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Discussion on: Ads In Your Linters

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Jordan Kicklighter

Here are my thoughts:

  • Putting ads in an open-source project is fundamentally against the mindset of open-source.
  • If you cannot maintain an open-source project, you don't have to. Pass the baton, if that's what it takes. I wouldn't encourage this, but it's always an option.
  • We as a community can and should do better at supporting the big open-source projects (or at least the ones without corporate backing).

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.

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Ben Lovy

We as a community can and should do better

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?

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Jordan Kicklighter

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.