Open Source is broken if you think you should be able to make money from it when you need to. I don't think it's broken for its stated aims.<p>I feel bad the chap, but I don't think Open Source is to blame. It is fundamentally hard to charge tiny amounts of money to millions of people, which is all he really has to do to survive, because receiving money, especially with all the different tax rules from countries, make micro/nanotransactions difficult.<p>It would be good to have some sort of marketplace for this sort of thing, that has the scale to wade through country regulations and still transmit enough money to makers to be useful.
I'm not sure if Open Source is broken, so much as the expectation to monetize <i>anything</i> is guaranteed. Most new businesses fail too.<p>Just because you've created something doesn't mean it'll always be monetizable. I'd argue that if income was the expectation, grinding year after year at the same thing with repeated failure is a mistake. Doesn't matter if it's writing software, or selling widgets on a street corner, not every possible idea will succeed in that way.
This is an interesting story. Millions of users, but you catch fire when you ask for money when you <i>need</i> it - on your very own channels.<p>And this is a project which highly depends on maintenance so you need to have personnel that does it with love and dedication.<p>Oh how much happier do I feel now, that once when someone in our community came up asking for help we didn't have such problems to arrange a fundraiser. Don't let hate win.
Really, if the project is of no benefit to him he should just drop it. Maybe it will cause some turmoil for developers. If its an important project then people and more importantly companies can contract with him for feature and bug fixes.<p>Just walk away, don't feel you owe anyone anything with open source. If they value the work they can open their wallet if they absolutely need something done.
Interesting story he made more success of out it compared to most projects but it wasn't enough to support his lifestyle and debt. The Russian war pushed him over the edge. The new model will provide him some additional money. Will it be enough for his lifestyle? Will his criminal record and location employment?<p>The fact that people rely on this project gives him some power. Attempting to use this power has gotten backlash and threats to remove that power. The sad story demands for money break unwritten rules. The pivot to closed license is a familiar story we've seen time and again and what happens is the free popularity boost of open source disappears and the project barely makes any money.<p>A lot people do open source so they can leverage that popularity into expert status rather then trying to profit directly. He has already built up that credibility (perhaps lost some here) but he should stop working on the project and attempt to find employment. The projects who rely on this will need to support this and will creating jobs in this area where he would have an excellent chance of landing this type of position. He created the market now he needs to stop serving it for free and profit.
He quit his main job to work full time relying on donations!<p>People are assholes, but I don't think he had a sound plan.<p>I think he should have found an employer that was ok with him dedicating some % of time to maintaining core-js.<p>Personally I'd like to work full time on my own projects, but I'd make sure it made financial sense before just quitting my job and hoping that the universe will sort it out.
If somebody asks for charity, many people give them charity, because we owe that much to our fellow human beings. If the same person works for thousands of hours, and then says "hey, remember me? I gave you this thing that took thousands of hours to make, and I desperately need money, can I have some?" a large percentage of people will say "fuck you, how dare you try to shake me down for money!"<p>A slightly more nuanced but equally confounding position is: "I'd give you money, sure, but your license doesn't require it, so go piss up a rope buddy".
I know of three open-source projects in recent times that have made it to the frontpage of HN for reasons concerning funding (Babel, Faker, and now Core-JS). Coincidentally, they are all JS/Node projects.<p>I wonder if many maintainers who end up feeling this way about open-source were ever good fits for open-source to begin with. At the same time, it's hard to say I wouldn't feel the same way as Denis if I maintained a project as popular as core-js thanklessly. I would like to think I'd have the power to just walk away once I realized it was unhealthy for me.
I can relate to the thankless grind of something you love becoming a burden.<p>Back in the 90s I wrote a window docking system library for Delphi. It was shareware, not open source, and it brought in about £1000 a month.<p>It was the support that killed me. So many people doing really weird things with it I had never thought about. Was it my bug or theirs?<p>The bottom line is that one person can't maintain something in their spare time that a lot of other people rely on.
We should have better institutions that can fund & support these vibrant world-bettering projects. Leaving support up to free market, making folks spend time fund-raising is a huge waste. This planet could be so much better eith such a small amount of coordinated effort.<p>NLnet grants are the only example that comes to mind. But these are short term, not sustaining.
For me (as opensource dev) his biggest mistake was to make a library that "just worked" and was completely invisible. I think we will see way more "advertising" on a log messages. I am also not going to publish unit tests and some core know how...
Related: Denis' original statement about this, discussed on HN a few days ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34780859" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34780859</a>
There is no browser today at 1% market share or greater that needs a polyfill to support ES6+.<p>I am honestly just left wondering why core JS is still around? What am I missing?
It's not broken. Publishing and sharing something for free under free terms, and then attempting to pull the rug after two years of gaining popularity is.
I myself am the beneficiary of many open-source projects. I readily acknowledge this.<p>That said, where my mind keeps going to is that open-source software is in many ways similar to communism. And communism failed <i>for a reason</i>.<p>If you want to freely give away your work, then by all means - do so. But do so with the understanding that you are promised absolutely nothing in return. No one <i>owes</i> you anything. This man would have been better off had he pursued a paying career and spent a reasonable amount of his free time working on this.
The actual details of the killings Denis Pushkarev committed are different to what he claims. The girls were on a pedestrian crossing and he ploughed through them anyway. I have no sympathy for this guy and I hope he gets what is coming to him.<p>Reminds me of that other guy, Steven Degutis or whatever, who flashed his penis at children multiple times over many years and then expected us all to feel sorry for him and give him advice and $100k+ job leads.<p>You are all being scammed by false sob stories from evil criminal men. Wake up HNeeple.