A long post, but the final paragraphs sum up both the problem and the ask:
"This was the last attempt to keep core-js as a free open-source project with a proper quality and functionality level. It was the last attempt to convey that there are real people on the other side of open-source with families to feed and problems to solve.
If you or your company use core-js in one way or another and are interested in the quality of your supply chain, support the project."
> Shit happened 3 weeks after the core-js@3 release. One April night, at 3 AM, I was driving home. Two deadly drunk 18-years-old girls in dark clothes decided somehow to crawl across a poorly lit highway - one of them lay down on the road, another sat down and dragged the first, but not from the road - directly under my wheels. That's what the witnesses said. I had no any chance to see them. One more witness said that before the accident they were just jokingly fighting on the road. Nothing unusual, it's Russia. One of them died and another girl went to a hospital. However, even in this case, according to Russian arbitrage practice, if the driver is not a son of a deputy or someone like that, he almost always will be found guilty - he should see and anticipate everything, and a pedestrian owes nothing to anyone. I could end up in prison for a long time, IIRC later the prosecutor requested 7 years.
> The only way not to end up in prison was reconciliation with "victims" - a standard practice after such accidents - and a good lawyer. Within a few weeks after the accident, I received financial claims totaling about 80 thousand dollars at the exchange rate at that time from "victims'" relatives. A significant amount of money was also needed for a lawyer.
I don't know the full details but this is incredibly sad. It must be a lot to have killed someone and then spent 18 months in prison. And he is still maintaining this library used by over 19 million repos full-time. Even though some of zloirock's actions have been rude and combative, I think he deserves sympathy.
This was right before the "author of core-js is looking for a good job :-)" debacle, I think if more people realized the full context they would've been more sympathetic. Or even if it happened today, when more people seem to realize the importance of funding open-source. Fortunately he is out of jail now, I hope he finally gets a decent amount of funding and everyone can move on.
> I don’t wanna say many words about prison and I have no great desire remembering this. It was slave labor at a chemical factory where my health was significantly ruined and where I 24/7 had a great time in a company of drug dealers, thieves, and killers..
It really angers me that he, of all folks, struggled to raise even a percentage of $80K while I personally know FAANG engineers who got $50K+ in signing bonuses alone.
This is such a depressing post about the sad state of open source. I can't imagine continuing to maintain the package after what happened.
I want to encourage zloirock to forget about this and move on. I think it would be best for him to take a good paid job, live with his family and enjoy a vacation.
> This is such a depressing post about the sad state of open source.
But it's also a depressing post about the sad state of single source. I work in a portion of the software world that interacts with real world widgets, 5 factory buildings are right next to mine. "Single source" is a cuss word around here. We do everything we can to avoid it. I think it's awesome what this guy has done; terrible that it's just one guy. A whole aspect of open source was that it shouldn't become reliant on a single source like this. It's supposed to leverage the gestalt of cooperation. I agree with you, it really is too bad.
In my unasked-for opinion, he should absolutely give up on this project, and take a salaried job that'll let him support his family and not have to deal with the entitlement issues and lack of perspective the community evidently has. If half of what's in this post is true, he's shown admirable restraint: I'd have burned it all down the first time someone got pissy about a free thing I gave them.
The open source community can be wild sometimes. Back when I was still maintainer and lead dev for Gaim (not Pidgin), I would occasionally get downright hateful people e-mailing me for not implementing whatever feature they thought needed to be implemented, or not getting it implemented quickly enough.
One guy managed to get ahold of my cell phone number somehow and called me at 4am to discuss "his ideas" with me for the project. I ended up having to change my number.
Thankfully 95% of the people I interacted with in the community were great and were great, but that other 5% was rough.
Old coworker of mine was/is(?) secretly the primary contributor to a a major console emulator. He revealed it to me only after working together for about 4 years.
He keeps it incognito because the vitriol his alias receives from impassioned members of the community makes him afraid of getting doxxed. He showed me some of them. I don't blame him.
Yes. But I think it also shows a common misunderstanding of "open source" (and even "free software").
What he did was incredibly valuable to a huge number of successful people and corporations. But no one owes him anything. That's the point of open source. If they did owe him something, they wouldn't have used it. They used it because it was great, it was established/known, it was available with no strings attached whatsoever. Again, that's the point, that's why it's popular.
But also, he owes them nothing. He doesn't have to keep maintaining the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and flexible package, as a full-time job, for free. He could could have just stopped after his first couple years where it was an inherently fulfilling passion project, he could just put in a couple hours a week, whatever. People would make do, it would still be quite valuable for a lot of people for a long time. Or those other projects and companies would come up with an more up-to-date alternative when really needed.
You really don't have to be a martyr, and we don't have to "give up on open source" or whatever. You can just make stuff available that you wanted to do anyway. Sometimes it leads to bigger opportunities, sometimes (usually?) not. Don't slave away and sacrifice your personal life because of what you think you deserve if you do, that's not going to materialize that way.
Remember this is all stuff just offered up with NO WARRANTY, NOT EVEN FITNESS FOR PURPOSE etc. And in practice it's super super valuable that way. Even without you sacrificing yourself. Let companies spend the big bucks on it, just work on what's fun in your free time.
It's the nature of most types of volunteering work. If you sign up to be the conductor of your local choir, you have the same thing. People start expecting you to do stuff. If you're going to be in that role, as ploxiln says, you need to be OK with that part of it. You have to be OK with the thanklessness of the task, and you have to seek your rewards elsewhere. Still, I feel very sorry for zloirock, and I hope that he gets some kind of compensation for his work, at least enough to get his life back together.
> You have to be OK with the thanklessness of the task, and you have to seek your rewards elsewhere.
Is this really how we want the world to be? Someone who is trying to help needs to be ok with being treated badly? I can understand not being put on a pedestal, but I think a "thank you" and a bit of gratefulness is warranted by people actively being helped.
The best way to do open source work is to consult or be employed and release open source stuff as part of your work. Otherwise it turns into politics, competition for money and popularity contest rather than product of passion. If you are as proficient as this guy you will find employers that do not mind open source work
Did he look though? Maybe he is not aware this is a possibility. Even if he cannot leave Russia there are likely russian companies that would pay him and be even happy if he contributes to OSS. I know Qiwi, Yandex publish and maintain packages
Yeah but if the statement is a guy like this could find something like this, then the answer is no. I think mostly because it's not entirely clear how to get such a job and how to do that job without handing over the reigns of your project to the company.
> Yeah but if the statement is a guy like this could find something like this, then the answer is no.
What? Why?
> I think mostly because it's not entirely clear how to get such a job
Same as any other job, by looking. Even I do something like that and I am not even close to corejs maintainer level
> reins
If you do this while working as independent contributor (popular in Russia) then it's not even a question, the company will not have any reins on whatever you do outside the contract. If you are employed then company may have the reins, but you will publish OSS while getting money and recognition for it, which is 80% of the formula.
The part where he spent the year 2020 in a russian slave labour prison might help explain his difficulty getting a job. Plus as a russian national living in russia, FAANG is not exactly knocking at his door.
I used FAANG as a shorthand for "big international tech companies that pay a lot". Glad to hear though that there are lots opportunites for tech folk in Russia to make good money.
> I used FAANG as a shorthand for "big international tech companies that pay a lot".
Uhh… Yes and that's my point? He could earn 50-100 USD per hour, which would get him a more than decent lifestyle in Russia. Why would someone pick between Lots Of Money and begging and not accept an alternative between that would allow him to keep doing OSS while feeding his family? This whole plea just doesn't compute with me.
> Glad to hear though that there are lots opportunites for tech folk in Russia to make good money.
It's not good money, it's just money to live okay. And it's not in Russia, it's everywhere. Internet, it did wonders.
I am not saying either party is better than another but I do not wish to live in a world that people are order of magnitude less willing to donate to FOSS developers than people posting sexy photos online.
Edit: maybe I used wrong comparison. Most of the income of the photo publishers should be from sales (to unlock paywall of exclusive content), not many will donation.
you can't really compare volunteering at a local choir / local homeless canteen to big corporations taking advantage of open source projects (which is perfectly legit) and never ever feel like they should contribute more to make open source financially sustainable. There is a reason why major open source projects are backed by companies selling products or services based on the open source project itself.
If you don't want big corporations using your software, change the license. They are not "taking advantage" of Free/open software, they are using it, and don't owe the maintainer for it. It feels very entitled to me (a Free software enthusiast who wishes more authors chose GPL over BSD/MIT). As G.W. Bush said "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... I can't get fooled again"
For a while it was a trend for people to use userscripts to delete their old comments on various social media sites after a certain amount of time. I think this practice is unfair, because the user gets the benefits of participating in open conversation but tries not to pay the (IMO absolutely minuscule) costs in terms of privacy.
