funding

The conversation exists because this guy in particular has talked and implemented various (in my opinion hostile) methods for commercialising open-source work. See his "experiment" (https://github.com/feross/funding) and selling terminal ads during npm install (https://dev.to/adriansandu/npm-bans-terminal-ads-and-mozilla...)

This is me. I have been in the beta for almost a month now and not gotten any sponsors. I have talked with many in the JS community who have proof of this (https://github.com/feross/funding/issues/15#issuecomment-524...). "Unfortunately, since it's opt-in it didn't move the needle at all. I think it directed a few hundred dollars to Sindre's Patreon. But that was it." I am currently looking at TideLift to see if there that is a more viable option. But to your point, it might all be "way too little for the effort required". EDIT: adding my link since I guess that is what others are doing in this thread. https://github.com/sponsors/wesleytodd

No. I haven't looked through many js packages. I could make it without any effort via: > https://github.com/feross/funding/blob/master/messages.json Currently it's "manually curated" which is a fancy way of saying, it's my own custom ad-tag that doesn't call an adserver. Replacing one field with a function that is immediately called and getting your value out, is how most people would integrate an ad-tag. Using DFP or whatever, you can plug in an adtag call and parse values and you're in business. Ad platforms don't usually support plaintext tags, but I have seen them still supported by some of the older "native ad" platforms who started as platforms that served HTML strings (Taboola, etc). The takeaway is that NPM nipped it in the bud because it's trivial to abuse.

> devs I know are very sensitive to ads/privacy, much more so than to paying money In case it's not clear to other readers: `funding` had no tracking, no data collection, and no code from untrusted third parties. It was a `console.log` with some fancy formatting. > Despite your good intentions, your ads will involve analytics/tracking, which you ultimately can't control They certainly would not. I was very clear to the sponsors that there would be no analytics. I even took pains to ensure only plain ASCII (excluding control characters) could be printed out. https://github.com/feross/funding/blob/58b090c51ce94de32107d...

the maintainer uses rent seeking as intention himself. [0] [0] https://github.com/feross/funding/issues/7#issuecomment-5245...

And now it looks like both Linode and Logrocket objected strongly enough to whatever this was that they're both removed https://github.com/feross/funding/commit/03937d3f1178a7908d7... https://github.com/feross/funding/commit/427bb8ffb6a1b683928... As of now, the project has no supporters https://github.com/feross/funding/blob/master/messages.json

About half the README content: https://github.com/feross/funding#who-is-feross And, if you grep the dependency tree of standard/standard it's pulling in at least 10 modules from the same author And, there's plenty of ways to juice the download count... My most successful project in this regard is a private Docker image which got pulled like a million times by AWS ECS retry loop when I accidentally pushed an image that crashed+exited immediately Which is to say, you and I would do well to emulate this Successful Winner who is also a Community Leader

> I think today the Javascript ecosystem looks much better than 3 years ago That’s certainly up for debate. Today you have NPM being treated as an Advertisement delivery tool. See the latest version of StandardJS and a new package called Funding. IMO it’s a pretty massive setback for the ecosystem. 1: https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381 2: https://github.com/feross/funding