There has been some discussion on Reddit and likely Twitter/HN/elsewhere about this topic, but I hadn't seen it come up here yet.
The problem: standard, a widely used and highly opinionated linter for JavaScript, recently started including advertisements served straight to your terminal when you install the tool, as reported by ZDNet. Check out that article for a screengrab of a banner that gets served, pushing LogRocket.
Naturally, this is controversial. One one hand, some of these OSS projects are underfunded, and need to monetize more effectively if they hope to continue providing value. On the other hand, there's now ads in your freaking terminal too. Do you want these clogging up your CI/CD logs? Is this yet another step towards the dystopia of cyberpunk hysteria? Or, is it just not a big deal? We can choose to use or not use this product, and should do so and move on without getting up in arms.
How do you feel about this practice? Will you be removing standard from your toolset as a result? How should the ecosystem as a whole handle this idea?
I don't write a ton of JavaScript, but when I do I generally have used standard. I'm still not sure whether or not this news will change that preference.
Photo by Darren Chan on Unsplash
Latest comments (41)
Simple solution for open source creators who need ad revenue: have a really great documentation on your side and add the ads there and not in the terminal.
And the first (and maybe only) ad you should add is a link to Patreon or something similar. People will give you money if they are happy with your work they use and you ask politely.
Stopped: feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/
Definitely for the better! Thanks for the link.
It's MIT licensed - just fork it, remove the offending parts, and publish it as
standard-noadsI've done the same with other things that have donation nag-screens in their software.
That guy seemed strange to me for years now. That ad is just the cherry on top 🙄
My opinion is against ads. Monetization should be like pay-to-use, not by showing ads. Nothing is free, if you want to use a tool, you have to pay for it - that is only legit. Putting ads to hijack user's attention and keeping them thinking about random products is not good.
I'm strongly agree with you, if developers would check their dependencies, we would never have got to the dependency hell we got today.
And TBH there is no problem with open source monetization because there never had been such social contract. For me it's all about unspoken agreements and what happens when people break them.
OSS development is in majority of the case under funded. Most of these Type I initiatives are done purely for personal gratification. Having ads is fine in my personal opinion, but we can introduce better ways to monetize these efforts.
Say I creat a node module that depends on one of the projects using
funding. When someone installs MY module, theybwill start seeing ads in their logs. Who else to blame than me?Don't like the idea. Nice cover picture🇯🇵 btw.
I'm all for getting paid. But make a new tool. Don't shoehorn a new new business model into something that was once free.