I see a lot of open source use the same way. Companies use open-source contributions but don't contribute back any of the value they receive. I'm strongly in favor of using strict GPL licensing or dual licensing for corporate and nonprofit use for every open source project. I know people like the MIT license so that people will use their projects, but fundamentally if you want open source to continue then open source contributions need to be enforced, because otherwise it doesn't happen
I think the disagreement here will continue indefinitely because it is a question of (personal and professional) ethics. Ethics doesn't necessarily offer easy answers, just sometimes hard questions. In every discussion like this on HN you see the direct conflict of several competing Ethical Frameworks that people choose to live by which is why the discussion will likely always recur and it will always seem like two or more teams talking past each other.
"What do we owe to each other?" is a massive, hard ethical question. It's not just an easy economic question with an answer of "well he did the work for free, so obviously it is priced at free" though many ethical frameworks, especially on HN, happily stop there. Some ethical frameworks, on the other hand, don't believe there is any such thing as "free labor", just "exploited labor" and find guilt in every bit of open source usage, expect some amount "owed" in backpay to eventually pay back. Some of those same ethical frameworks still feel that "open source" is an ideal, a community good, but also think that for the health of the community as a whole, some support needs to be given to individuals in that community when/where/as they need it, for the good of the whole, and that both things can be true: "open source creates good software" and "open source sometimes creates the conditions to exploit labor (and we owe it to ourselves to mitigate that)".
I can't tell anyone what their ethical framework should be, just that this discussion will likely remain an impasse because it is about personal and professional ethics. How much I feel that I owe the most exploited of the workers in our industry, is something that keeps me up at night sometimes, and that guilt doesn't come from "nowhere" and I'm well aware of the economics and the license agreements in play: that guilt comes from the ethical frameworks that I hold dear and am unlikely to waver on.
He's the maintainer of a major software library. Everyone who depends on his work does owe him gratitude and respect. They'd have to pay me big bucks to care enough to do what he did, so I respect him for doing it.
Maintainers like Denis shouldn't be asking for donations, they should be sponsored the same way Nike sponsors athletes. If you're a burnt out open source maintainer or know someone who is, I'd love to talk to you. My job is to help create awareness about the issue with companies that depend on your package. I reached out to Denis because we all know he deserves better. Appreciate any leads you could additionally share with me.
Edit: I see you work for thanks.dev, which doesn't seem like it would cover the projects I mention below. I leave my original comment in case anyone else is interested in sponsoring the things I mention.
I'd like to find sponsors for a few non-web-related projects. In particular the Linux USB Gadgets userspace stack (libusbgx/gt/gadgetd/etc), a library for the Microsoft PST email format (libpst) and a tool for running linters/etc (check-all-the-things). Happy to chat about these over email.
Thanks Paul, yes I do work for thanks.dev & non-web-projects are on our roadmap. Let me know if you’d like to be a early pilot user when we’re ready for testing…
While your argument is kinda bad, its also incorrect. They moved to russia before the current war. Also its their home country, the world isn't progressive enough that this isn't every immigrant's default choice.
Right, but it was after the invasion of Georgia, green men in Donetsk, and the annexation of Crimea? So 3 wars started in the span of 10 years and the guy returns because things are cheaper than in the west.
Well, I hope he enjoys his beloved home country now. He will have to stay there for quite a while.
Russia does so many bad things that by that argument all Russians should just move out. I dont know what point you are trying to make with the tweet, I have no context there.
The United States would have emptied itself out a long time ago if we followed the same rule, but somehow I don't think that's an outcome this guy feels is necessary, either.
Ukraine. I can't leave, another country invaded mine unprovoked and they are killing my people so I kinda have to stay. I am looking forward to your argument why this makes me a bad person.
The point is that it DOESN’T make you a bad person. You’ve just argued the other side. A country is not its government, especially in oppressive undemocratic regimes like Russia. This is basic shit. I am utterly truly sorry for the unimaginable horrors which you are going through. I genuinely couldn’t begin to understand how this must be for you. I hope I never do. This doesn’t give you a blank cheque to jump online and foster divisiveness between two groups of people just because one of them has a fucked up government that can’t possibly be argued to be representing them.
What in that twitter thread makes you think he enjoys it? The fact that he does not share a certain political opinion? Is a political belief, or lack of it, enough to enjoy life in a country?
Nike (or a more appropriate entity) wouldn't be able to sponsor him even if it wanted to, given how the ties with the Russian banks have now been severed. Another case for bitcoin, I guess?
Your lack of empathy in favor of blind group hatred is a pretty solid example of one of humanity's worst traits.
However, I'm not going to return the favor by ignoring your personal context.
Is the reason you're denouncing core-js's maintainer because you, yourself, have been subject to particularly awful circumstances owing to Russia's war? Are you projecting on him because you've been hurt? What's your situation?
I'm just shocked at the reaction from the HN crowd in this post. The guy lives in the west but returns to Russia, then blames Ukraine for being invaded, actually kills a teen girl and writes shit about her in the very same post added to HN, and blames everyone around him for his situation. Yet HN loves him because he wrote a cool Javascript library. Blows my mind.
I didn't see any part of the post where he blamed Ukraine for being invaded. There was a passage where he stated he can't publicly support either side because he has friends (family?) on both sides, but that's all I read.
The manslaughter came as a shock, yes, and I think there's more to that story than he's telling us. He probably isn't a great human being.
None of that, however, is relevant to the fact that maintaining core-js in particular and FOSS in general is a thankless and awful job.
It's possible to support FOSS, and support remuneration for FOSS, without supporting specific individuals.
What's your reasoning for saying he's probably not a great human being? Assuming what he says is true. If he had no way of seeing that coming, how is that different from blaming / judging a train driver in any way for someone's suicide or going as far to as to say they killed them.
I'll admit it's conjecture based on limited data. However, the tone he takes when discussing the event seems accusatory towards the victims, rather than repentant or horrified, which is what I would expect.
I agree that his tone could be better, but if this was really none of his fault (other than being at the wrong road at the wrong time), I could understand why he writes that way given the trouble it has caused him, significant time in prison, criminal record that he will never erase and debt that translated to US standards is way way higher than those 80k and it could end up way worse, too. Like of course, it's a tragedy what happened to the girl, I think a lot of people could relate to doing stupid things intoxicated when young, especially in countries where vodka consumption is high, I do not say that the tone is appropriate, but I could understand the place where he's coming from where the girls' irresponsible behaviour severely impacted his life, he is just quite angry. I wonder how many of the people in this comment section labeling him a killer (I don't say that you did) would speak with the same tone if they were put in the exact same situation given the lack of empathy with his situation.
I don't think it's particularly useful to expect that someone would react the same way you believe that you would, in all honesty.
This is like saying that you're not sad about your mother dying because you didn't immediately burst into tears. It's well understood that we all process grief differently and sometimes we even struggle or fail to process it.
So is it so unreasonable that one may process any notable or traumatic event differently? I can try to put myself in the shoes of someone who is sent to a gulag for 7 months under circumstances that appear to be unfair, and I can't imagine anything except how much it would fucking suck and how actually, I might have complicated feelings that range from anger to despair.
Whether I like this guy or not, or think he is a good guy or a bad guy, has absolutely no bearing on this. It's just not useful or helpful to police someone's reaction.
He's Russian. He returned home, where he was born, where he has friends, multiple generations of family, decades of memories, and could hope to find some support when shrinking his life to fit in a smaller income. Moreover, he has stated that he'll leave if he can, if that's what is required to work on open-source.
> I'd have burned it all down the first time someone got pissy about a free thing I
Sadly this is the state of open source projects. People feeling entitled and doing nothing but complain. It's sad really because negative compacts often have a more lasting impact than positive ones.
Please, if you are capable of doing development at this level, take the high-paying job, save for a decade, and get FI. Then you can work on OSS 120 hours a week if you like.
If you're working for a company that relies on OSS, please suggest establishing an OSS fund to specifically support projects like core-js. Have the company pledge some percentage of profits, where employees decide how the funds get appropriated. E.g. by popularity, relevance, love, or whatever other criteria feels right. Think of the Humble Bundle sliders, for example.
It's heart breaking to know that the world's largest companies are using software whose author is struggling financially. That xkcd is 100% right, but this situation is far from amusing.
