It’s sad to say but this is exactly what you should expect to happen if you license your work under MIT or equivalent.
And yes, this is exactly why every techbro out there will complain loudly in your GitHub/Lab issues if you don’t use MIT - they want to exploit your labour while they woo investors with a product that’s 99% a bunch of open source projects mixed together with some extra 1% proprietary sauce without contributing back in any capacity.
This is precisely why Linux is based. This is precisely why I prefer GNU-based systems over musl, or that attempt at re-implementing coreutils in Rust and with the MIT license.
...And on the note of the coreutils rust implementation, even this language the main guy is using is tedious here https://sylvestre.ledru.info/presentations/coreutils-fosdem-2023/#69 and here https://sylvestre.ledru.info/presentations/coreutils-fosdem-2023/#25
It is NOT about the license. Please don't talk to me about this. I am above this discussion, because I am "not interested" in the debate. Yeah, okay. Well you still ultimately had to make a choice and that choice has repercussions. This is the FOSS version of conservatives saying "it's just a joke"
I'm not really seeing how the MIT license has much of a bearing on his situation here.
GNU licensed code is also used and relied upon for commercial purposes, and people aren't any more likely to respect or donate to GNU-licensed projects than they are to donate to MIT-licensed ones.
And actually, if you're looking at it from the perspective of really wanting to fuck up a large number of companies, MIT license would be a great choice.
First you bait them into using your code by maintaining the project for years, then once everyone relies on you, you suddenly pull the plug and make them eat shit. :joker-troll:
That being said, he should absolutely pull the plug on core-js maintenance.
Anyone can use your code, including commercially. They can make modifications to it and not release the changes publicly. Just give attribution that you've used the code.
I laugh when mega-sites/companies do something okay towards the opensource community. (release some old code or help fund a project) and everyone instantly gives them a handjob. While %20+ of their project's code is created and maintained by random nerds spreed out across the planet for free.
The days of being in love of the idea of opensource is dead. All my spaghetti code is released under open for noncommercial purposes, bitches.
:brace-cowboy:Anyone giving their labour to 100 of the top 500 companies for free has lost their goddamn mind.
Just using the AGPLv3 license would be enough to deter these parasites. No need to invent a non-standard license.
Using a standard license would take away the fun of making some lawyer read my 512 page license that would be nothing but me rambling, spamming emojis mixed with communist theory.
:marx-goth:
Ah, the AGPLv3+ (+Communism) license where the preamble section has been modified to include a full copy of Capital
Friendly reminder that it's better for everyone involved if you just use a standard license.
Just make sure to use AGPLv3 to tell the capitalists to eat shit and die, but in proper legalese.
Do you find a self-hosted gitea actually useful? I just push to a directory and the web interface is cgit which looks like this https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/
It's not designed to track issues or anything, it's just a web interface to browse repos. But since I'm the only one working on my own code, I guess it's fine. But I've wondered about setting up something with more substance.
open for noncommercial purposes
IMO that is open source. The FOSS techbros cry that it's not, but it is.
Yeah the "free" part of FOSS should apply to everything downstream as well - but if you want to use my code for something not FOSS you can pay up.
Noncommercial licenses are useless. They will just ignore that shit the way they ignore the GPL. What you need to do is build your software as a mod for a Nintendo or Disney game. You have to incorporate IP from big litigious companies like Microsoft and Oracle, in a way which is completely illegal, and completely impossible to separate. Then you have THEIR army of lawyers going after the corporate parasites.
Seems like he was on the road to something and then the Geneva Conventions Violating Collective Punishment against Russia came and it shut off the trickle he was getting.
https://guide-humanitarian-law.org/content/article/3/collective-punishment/
I don't really javascript... all the screenshots in his post calling him "the worst maintainer," is that just because he had the audacity to ask for money or is there something else behind it?
Either way I hope he burns it all down
Can't really be a bad maintainer when you're thanklessly keeping a critical piece of compatibility software up-to-date for no pay since the capitalists let the internet standards be all piecemeal and fucked up.
He's largely responsible for holding this critical piece of the ecosystem together by himself with little to no funding and had a stint in jail for reasons he goes over in the post, so there's bound to be some slippage in addressing issues.
