wrong.

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