> employees decide how the funds get appropriated. E.g. by popularity, relevance, love, or whatever other criteria feels right
FWIW this is not the way. Distributing based on these criteria means most of the funding will go to those who already receive most of the funding. It does not solve the XKCD/2347 problem, which is exactly what this guy is encountering: People who maintain unknown software, software you don't even realize you're using, but which is so useful it ends up used everywhere.
OpenSSH (via OpenBSD) faced that issue in 2014 (https://www.osnews.com/story/27519/openbsd-will-shut-down-if...), and got funding because the story got attention. I suspect core-js after this post has also solved his problem for the time being thanks to this post (assuming it gets enough attention; seeing as it's at the top of HN now, I bet it will). But this is not viable. People in open source often do not see money as a resource, but as a corruptor, so they refuse to touch it unless strictly necessary; to a fault. (I should know; I was in that situation as well for years. Out of idealism I also refused to touch money. Now I work in fintech, so clearly I changed my outlook; but old me would probably hate current me.)
What a soul-crushingly sad and difficult read this was, though. Jesus.
At this risk of some self promotion, we developed StackAid (https://stackaid.us) to help fund the long tail of open source because of the exact problems you mentioned. People only tend to remember the popular/direct dependencies.
Am I interpreting it right, and your service acts as an escrow? Even though you seem to solve the payment headaches, I'm not sure I'd trust a middle-man to do the right thing in these matters. Would it be possible to use your tool entirely offline and just get a list of dependencies, and suggested payment per month for each depending on available funds? And then allow me to tweak it depending on whatever criteria I want, similar to the Humble Bundle sliders?
Getting the payments out to every project would be a hassle that you already solve, but I think it would be preferable to deal with those than with a centralized service that everyone depends on.
Yes, we do hold payments for projects and pay them out monthly. However if you don't want to claim your funds on StackAid but do accept donations elsewhere, we will use those service to pay you out instead. Running the tool offline would be challenging because we a large index of dependency->repository mappings across various ecosystems so we can resolve your dependency tree. You would also still be stuck manually paying out to possibly hundreds of projects. FWIW we are completely transparent about the payments we make to each project as well as how much goes to us.
> Distributing based on these criteria means most of the funding will go to those who already receive most of the funding.
It depends on the strategy used. If we define "popularity" as "number of our projects that depend on this OSS project", then the distribution should be fair, and projects like core-js would be well compensated. This could all be automated, and the popularity ranking could be fixed and used by default, so that employees could add additional funding by voting on their most used and loved projects. I think both approaches would work well.
In any case, my suggestion was to create a company-wide OSS fund to begin with, which most companies don't even bother with. The strategy of how they're appropriated can always be improved after that.
Sounds like it’s time for him to move on. I’m sure it’s incredibly difficult to give up on a passion project which is also very popular, but he doesn’t sound happy and in a good mental space. Besides, I highly doubt that companies will suddenly start supporting open source devs.
A break and a paid job might be what he needs to reboot mentally. Hope he gets through this tough time!
I wrote this sentiment earlier[1], but I'll repeat it here.
If a dev wants money for his work, he should license his work as appropriate and demand payments. If a dev releases his work free-as-in-libre and/or free-as-in-beer, they don't get to complain if the donations are "insufficient".
Or to put it another: Of course a company won't pay up if they don't have to.
This guy seems to be considering making his work into a commercial product, so at least he has the correct idea. Speaking objectively I hope it works out for him.
And to echo the top reply to your original comment, nope you don’t get to decide to for everyone.
I personally think that releasing free software and then complaining that the multibillionaire (trillionaire?) companies that rely on it refuse to fund you even after you’ve expressly asked for it is perfectly justified.
Okay, and now half the devs simply decide to not deal with the issue of licensing and just business source everything. Congrats, that's definitely the better world to code in, right?
> If a dev releases his work free-as-in-libre and/or free-as-in-beer, they don't get to complain if the donations are "insufficient".
Of course they get to complain. Complaining and doing nothing to change the situation is what's problematic.
Doing work without reward, even if you did not expect any in the first place, can be soul-sucking, and it is totally normal to complain about it.
You don't do FOSS for the recognition/glory, but complaining about the hatred, hypocrisy, and complete lack of respect of the industry towards FOSS is normal.
The backlash he got after he "dared" ask for help was completely uncalled for. I'd even say this, it's the user who does not get to complain, let's remind everyone of what most FOSS licenses include:
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.
You get a message during `npm install` from the dev asking for funding and a job? Tough shit, you don't get to complain because you're not paying him.
No, they don't. They specifically waived any compensation by licensing their work for free-as-in-libre and/or free-as-in-beer. If they want to have social and legal standing to complain, they should have demanded compensation upfront.
>You don't do FOSS for the recognition/glory, but complaining about the hatred, hypocrisy, and complete lack of respect of the industry towards FOSS is normal.
FOSS doesn't ask for money. -> Users proceed to pay no money, because why would they? -> FOSS is pissed they don't get money.
This whole saga is hypocritical on FOSS's part. If devs want money they should demand money with appropriate licensing. It really isn't hard, it's dead simple.
Users and companies are happy to pay up if you can get them to sign the contract.
>I'd even say this, it's the user who does not get to complain, ... You get a message during `npm install` from the dev asking for funding and a job? Tough shit, you don't get to complain because you're not paying him.
Absolutely. Users don't get to complain about something they got for free.
> If a dev wants money for his work, he should license his work as appropriate and demand payments. If a dev releases his work free-as-in-libre and/or free-as-in-beer, they don't get to complain if the donations are "insufficient".
The author might still do it (it's one of his options) but please note that proprietary core libraries (and proprietary software in general) are immensely less useful than open source software. The value proposition of core-js is that it's a basic piece of infrastructure that other open source projects build upon, and if it were proprietary, no OSS could depend on it.
Yeah, I saw that victim-blaming take last time and I still say it's bunk. They do get to complain.
It would be a better world if this guy could just be building his extremely useful package and making a modest living. We are not in that world yet, but we will never get there if people can't talk about problems. I understand this can be a shock to free-market fundamentalists, but not every issue is best solved through capitalism. Forcing an excellent developer to become a probably-mediocre startup CEO is not a clear step forward here.
So I'm grateful to him speaking up. If you don't want to hear it, maybe exercise your freedom to stop reading articles like this.
The problem is that as soon as he turns this into a billable enterprise solution it will artificially inflate the price. He’s giving all the people who depend on this project a chance to get it at a discount.
So long as compensations are optional (note: donations are voluntary, aka optional), most users/companies are not going to give monies. That's just how society rolls, to say nothing of the professional business world subset.
This is an industry with so much more money than it knows what to do with, and yet critical software rots for the want of a few thousand dollars here and there.
He should 100% try to find regular sustainable work somewhere instead of working on this project.
Secondarily, find a lawyer to write up a contract for $80/hr for companies to sign and have him do work on core-js when they need an update or a feature. He can give an estimate on hours, send them a contract, get it signed and have the work done. If the people asking for feature requests and updates don't want to pay, then that's fine, it doesn't need to get done.
AFAIK: technically only a limited amount of companies and people are sanctioned, but the sanction list includes most if not all Russian banks... So I think Patreon, etc, or their banks would be scared about transferring money to his bank account.
I wonder if external banking is possible: a Russian goes to a supermarket in Russia, he buys food, he pays by transferring money from his e.g. Swiss bank account to the supermarket owner's Swiss bank account. The supermarket owner wins because s/he basically managed to trade local goods for foreign currency (the Ruble is on shaky ground), the customer wins because he gets to eat.
I think I remember paying for a hotel in Russia using PayPal but transferring the money to a German bank account of the hotel owner's cousin or something...
Only a small fraction of russians needs to pay online for foreign stuff. Besides that, UnionPay cards are available, you can use them to withdraw money in most countries and shop online sometimes
It's definitely time for him to let this project go, working on it is a literally thankless task and the level of entitlement shown towards his work has been infuriating to watch. The outrage towards him daring to ask the community for help, something done in an act of desperation, is a real wake up call for open source maintainers - the community doesn't give a fuck about you, they want your code and they want it free.
The psychological burden of carrying such an important but relatively unknown project has trapped him in this state of desperation for years now. It's tunnel vision and sunk loss thinking, time to quit.
The court documents on that case are publicly available if you're willing to look for them (and can read Russian). I haven't read everything, but I didn't see anything contradicting his side of the story.
he said he was "driving home at 3am," you know, as one does, and two girls were "crawling on the highway." i am honestly not sure i've ever heard a less believable story
I have a friend who went through almost exactly the same driving event as this guy. Hit a man wearing all black on a country road at 1AM. Could have driven away but called 911, rendered first aid, and stayed through the ordeal. He also ended up spending several years in US prison for it.