Open source maintainers get a lot of toxicity from the wider tech industry in general. It's a largely thankless job that often resembles working a service industry job in terms of interactions with your "customers".
I'm surprised he didn't offer to go back to the chemical factory after returning to full time work as a donation funded JavaScript library maintainer. Name a worse niche for software development, you fucking can't
If I were a web developer, I'd feel a great pang of anxiety when building my project and seeing libraries 3-levels removed from me desparately ask for money. As if there were some great precarity the whole environment was perched upon... One left-pad from disaster...
"You're the worst developer! Die you rushsin fascist!" I would email, wiping a bead of sweat off my brow. There's a zoom meeting with the client in ten minutes, and he's going to yell at me about the font size again. I don't have time for this maintainer bullshit.
I don't think I could ever be this committed to a project where it's visibly fucking up the rest of my life. I would have decided this was not worth it a long time ago. I also would never have quit my job to maintain an open-source repo without any plan to support myself monetarily.
It does seem weird to get this upset about it when you have other (good) options. The issue is he's so hyperfixated on his project that he can't bear to let it go. The nature of FOSS is that it's meant to be collaborative and open. If it's really an open project, then you'd have PRs from developers running up against new issues. The fact that he's basically doing it all himself and being proactive and anticipating standards changes and stuff is voluntarily putting all that work on himself.
Presumably, if he abandoned it and things started to break, you'd see people realize how critical it is and more work from others to maintain it, or people would migrate. There's no reason this package has to be the package forever. Idk. This is weird.
Yeah. Sure. But on the flipside: a javascript library providing 10+ years of back- and forward-compatability with every different browser under the sun? Maintained by one guy? There's no way that's not a massively bloated piece of software that probably ought to be replaced anyway.
The market abhors a vacuum. Presumably no one stepped in because it wasn't broken enough yet, and there are competitors or replacements, as he mentioned in the post.
The other part of me wonders how much of a requirement continuing cutting-edge development is for this library. That just entails back-porting new JS features to engines that don't support them yet. I can see, like, back-porting common JS features that have been around for like ten years, which have worked their way into common usage, back to IE8. But for the new stuff ECMAScript is adding, the only thing is that it would be adding native support for features that are almost certainly covered in other packages. And if you have to use a library to ensure those features work anyway, it's the same thing.
I don’t think I could ever be this committed to a project where it’s visibly fucking up the rest of my life.
The way he describes is honestly sounds like someone with an addiction. The thought of leaving it behind must cause him serious pain if he's willing to take so much of it to keep the project going.
I think we should just let the javascript ecosystem collapse actually
lol lmao if you think that xkcd is just about digital infraestructure, replace the random guy in Nebraska to the random road or train track bridge in a isolated 1000km stretch that passes through multiple [insert decadant region/town here] built between 50 to 80 years ago. If all of those suddenly came crashing down you'd be horrified with just how broken communication and transportation would end up over night.
Developers will be the first in need of re-education when the revolution comes.
All engineers must tend towards psychopathy, it's the focus on the work that demands it.
Having gone to engineering school and wanting nothing to do with the profession as soon as I graduated... Yeah that's about right.
Yeah, back in 2000 I was just starry eyed with what code could do, I made stupid crazy things that would fly around the screen or spit out Simpson's quotes. Coming up with solutions from scratch for problems made me feel like Superman.
My first real job was with what ended up being a new pyramid scheme and I remember the day it finally went online and the management were hooting and hollering in the office at all the money rubes were paying in the first few hours, never to be seen again. It was monstrous.
I feel both lucky and dumb that I just needed to know the basics about code to get by in college, and that I liked doing just that and learning to think algorithmically, but that I never went into anything that could feed me by just coding so I managed to steer away from the business end of software.
That was an incredible read. It's beyond fucked how he has been treated
I'm not sure I feel much sympathy after he killed somebody, but I do think he has incredible patience to deal with this for so long.
IMO the lesson here is that if you want to do open source stuff you should pick a project that won't make somebody else money. That's why my stuff is always Linux Desktop utilities.
Or just be more aggressive about extortion and dual licensing. Dude spent way too long asking politely and accepting hate in return out of a very misplaced sense of duty
