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.
The nice thing about open source is you have people who can fork a project and remove the things they don't want. I am not entirely sure how this would be something that could last too long because standard will just get forked and everyone will migrate there.
There's also discussion about it here:
This space available for rent
Michiel Hendriks ・ Aug 25 ・ 1 min read
Whoops, missed this! Thank you.
I'm glad they ended the experiment.
That said, I feel like a similar feature that requires an opt-in from the user might actually be worthwhile. I'd suspect that a number of developers (myself included) wouldn't mind deliberately opting in to an occasional non-intrusive terminal ad, especially one displayed during a download progress screen, because we'd know it's financially supporting the project.
However, for that to work:
The way they appear to have done it, it was an idea with some potential, done badly.
As thoughtfully implemented as this, I may even have happily opted in. The issue has never been about whether these projects need financial support, of course, but these details matter.
I don't like it, but this is a case where I'd also point to this library being MIT licensed and it is nice that if enough people disagreed with their approach, they could fork it. The beauty of open source.
I think it's about thoughtfulness here. I wouldn't be opposed to a Wikipedia-style annual fundraising effort made possible through this kind of message in the terminal. E.g. Once in a while they hit you with a prompt to donate. You're free to ignore and it's transparent that this will happen once and a while and it's a reasonable approach to sustainability.
True enough - someone just went and did it for GIMP, taking offense at the (rather unfortunate) acronym. Curious to see how that goes for them. The danger is always fragmentation, but a tool like
standard(or GIMP for that matter) is so entrenched that maybe it's the right option - just let people make their own choice, without having to sacrifice much utility.Do you happen to know how well the Wikimedia folks do with that approach? I agree, it's respectful, unobtrusive, and undeniably necessary, but it also seems like a never-ending uphill battle for their operation just to stay afloat. I can absolutely understand product developers not eager to jump on that train. Wiki's web of products are the end goal whereas
standardis just supposed to fit into your set of tools somewhere along the pipeline so you can get the actual job done.Here are my thoughts:
For that last bit, product ads are completely unacceptable. That said, and this may be controversial, I don't see a problem with a maintainer adding a message somewhere mentioning that there is a way to support the project through code/money contributions. Many developers may not consider how much time/effort is saved by these projects, and small messages provide an opportunity to educate and promote change. Ads to use a company's product are in no way acceptable.
The next step is how, exactly. It seems the majority will always use free software for free, but time and skill are never going to become less expensive. I agree, I fully support maintainers publicizing ways to contribute, and I also agree that ads of this style are unacceptable, but asking kindly is still clearly inadequate. How do we incite a larger percentage of users to vote with their wallets, not just their downloads?
Perhaps the answer isn't getting more individual users to contribute monetarily, but encouraging businesses to? How you start that practice, I'm unsure.
Maybe we also try continuing the trend of encouraging users to contribute time into the project. By lessening the burden of the core maintainer(s) while simultaneously paying them cash from businesses benefiting from the tech, we attack the problem from both sides.