I have been driving home after midnight, coming from my where my parents live, a long distance away, and encountered a man who had climbed up into the elevated highway. It was straight and well-lit, but the best I could make out was that he was running at cars wielding a cardboard box (?). I began to decelerate and moved into the lane furthest from him, at the time, and after another car in front of me passed him, he moved into my lane. I'm still braking to slow down, and I change lanes to avoid him again, swerving and praying the lights in my rear view are slowing too and don't hit me as I try to avoid this man.
As I pass him, I manage to be one lane to his left, and he makes a lunge to try and jump in front of my vehicle. With some frequency, to this day I wonder how fucked I would have been if he succeeded in jumping in front of my car. The story I tell myself is that he was mentally unwell and thought he was heroically "tilting at windmills". It is more likely he was belligerently drunk, or was suicidal and wanted some help in it.
I don't know what makes something believable or unbelievable in your mind, but these are the details of an almost-incident that happened to me.
Russia does not have a "justice system" in the way that we would understand it in the West. Instead it has (and indeed, always had) a system of patronage and bribery, where your status within the system determines your sentence. If you are an oligarch, or the son of an oligarch, you will walk free, unless you cross Putin. If you are a nobody, you pay off the right people or you go to prison or end up freezing to death in a foxhole in the Donbass (Wagner recruits directly from prison, just as Stalin emptied the gulags for his cannon-fodder in WWII).
That's just how Russia is and always has been, and unfortunately, very likely always will be.
Is Denis guilty? Perhaps, but he will not have had a fair trial by any Western standard, and so we have to presume innocence.
I mean, that part isn't really surprising or noteworthy. Lots of people in russian prison don't deserve to be there (the ones detained on protests, political cases etc).
Agreed, but I think it goes beyond tunnel vision and sunk costs. He clearly likes helping developers! He is a good-hearted person who will feel bad screwing over a bunch of people who depend upon him. The main thing that's getting him to shift is that now he has a spouse and a child who depend upon him much more directly, and so he's even less willing to disappoint them.
Pretty easy to say when you’re not the guy stressing out about paying bills while six-figure earners whose jobs are made significantly easier because of you trash you.
I generally agree with the idea that nobody owes anyone else anything, but in this case, I think he should’ve been let it all burn to the ground — maybe then the ingrates would be able to understand how critical his library is.
Babel has four paid developers, an almost $200k/year budget and hundreds of contributors. I'm sure that's enough to maintain the polyfills, if someone else wasn't already doing it for free - not to throw shade on them, but that's reality (not one I particularly like).
I do agree with that second statement. It is unfortunate that he got into this situation, but there is absolutely no reason to continue if it's not working out. He has the choice to go make six figures too, and doesn't owe anyone maintaining this library either.
If you would have read the article, you would have seen the image from a Babel maintainer saying they won't fork because they don't have the resources to maintain it.
If the coreJS maintainer stops working on it and it bitrots for a year or two, maybe the babel people will magically find the manpower to maintain it then. As it stands, why should they spend their time maintaining a fork of a project that is still maintained and in good shape?
Yeah, maybe. Or maybe the current subject matter expert that’s been pouring thousands of hours into this project should be funded by the billion dollar companies that rely on him, same as what’s happened to the projects at the top of the ecosystem.
> Or maybe the current subject matter expert that’s been pouring thousands of hours into this project should be funded by the billion dollar companies that rely on him
Ideally yes, but as we've seen time after time, charity as a business model doesn't work with corporations. I think the coreJS maintainer would be fully justified to take another job, and then work on coreJS as a hobby as much or as little as he likes. Nobody needs to martyr themselves so that a bunch of billion dollar advertising companies can save a buck.
Maybe in the future we decide to finance core open source projects as public infrastructure through taxes, or those billion dollar corps set up some kind of foundation to fund them, but for now the whole situation is highly dysfunctional and one cannot blame maintainers who put the financial interests of themselves and their family ahead of producing open source.
Of course they won't volunteer to maintain a massive project that they depend on, when someone else is already doing the work.
But you can bet the minute core-js goes away, the community will pull together to maintain or create something new, purely out of necessity - that's the main motivator. Hopefully with a more distributed model that doesn't overload a single person.
Nobody actually follows the philosophy of "you take, and give as you can"
As the article mentions, nobody else contributed to corejs in a meaningful way. Everyone takes, but nobody gives. This is called tragedy of the commons, and it is a well-known problem in economics
> the community doesn't give a fuck about you, they want your code and they want it free
This is why I'm skeptical about non-free software licenses. Maybe we should all be applying AGPLv3 to our free software code instead of stuff like MIT or BSD. That way anyone who just wants to exploit people's work at their jobs to make a killing while simultaneously hating them for it will have to look elsewhere.
Imo zloirock should work for himself and get rid of the core-js project (or make it least of his priorities). It's a liability to him at this point, just making himself look like a fool desperate for handouts.
His freedom is on the line and not one company seems to care.
If the open source community turns its back at you, turn your back at them.
In one of my previous jobs, my CTO asked me who I thought was the most important person in the company was. I wasn’t sure. He pointed to the lady who was responsible for entering and maintaining data, on which the entire business was built upon.
She was a quiet person, who did her job exceptionally well. Yet, most people didn’t know her or didn’t realize her importance. I am certain she wasn’t paid that well either.
Point being, nobody is going to reward you, unless you ask for it. I once spent 4 years at a job, I did my job well. Didn’t get a single dollar raise. I didn’t ask, nobody cared either. Most I got was some praise in team meetings once in a while.
The most disgusting part of the story is all hate and vitriol thrown at him. By people using his software for free, by people who are likely not even a tenth as good as he is - both as a person and as a programmer. All this in an industry with plenty of money. This is super depressing. I genuinely hope he gets to spend his future happy
You have to ask to the appropriate forum though, and that's what he got completely wrong. Getting npm to scream for help when a developer installs your package is equivalent to asking your peer for a raise.
I'd say that over 99.999% of the people who saw that message, created memes about it, etc.. did not have a corporate credit card and the power to use it at their discretion. If you want money from corps, THOSE are the guys you need to find and ask money from.
> I'd say that over 99.999% of the people who saw that message, created memes about it, etc.. did not have a corporate credit card and the power to use it at their discretion. If you want money from corps, THOSE are the guys you need to find and ask money from.
So he should be cold emailing netflix, airbnb, linkedin purchasing managers?
If you look at “real” non-profits, there are a couple of key things that are largely missing from Open Source fundraising today.
First is capital campaigns. A capital campaign is a campaign to raise a large amount of money towards a goal. E.g. “we need 3 million dollars by the end of the year for our building renovations.” Having a concrete target is more motivating that just asking for “whatever you can give” to “keep the lights on.”
Second is cultivating relationships with (large) individual donors. It makes sense to track people who have donated to you, send them thank you cards, and take the biggest donors out to lunch. Then when you need money and you’re running your capital campaign, you can ask previous donors for larger contributions. It’s not cold-emailing, because you have a previous relationship with your donors.
Today, open source funding looks more like begging with a sign—sitting in a prominent place and asking for a small amount of money from a lot of people. Nothing wrong with that, you can get enough to eat, but I’d like to see free and open source software try more sustainable and effective strategies.
I did some work like this back in the day, on the side while doing my normal software dev day job.
It's another acquired skill that you don't get just because you're an excellent programmer. On that basis, adding a donation prompt when installing the package is I think a valid attempt at solving the problem, but it's a solution coming from a developer mindset not a fundraiser mindset; if you code it they will come, all that.
If you had the capital you'd hire someone to help with this or find a suitable volunteer with a goal to making it paid.
What I'm really struggling with is how much this contrasts with the story for the developers of Dwarf Fortress, who don't get that same hate and vitro piled on them, and in fact, people throw money at them because they want the developers to have money. To the tune of like $9 million or something! Whereas this guy, pouring his heart into something useful and not for fun, gets all this hate shoveled his way?
I guarantee they got all kinds of hate and weirdness sent their way, too. Any game with a notable userbase does, including the commercial ones. Like, weird, personal, abusive shit from people who demonstrably (it's pretty clear from their "ideas") have no idea what they're talking about and evidently have unfortunate (for everyone else, anyway) amounts of free time on their hands.
And I don't just mean "you monetized this in a way I dislike" or "boo, DRM" or "you had dozens of game-breaking bugs at launch" or whatever, which, maybe don't be a dick about it, but at least I get why those things upset people and, especially in the last case, why they might get a bit entitled-seeming about it, since they did part with money—no, it's over the tiniest, most trivial stuff, including, often, things that are the way they are for a very good reason and would piss off 100x as many people if the abusive jerk got his (or her, I guess... but realistically, it's just about always a "his") way. But no, this minor thing is wrong so you're incompetent and any idiot could do better and [some names they somehow came up with, sometimes with disturbing accuracy] who worked on that part should be fired immediately. JFC. They'll spam you with this crap, on every channel they can.
And that's if you're not a woman prominent in the project. Then you get the creeper shit, too.
There's no possible way the DF devs haven't seen their fair share of that.
(though, sure, they were ultimately able to monetize it in a way that very few passion projects of that sort ever can, and certainly not utility open source libraries—that part of the story's way different)
My personal bias is that open source authors and maintainers don't owe anyone anything. They're making their code available to anyone for free, and it's on you if there's something you don't like about it. You can always fork it if you need to. Heck, you don't even have to use it. Write your own thing if something fundamentally bothers you about it.
And yet there's a large group of people who think they're somehow doing you a favor by using your open-source code, as opposed to the other way around. I've tried to talk to some of them, to try to get some idea of it. It typically boils down to either
1. I used and advocated for the project, making it more popular, and therefore they owe me.
2. Using an open-source library is an investment. I'm making a compromise by not writing it myself exactly how I want it. I'm attempting to do things their way, which in some ways is mentally harder than writing it to begin with, so when it changes radically or goes away, or they ask me for support, they have done me dirty. I deserve better.
3. #2, except they recognize that the author/maintainer doesn't owe them anything and hasn't acted maliciously, but they're still bummed that they either have to change things or fork the project and maintain it themselves. It's emotional rather than logical.
Of the three, I can kinda understand the last one, but I'll never agree with it.
People playing the game (Dwarf Fortress) chose to play it and likely enjoy it. Those who use core-js likely need to use it to solve some weird problems, likely occuring while they're working on something else.
Myself i hate working in JavaScript ecosystem and every few months, when i need to update one of my packages, something is broken. I appreciate every person that worked on libs that i use but i hate everyone of those packages.
He only said "I don't want to choose between two kinds of evil. I will not comment on this in more detail, since there are people close to me on both sides of the border who may suffer because of this."
I don't think "two kinds of evil" is meant to imply that both sides are equally bad. Just that there are no good options for him. After all, when we say "the lesser of two evils" we don't (usually) mean evil in the literal sense. We mean that we are being forced to pick the least-bad of two bad options.
What would you say if you were in Russia? Would you publicly pour out your complete thoughts, whatever they may be, in a popular blog post with your name signed underneath? With an unfunded OSS project, a family to support and criminal history? Don't forget, you can't just "say stuff" in most corners of the world.
It looks like Denis is actually supporting russian government and their lies about this war - https://twitter.com/roman01la/status/1625254253156528147 . He literally spreads russian propaganda points and blames Ukraine for being attacked.
I understand that his perspective is not consonant with Western views and that he does place some blame on Ukraine, but he literally says "I'm against war. I'm against the current Russian government." which I hardly think is fair to represent as supporting the Russian government and the war!
If you don't support the war and afraid to express your opinion, you can just remain silent and don't say that "both sides are equally bad". This kind is rhetoric is exactly what Russian war supporters use.
His comments were in response to an issue opened in the repo, it's not like he went out of his way to bring the problem up. If you take concern with him speaking with his family's best interests in mind (especially the "indoctrination" he is concerned about for his child), then stop using core-js.
I'm shocked I have to scroll down so far to see someone complain about that. He absolutely is shifting 100% of the blame for him killing someone onto the person he killed.
Honestly, I feel really sorry for the guy and I'm willing to take him at his word that it wasn't his fault, but I found the bit about him hitting the girls a little off. It almost seemed like he was more angry at them for being in the road than himself for hitting them.
As some who has hit someone in my car before and was not to blame (legally at least) I'm more than aware these things happen, but I think if I killed someone, especially if it was someone as young as 18, I'd be tormented by guilt. Even if it were an accident.
Assuming we take his story at face value, from a legal standpoint you are correct. However, if I accidentally ran somebody over and even if I was not at legal fault I would certainly feel guilty and it feels wrong to me how quickly he pushed it off.
I also find it a bit weird he implied he was driving a car but in the news article it said he was driving a motorcycle.
I was trying to check if my transaction went through, but then I started to wonder if I should fact check him on his claim that he didn’t have 80k usd to evade prison sentence.
But to answer your question - years of work for such a widely used project should be compensated more in my opinion. An engineer at google with similar skill will make 2-5x, maybe 10x as much.
Not exactly. 3.4 BTC received. Depending on when the donations were made it could be more or less than $73000.
Though it does look like he held ~1 BTC until Nov 2020 and then transferred it out. So it's possible he's actually received roughly the equivalent of $73000 USD from those donations
I see a lot comments here suggesting the he should just pack his bags and get a corporate gig. How many other great open source projects will we miss out on because developers see this advice and not even bother in the first place.
Sure, but you (maybe not you specifically) _solve problems_ by using a lot of open source. Your ability to do your job and get paid depends on the labor of others. Why not compensate them for it.
Here's simple solution: create a product and sell it for money. Seriously. Stop giving stuff away for free.
EDIT: let me elaborate.
Writing open source is not a business strategy. At best, it's a gimmick, or outsourcing infrastructure maintenance to the public.
What you should do is the following:
1) Project authority.
This is easy. You are the creator and maintainer of a critical piece of infrastructure. You are THE EXPERT!
2) Project non-neediness
None of this "guys I'm struggling here". People should come to you because you have value to provide, not because they pity you.
3) Value proposition
Create a compelling value proposition where you get money in exchange for something.
That something could be a product, a subscription, a consultation service, or something else. The possibilities are endless.
You are a smart person. If you dedicate a week or two you can figure this out.
I don't know many people who are successfully making money from open source. I only know of Zig. Here's what Andrew Kelly did:
- He projects authority. You can watch him programming live. He has many live streams and talks.
- He does not project neediness. He talks frankly about his finances but none of this "omg you guys are so thankless for all my work". It's more like: hey guys, I'm working on this, if you are interested in this and would like it to continue, consider donating.
- He did the drudge work of setting up a non-profit foundation to receive the donations
- He got help from people: he doesn't run everything, he doesn't code everything. There are several people working in the Zig Foundation.
Now, I don't think you can do this with core-js. It's already pretty mature and any donation you get is basically going to come out of pity. You don't want to be in this situation.
That's why I think it's better for you to create a consultancy and provide some kind of service where people are compelled to pay you money because you are just so valuable.
My man, there are people out there making over $10k/mo from things like "copywriting" a few emails a month for a few high class clients.
I can, it sounds like a world where people are more fairly compensated for their work.
I’m increasingly cynical about open source as time goes on. There really need to be better licenses that deal with the funding issue, because huge companies shouldn’t have any right to freeload.
He should close access to his repo immediately and try to get paying job. Anyone wants access, help, new version - pay money. It is very depressing reading his story. Feel almost like: do no good for humanity as you will get punished for it.
BTW: Zloirock is a transliteration, translates as bad karma, evil fate, bad luck etc.
https://words.filippo.io/full-time-maintainer/ represents an attempt to find a sustainable answer to some parts of this issue. I'm not sure whether it's appropriate to attempt that model wholesale in your particular case, but it may be worth reaching out to Filippo for a conversation.
That was an interesting writeup and I hope Mr. Valsorda succeeds in this; certainly funding paths for bottom of the stack open source code is sorely needed.
However, I don't really think the coreJS maintainer is in a position to do an experiment like this. He should focus on getting a well paid job so he can support himself and his family, pay off the damages he owes, and GTFO of Russia before he's drafted for cannon fodder in Ukraine. Then build up a comfortable buffer, and only then, if he still feels like it and coreJS is still relevant in the world, does he have the financial security that would allow him to do such an experiment.
The top 100 companies who depend on this software should be slinging millions at this guy.
That's my simple ethics take on it. The value created is that large at least. The amount of money he saved them in dev time.
"Then he should license it as xyzsksudhsj, he should have released it as a commercial product, he should have put on a tie and pulled himself up by his bootstraps" no. Highly unlikely the tool would have become as useful as it as, or as widespread and thus a source of truth (and a guiding force in the world of web standards). That's victim blaming.
It's time for the top 100 companies to pony up, straight up. They don't "have to..." until the outrage gets high enough, until the internal pressure gets large enough.
So we should all do our part and start sending emails up the chain, start the conversation, start being a little annoying.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 522 ms ] thread"This was the last attempt to keep core-js as a free open-source project with a proper quality and functionality level. It was the last attempt to convey that there are real people on the other side of open-source with families to feed and problems to solve.
If you or your company use core-js in one way or another and are interested in the quality of your supply chain, support the project."
> The only way not to end up in prison was reconciliation with "victims" - a standard practice after such accidents - and a good lawyer. Within a few weeks after the accident, I received financial claims totaling about 80 thousand dollars at the exchange rate at that time from "victims'" relatives. A significant amount of money was also needed for a lawyer.
I don't know the full details but this is incredibly sad. It must be a lot to have killed someone and then spent 18 months in prison. And he is still maintaining this library used by over 19 million repos full-time. Even though some of zloirock's actions have been rude and combative, I think he deserves sympathy.
This was right before the "author of core-js is looking for a good job :-)" debacle, I think if more people realized the full context they would've been more sympathetic. Or even if it happened today, when more people seem to realize the importance of funding open-source. Fortunately he is out of jail now, I hope he finally gets a decent amount of funding and everyone can move on.
I want to encourage zloirock to forget about this and move on. I think it would be best for him to take a good paid job, live with his family and enjoy a vacation.
But it's also a depressing post about the sad state of single source. I work in a portion of the software world that interacts with real world widgets, 5 factory buildings are right next to mine. "Single source" is a cuss word around here. We do everything we can to avoid it. I think it's awesome what this guy has done; terrible that it's just one guy. A whole aspect of open source was that it shouldn't become reliant on a single source like this. It's supposed to leverage the gestalt of cooperation. I agree with you, it really is too bad.
Thankfully 95% of the people I interacted with in the community were great and were great, but that other 5% was rough.
He keeps it incognito because the vitriol his alias receives from impassioned members of the community makes him afraid of getting doxxed. He showed me some of them. I don't blame him.
What he did was incredibly valuable to a huge number of successful people and corporations. But no one owes him anything. That's the point of open source. If they did owe him something, they wouldn't have used it. They used it because it was great, it was established/known, it was available with no strings attached whatsoever. Again, that's the point, that's why it's popular.
But also, he owes them nothing. He doesn't have to keep maintaining the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and flexible package, as a full-time job, for free. He could could have just stopped after his first couple years where it was an inherently fulfilling passion project, he could just put in a couple hours a week, whatever. People would make do, it would still be quite valuable for a lot of people for a long time. Or those other projects and companies would come up with an more up-to-date alternative when really needed.
You really don't have to be a martyr, and we don't have to "give up on open source" or whatever. You can just make stuff available that you wanted to do anyway. Sometimes it leads to bigger opportunities, sometimes (usually?) not. Don't slave away and sacrifice your personal life because of what you think you deserve if you do, that's not going to materialize that way.
Remember this is all stuff just offered up with NO WARRANTY, NOT EVEN FITNESS FOR PURPOSE etc. And in practice it's super super valuable that way. Even without you sacrificing yourself. Let companies spend the big bucks on it, just work on what's fun in your free time.
I strongly disagree. Only because so many people feel that he owes them something.
Is this really how we want the world to be? Someone who is trying to help needs to be ok with being treated badly? I can understand not being put on a pedestal, but I think a "thank you" and a bit of gratefulness is warranted by people actively being helped.
What? Why?
> I think mostly because it's not entirely clear how to get such a job
Same as any other job, by looking. Even I do something like that and I am not even close to corejs maintainer level
> reins
If you do this while working as independent contributor (popular in Russia) then it's not even a question, the company will not have any reins on whatever you do outside the contract. If you are employed then company may have the reins, but you will publish OSS while getting money and recognition for it, which is 80% of the formula.
I myself have left the country but I have some friends who are still there, they consult just fine and get paid. Including for foreign businesses.
Uhh… Yes and that's my point? He could earn 50-100 USD per hour, which would get him a more than decent lifestyle in Russia. Why would someone pick between Lots Of Money and begging and not accept an alternative between that would allow him to keep doing OSS while feeding his family? This whole plea just doesn't compute with me.
> Glad to hear though that there are lots opportunites for tech folk in Russia to make good money.
It's not good money, it's just money to live okay. And it's not in Russia, it's everywhere. Internet, it did wonders.
Edit: maybe I used wrong comparison. Most of the income of the photo publishers should be from sales (to unlock paywall of exclusive content), not many will donation.
I see a lot of open source use the same way. Companies use open-source contributions but don't contribute back any of the value they receive. I'm strongly in favor of using strict GPL licensing or dual licensing for corporate and nonprofit use for every open source project. I know people like the MIT license so that people will use their projects, but fundamentally if you want open source to continue then open source contributions need to be enforced, because otherwise it doesn't happen
I think the disagreement here will continue indefinitely because it is a question of (personal and professional) ethics. Ethics doesn't necessarily offer easy answers, just sometimes hard questions. In every discussion like this on HN you see the direct conflict of several competing Ethical Frameworks that people choose to live by which is why the discussion will likely always recur and it will always seem like two or more teams talking past each other.
"What do we owe to each other?" is a massive, hard ethical question. It's not just an easy economic question with an answer of "well he did the work for free, so obviously it is priced at free" though many ethical frameworks, especially on HN, happily stop there. Some ethical frameworks, on the other hand, don't believe there is any such thing as "free labor", just "exploited labor" and find guilt in every bit of open source usage, expect some amount "owed" in backpay to eventually pay back. Some of those same ethical frameworks still feel that "open source" is an ideal, a community good, but also think that for the health of the community as a whole, some support needs to be given to individuals in that community when/where/as they need it, for the good of the whole, and that both things can be true: "open source creates good software" and "open source sometimes creates the conditions to exploit labor (and we owe it to ourselves to mitigate that)".
I can't tell anyone what their ethical framework should be, just that this discussion will likely remain an impasse because it is about personal and professional ethics. How much I feel that I owe the most exploited of the workers in our industry, is something that keeps me up at night sometimes, and that guilt doesn't come from "nowhere" and I'm well aware of the economics and the license agreements in play: that guilt comes from the ethical frameworks that I hold dear and am unlikely to waver on.
He's the maintainer of a major software library. Everyone who depends on his work does owe him gratitude and respect. They'd have to pay me big bucks to care enough to do what he did, so I respect him for doing it.
I'd like to find sponsors for a few non-web-related projects. In particular the Linux USB Gadgets userspace stack (libusbgx/gt/gadgetd/etc), a library for the Microsoft PST email format (libpst) and a tool for running linters/etc (check-all-the-things). Happy to chat about these over email.
https://github.com/linux-usb-gadgets https://github.com/pst-format/libpst https://github.com/collab-qa/check-all-the-things
Well, I hope he enjoys his beloved home country now. He will have to stay there for quite a while.
Edit* looks like he does indeed enjoy it. Good for him. https://twitter.com/roman01la/status/1625254253156528147/pho...
What in that twitter thread makes you think he enjoys it? The fact that he does not share a certain political opinion? Is a political belief, or lack of it, enough to enjoy life in a country?
However, I'm not going to return the favor by ignoring your personal context.
Is the reason you're denouncing core-js's maintainer because you, yourself, have been subject to particularly awful circumstances owing to Russia's war? Are you projecting on him because you've been hurt? What's your situation?
The manslaughter came as a shock, yes, and I think there's more to that story than he's telling us. He probably isn't a great human being.
None of that, however, is relevant to the fact that maintaining core-js in particular and FOSS in general is a thankless and awful job.
It's possible to support FOSS, and support remuneration for FOSS, without supporting specific individuals.
This is like saying that you're not sad about your mother dying because you didn't immediately burst into tears. It's well understood that we all process grief differently and sometimes we even struggle or fail to process it.
So is it so unreasonable that one may process any notable or traumatic event differently? I can try to put myself in the shoes of someone who is sent to a gulag for 7 months under circumstances that appear to be unfair, and I can't imagine anything except how much it would fucking suck and how actually, I might have complicated feelings that range from anger to despair.
Whether I like this guy or not, or think he is a good guy or a bad guy, has absolutely no bearing on this. It's just not useful or helpful to police someone's reaction.
Jesus Christ.
Sadly this is the state of open source projects. People feeling entitled and doing nothing but complain. It's sad really because negative compacts often have a more lasting impact than positive ones.
Nah, he should get creative.
1. Silently change the license to GPL.
2. Wait a few billion downloads.
3. Meticulously sue one company after the other.
It's heart breaking to know that the world's largest companies are using software whose author is struggling financially. That xkcd is 100% right, but this situation is far from amusing.
FWIW this is not the way. Distributing based on these criteria means most of the funding will go to those who already receive most of the funding. It does not solve the XKCD/2347 problem, which is exactly what this guy is encountering: People who maintain unknown software, software you don't even realize you're using, but which is so useful it ends up used everywhere.
OpenSSH (via OpenBSD) faced that issue in 2014 (https://www.osnews.com/story/27519/openbsd-will-shut-down-if...), and got funding because the story got attention. I suspect core-js after this post has also solved his problem for the time being thanks to this post (assuming it gets enough attention; seeing as it's at the top of HN now, I bet it will). But this is not viable. People in open source often do not see money as a resource, but as a corruptor, so they refuse to touch it unless strictly necessary; to a fault. (I should know; I was in that situation as well for years. Out of idealism I also refused to touch money. Now I work in fintech, so clearly I changed my outlook; but old me would probably hate current me.)
What a soul-crushingly sad and difficult read this was, though. Jesus.
Am I interpreting it right, and your service acts as an escrow? Even though you seem to solve the payment headaches, I'm not sure I'd trust a middle-man to do the right thing in these matters. Would it be possible to use your tool entirely offline and just get a list of dependencies, and suggested payment per month for each depending on available funds? And then allow me to tweak it depending on whatever criteria I want, similar to the Humble Bundle sliders?
Getting the payments out to every project would be a hassle that you already solve, but I think it would be preferable to deal with those than with a centralized service that everyone depends on.
It depends on the strategy used. If we define "popularity" as "number of our projects that depend on this OSS project", then the distribution should be fair, and projects like core-js would be well compensated. This could all be automated, and the popularity ranking could be fixed and used by default, so that employees could add additional funding by voting on their most used and loved projects. I think both approaches would work well.
In any case, my suggestion was to create a company-wide OSS fund to begin with, which most companies don't even bother with. The strategy of how they're appropriated can always be improved after that.
A break and a paid job might be what he needs to reboot mentally. Hope he gets through this tough time!
If a dev wants money for his work, he should license his work as appropriate and demand payments. If a dev releases his work free-as-in-libre and/or free-as-in-beer, they don't get to complain if the donations are "insufficient".
Or to put it another: Of course a company won't pay up if they don't have to.
This guy seems to be considering making his work into a commercial product, so at least he has the correct idea. Speaking objectively I hope it works out for him.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34759316
I personally think that releasing free software and then complaining that the multibillionaire (trillionaire?) companies that rely on it refuse to fund you even after you’ve expressly asked for it is perfectly justified.
Of course they get to complain. Complaining and doing nothing to change the situation is what's problematic.
Doing work without reward, even if you did not expect any in the first place, can be soul-sucking, and it is totally normal to complain about it.
You don't do FOSS for the recognition/glory, but complaining about the hatred, hypocrisy, and complete lack of respect of the industry towards FOSS is normal.
The backlash he got after he "dared" ask for help was completely uncalled for. I'd even say this, it's the user who does not get to complain, let's remind everyone of what most FOSS licenses include:
You get a message during `npm install` from the dev asking for funding and a job? Tough shit, you don't get to complain because you're not paying him.No, they don't. They specifically waived any compensation by licensing their work for free-as-in-libre and/or free-as-in-beer. If they want to have social and legal standing to complain, they should have demanded compensation upfront.
>You don't do FOSS for the recognition/glory, but complaining about the hatred, hypocrisy, and complete lack of respect of the industry towards FOSS is normal.
FOSS doesn't ask for money. -> Users proceed to pay no money, because why would they? -> FOSS is pissed they don't get money.
This whole saga is hypocritical on FOSS's part. If devs want money they should demand money with appropriate licensing. It really isn't hard, it's dead simple.
Users and companies are happy to pay up if you can get them to sign the contract.
>I'd even say this, it's the user who does not get to complain, ... You get a message during `npm install` from the dev asking for funding and a job? Tough shit, you don't get to complain because you're not paying him.
Absolutely. Users don't get to complain about something they got for free.
I'm arguing that complaining about lack of compensation is stupid and hypocritical after you have explicitly waived such compensations.
The author might still do it (it's one of his options) but please note that proprietary core libraries (and proprietary software in general) are immensely less useful than open source software. The value proposition of core-js is that it's a basic piece of infrastructure that other open source projects build upon, and if it were proprietary, no OSS could depend on it.
It would be a better world if this guy could just be building his extremely useful package and making a modest living. We are not in that world yet, but we will never get there if people can't talk about problems. I understand this can be a shock to free-market fundamentalists, but not every issue is best solved through capitalism. Forcing an excellent developer to become a probably-mediocre startup CEO is not a clear step forward here.
So I'm grateful to him speaking up. If you don't want to hear it, maybe exercise your freedom to stop reading articles like this.
Secondarily, find a lawyer to write up a contract for $80/hr for companies to sign and have him do work on core-js when they need an update or a feature. He can give an estimate on hours, send them a contract, get it signed and have the work done. If the people asking for feature requests and updates don't want to pay, then that's fine, it doesn't need to get done.
I wonder if external banking is possible: a Russian goes to a supermarket in Russia, he buys food, he pays by transferring money from his e.g. Swiss bank account to the supermarket owner's Swiss bank account. The supermarket owner wins because s/he basically managed to trade local goods for foreign currency (the Ruble is on shaky ground), the customer wins because he gets to eat.
I think I remember paying for a hotel in Russia using PayPal but transferring the money to a German bank account of the hotel owner's cousin or something...
People who can afford it literally travel to Belarus\Kazakhstan for a weekend just to get a debit card that works worldwide.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/core-js
The psychological burden of carrying such an important but relatively unknown project has trapped him in this state of desperation for years now. It's tunnel vision and sunk loss thinking, time to quit.
Really fucked up.
As I pass him, I manage to be one lane to his left, and he makes a lunge to try and jump in front of my vehicle. With some frequency, to this day I wonder how fucked I would have been if he succeeded in jumping in front of my car. The story I tell myself is that he was mentally unwell and thought he was heroically "tilting at windmills". It is more likely he was belligerently drunk, or was suicidal and wanted some help in it.
I don't know what makes something believable or unbelievable in your mind, but these are the details of an almost-incident that happened to me.
That's just how Russia is and always has been, and unfortunately, very likely always will be.
Is Denis guilty? Perhaps, but he will not have had a fair trial by any Western standard, and so we have to presume innocence.
That's a pretty polarizing mindset. The community wants to be a community - you take, and give as you can. Nobody owes anyone else anything.
I generally agree with the idea that nobody owes anyone else anything, but in this case, I think he should’ve been let it all burn to the ground — maybe then the ingrates would be able to understand how critical his library is.
I do agree with that second statement. It is unfortunate that he got into this situation, but there is absolutely no reason to continue if it's not working out. He has the choice to go make six figures too, and doesn't owe anyone maintaining this library either.
Ideally yes, but as we've seen time after time, charity as a business model doesn't work with corporations. I think the coreJS maintainer would be fully justified to take another job, and then work on coreJS as a hobby as much or as little as he likes. Nobody needs to martyr themselves so that a bunch of billion dollar advertising companies can save a buck.
Maybe in the future we decide to finance core open source projects as public infrastructure through taxes, or those billion dollar corps set up some kind of foundation to fund them, but for now the whole situation is highly dysfunctional and one cannot blame maintainers who put the financial interests of themselves and their family ahead of producing open source.
Of course they won't volunteer to maintain a massive project that they depend on, when someone else is already doing the work.
But you can bet the minute core-js goes away, the community will pull together to maintain or create something new, purely out of necessity - that's the main motivator. Hopefully with a more distributed model that doesn't overload a single person.
As the article mentions, nobody else contributed to corejs in a meaningful way. Everyone takes, but nobody gives. This is called tragedy of the commons, and it is a well-known problem in economics
Well there are some backers out there:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/core-js
This is why I'm skeptical about non-free software licenses. Maybe we should all be applying AGPLv3 to our free software code instead of stuff like MIT or BSD. That way anyone who just wants to exploit people's work at their jobs to make a killing while simultaneously hating them for it will have to look elsewhere.
This old post's made a huge impression on me:
https://web.archive.org/web/20091210171517/https://zedshaw.c...
> “Hey your software is awesome! Can I get it for free so I can use it at work and make money or please my boss? That’d rock! (for me).”
> I want people to appreciate the work I’ve done and the value of what I’ve made.
> Not pass on by waving “sucker” as they drive their fancy cars.
His freedom is on the line and not one company seems to care.
If the open source community turns its back at you, turn your back at them.
She was a quiet person, who did her job exceptionally well. Yet, most people didn’t know her or didn’t realize her importance. I am certain she wasn’t paid that well either.
Point being, nobody is going to reward you, unless you ask for it. I once spent 4 years at a job, I did my job well. Didn’t get a single dollar raise. I didn’t ask, nobody cared either. Most I got was some praise in team meetings once in a while.
The most disgusting part of the story is all hate and vitriol thrown at him. By people using his software for free, by people who are likely not even a tenth as good as he is - both as a person and as a programmer. All this in an industry with plenty of money. This is super depressing. I genuinely hope he gets to spend his future happy
I'd say that over 99.999% of the people who saw that message, created memes about it, etc.. did not have a corporate credit card and the power to use it at their discretion. If you want money from corps, THOSE are the guys you need to find and ask money from.
So he should be cold emailing netflix, airbnb, linkedin purchasing managers?
1. relicense it for paid commercial use, and communicate that, I imagine you would go through a version change.
2. Save some important features/bugs for the license change
3. Email politely explaining, they are breaking the license.
4. Come to terms on price. So long as we detect you are using core-js on your Top 10000 site, please pay $$ per year.
First is capital campaigns. A capital campaign is a campaign to raise a large amount of money towards a goal. E.g. “we need 3 million dollars by the end of the year for our building renovations.” Having a concrete target is more motivating that just asking for “whatever you can give” to “keep the lights on.”
Second is cultivating relationships with (large) individual donors. It makes sense to track people who have donated to you, send them thank you cards, and take the biggest donors out to lunch. Then when you need money and you’re running your capital campaign, you can ask previous donors for larger contributions. It’s not cold-emailing, because you have a previous relationship with your donors.
Today, open source funding looks more like begging with a sign—sitting in a prominent place and asking for a small amount of money from a lot of people. Nothing wrong with that, you can get enough to eat, but I’d like to see free and open source software try more sustainable and effective strategies.
It's another acquired skill that you don't get just because you're an excellent programmer. On that basis, adding a donation prompt when installing the package is I think a valid attempt at solving the problem, but it's a solution coming from a developer mindset not a fundraiser mindset; if you code it they will come, all that.
If you had the capital you'd hire someone to help with this or find a suitable volunteer with a goal to making it paid.
I really don't understand people.
Also, I never saw it as a house of cards, since the blocks have varying sizes they just look like abstract blocks to me. Interesting.
At the very least, it would destabilize them.
Kind of like a house of cards
And I don't just mean "you monetized this in a way I dislike" or "boo, DRM" or "you had dozens of game-breaking bugs at launch" or whatever, which, maybe don't be a dick about it, but at least I get why those things upset people and, especially in the last case, why they might get a bit entitled-seeming about it, since they did part with money—no, it's over the tiniest, most trivial stuff, including, often, things that are the way they are for a very good reason and would piss off 100x as many people if the abusive jerk got his (or her, I guess... but realistically, it's just about always a "his") way. But no, this minor thing is wrong so you're incompetent and any idiot could do better and [some names they somehow came up with, sometimes with disturbing accuracy] who worked on that part should be fired immediately. JFC. They'll spam you with this crap, on every channel they can.
And that's if you're not a woman prominent in the project. Then you get the creeper shit, too.
There's no possible way the DF devs haven't seen their fair share of that.
(though, sure, they were ultimately able to monetize it in a way that very few passion projects of that sort ever can, and certainly not utility open source libraries—that part of the story's way different)
My personal bias is that open source authors and maintainers don't owe anyone anything. They're making their code available to anyone for free, and it's on you if there's something you don't like about it. You can always fork it if you need to. Heck, you don't even have to use it. Write your own thing if something fundamentally bothers you about it.
And yet there's a large group of people who think they're somehow doing you a favor by using your open-source code, as opposed to the other way around. I've tried to talk to some of them, to try to get some idea of it. It typically boils down to either
1. I used and advocated for the project, making it more popular, and therefore they owe me.
2. Using an open-source library is an investment. I'm making a compromise by not writing it myself exactly how I want it. I'm attempting to do things their way, which in some ways is mentally harder than writing it to begin with, so when it changes radically or goes away, or they ask me for support, they have done me dirty. I deserve better.
3. #2, except they recognize that the author/maintainer doesn't owe them anything and hasn't acted maliciously, but they're still bummed that they either have to change things or fork the project and maintain it themselves. It's emotional rather than logical.
Of the three, I can kinda understand the last one, but I'll never agree with it.
Sounds like the OSS equivalent of being paid in exposure
Myself i hate working in JavaScript ecosystem and every few months, when i need to update one of my packages, something is broken. I appreciate every person that worked on libs that i use but i hate everyone of those packages.
One dog asks another why do you sleep inside on the rug in the warm, while I live outside in the doghouse on a chain?
The inside dog answers, because I entertain and you serve.
But let's avoid flamewars irrelevant to the discussion.
I don't think "two kinds of evil" is meant to imply that both sides are equally bad. Just that there are no good options for him. After all, when we say "the lesser of two evils" we don't (usually) mean evil in the literal sense. We mean that we are being forced to pick the least-bad of two bad options.
2. Russia puts you in prison, you dont get a fair trial and you don't have freedom of speech
3. No profit
As some who has hit someone in my car before and was not to blame (legally at least) I'm more than aware these things happen, but I think if I killed someone, especially if it was someone as young as 18, I'd be tormented by guilt. Even if it were an accident.
How much time he actually had to react is up to anyone’s guess, but let's not dumb it down to "HIS car killed".
I also find it a bit weird he implied he was driving a car but in the news article it said he was driving a motorcycle.
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/bc1qlea754...
Do I read properly there are ~$1000 now and ~$73000 ever deposited?
But to answer your question - years of work for such a widely used project should be compensated more in my opinion. An engineer at google with similar skill will make 2-5x, maybe 10x as much.
Though it does look like he held ~1 BTC until Nov 2020 and then transferred it out. So it's possible he's actually received roughly the equivalent of $73000 USD from those donations
I do it because it's a job, and I need money. I program to _solve problems_, not because I love programming.
Some people just really love programming.
I hope they get what they are worth though.
EDIT: let me elaborate.
Writing open source is not a business strategy. At best, it's a gimmick, or outsourcing infrastructure maintenance to the public.
What you should do is the following:
1) Project authority.
This is easy. You are the creator and maintainer of a critical piece of infrastructure. You are THE EXPERT!
2) Project non-neediness
None of this "guys I'm struggling here". People should come to you because you have value to provide, not because they pity you.
3) Value proposition
Create a compelling value proposition where you get money in exchange for something.
That something could be a product, a subscription, a consultation service, or something else. The possibilities are endless.
You are a smart person. If you dedicate a week or two you can figure this out.
I don't know many people who are successfully making money from open source. I only know of Zig. Here's what Andrew Kelly did:
- He projects authority. You can watch him programming live. He has many live streams and talks.
- He does not project neediness. He talks frankly about his finances but none of this "omg you guys are so thankless for all my work". It's more like: hey guys, I'm working on this, if you are interested in this and would like it to continue, consider donating.
- He did the drudge work of setting up a non-profit foundation to receive the donations
- He got help from people: he doesn't run everything, he doesn't code everything. There are several people working in the Zig Foundation.
Now, I don't think you can do this with core-js. It's already pretty mature and any donation you get is basically going to come out of pity. You don't want to be in this situation.
That's why I think it's better for you to create a consultancy and provide some kind of service where people are compelled to pay you money because you are just so valuable.
My man, there are people out there making over $10k/mo from things like "copywriting" a few emails a month for a few high class clients.
You can do better.
I’m increasingly cynical about open source as time goes on. There really need to be better licenses that deal with the funding issue, because huge companies shouldn’t have any right to freeload.
BTW: Zloirock is a transliteration, translates as bad karma, evil fate, bad luck etc.
However, I don't really think the coreJS maintainer is in a position to do an experiment like this. He should focus on getting a well paid job so he can support himself and his family, pay off the damages he owes, and GTFO of Russia before he's drafted for cannon fodder in Ukraine. Then build up a comfortable buffer, and only then, if he still feels like it and coreJS is still relevant in the world, does he have the financial security that would allow him to do such an experiment.
That's my simple ethics take on it. The value created is that large at least. The amount of money he saved them in dev time.
"Then he should license it as xyzsksudhsj, he should have released it as a commercial product, he should have put on a tie and pulled himself up by his bootstraps" no. Highly unlikely the tool would have become as useful as it as, or as widespread and thus a source of truth (and a guiding force in the world of web standards). That's victim blaming.
It's time for the top 100 companies to pony up, straight up. They don't "have to..." until the outrage gets high enough, until the internal pressure gets large enough.
So we should all do our part and start sending emails up the chain, start the conversation, start being a little annoying.