Standard, a Javascript Style Guide Library With 3M Downloads Per Month, Now Showing Ads When Installed Via NPM 82
Standard, a popular Javascript style guide library that is downloaded about three million times each month, is beginning to show ads when installed through npm, a developer announced this week. The move, which has been pegged as an experiment, comes as the developer looks to find sustainable ways to support contributions to the open source development. In a post, Feross Aboukhadijeh, a developer of Standard, said whenever Standard 14 is installed, "we'll display a message from a company that supports open source. The sponsorship pays directly for maintainer time. That is, writing new features, fixing bugs, answering user questions, and improving documentation."
The announcement has sparked a debate in the community with some suggesting that there should be a better way to support the FOSS developers without seeing ads on the terminal.
The announcement has sparked a debate in the community with some suggesting that there should be a better way to support the FOSS developers without seeing ads on the terminal.
Exactly the quality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Exactly the quality (Score:4, Insightful)
you get what you pay for.
Re:Exactly the quality (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that these days most paid options are more ad-infested than free options.
I am getting so fed up with the entire tech industry.
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You may not know this, but most commercial software is of lower quality than free alternatives.
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What a stupid saying; if you have two free options, one that sucks and one that doesn't, it is equally true for each.
And so totally irrelevant. Low price is meaningless to making a choice.
If somebody sells you something at an inflated price, you paid that price and got that thing. Somebody else paid less for something better. Both of you "got what you paid for."
All it means is that the thing was delivered, it tells you nothing about the choices and their utility for some use case.
It is just philosophy for p
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Re: Exactly the quality (Score:2)
Quite simple solution ... (Score:1)
Do not install through npm (whatever the heck that is).
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(Of course, I don't do
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This is close to my own solution, which is going frameworkless (no jquery, no react, etc.), but still use npm, but only pick packages that have *zero* dependencies (one way to find them is to look for the tag "zerodeps").
Going about it this way avoids dependency-hell and sort of guarantees a baseline quality level. Because, let's face it, 99% of all packages on npm are not worthy of the term "library".
Traditionally, a library has no dependencies, and involves *at least* a thousand lines of code (not counti
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NPM iis only pulling this crap because they think they can get away with it. And the sad thing is, they probably can because too many people don't care.
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If Apple pulled this, it would be 3 months before anyone even noticed, and only the "blogosphere" would give a shit. Ads while the App Store app installed an app? Who the fuck cares? Who watches their phone while an app installs?
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Which is why I've been able to do development and never use it?
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besides npm is just the default distribution channel, not the issue which is foss funding.
package quality varies wildly but there is no doubt that the private industry has obtained huge value from the foss community ... basically for free, except for a few companies with various levels of partnership/sponsorship/service with a few repos that are strategic for them. vast majority of companies simply leech ... when they are not making arbitrary feature requests.
anyway, ads on the commandline? no thanks, there
Ha! (Score:4, Funny)
Lynx can’t save you from *these* JavaScript ads...
Adware merits ad blocking. (Score:2)
How does one block the adverts?
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It would be best to avoid the ads by not downloading this library, or any other from this developer.
If you don't rely on the library, this shouldn't be an issue.
If you do, now is the time to find a replacement since the dev is announcing publicly they have no interest in maintaining an open source project. It's just as likely to be taken down as made closed source and rented out as a service.
Hopefully at least the second option will be available to give extra time to those not migrating away now before it
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No it isn't. Your turn. Provide something more than your biased opinion.
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Advertising is a crime against humanity. And should be prosecuted and sentenced as such.
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You are such an incredible pile of shit, there's no way you aren't infested with maggots. Please ram a hot knife through your eyes so as to rid the world of your putridness.
Getting outraged over showing ads on the command line during install? Really?! You are so messed up in the head, you must have paid someone to write your comment. Oh, the irony!
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It's an ad. Displayed on the command-line, during install. How many fucking times do you install the same package, and how many times do you watch the screen and read every line while doing so?
You are getting worked up over nothing.
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You don't have to be using it directly for you to be affected.
If you're actually "affected" by this then you're really just a bit too sensitive for the real world.
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Comment removed (Score:3)
Re:core-js much better/worse example. (Score:5, Insightful)
core-js is used in 14k projects and gets 80 million downloads a month
And you wouldn't hire him? He's obviously experienced, and you're hiring him to do programming, not marketing. Maybe you can find perfect people to hire......somewhere, but I'm happy to hire people who can get the job done.
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Re: core-js much better/worse example. (Score:2)
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The maintainer of core-js [github.com] decided to spam everyone with an ad for himself asking for a job. Of course by being so irresponsible it seems unlikely anyone would hire them.
Why not? He's obviously a talented developer and has built software that is important and useful to many, many people. Plenty of projects have donation pages and even donation banners on npm install, what's wrong with that? Even if you have a problem with it npm and core-js are free software that has been given to you and you can change if you don't like it.
It's a really sad state of affairs when people are getting all up in arms because "Oh no I saw an ad for a thing on a free software project!", seriously
Well... (Score:3, Informative)
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The problem is that this is just the beginning. Soon other maintainers decide to do the same.
A React project starts with more than 800 dependencies, so imagine how fun would be watching 800 ads scroll by.
And then, as people can't see them anymore among the flood, authors will put bigger ads, with ASCII text, or even worse, a sleep() call to make sure you read it.
No, we can't allow this. That's not the place for it.
I really hope NPM bans the practice and removes all the offending versions.
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Oh the horrors! Ads scrolling by! !!!!!!111eleventy!!!!!111
Get over yourself, you retard. Maybe next time you install, you can just do something productive with your time, like post complaints to slashdot. Then you won't have to see those dreaded ads.
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They've just made my job harder.
Such an entitlist. Stop using those tools, you're only using them because they made your job easier in the first place so write and maintain alternatives yourself. You don't even have to do it from scratch because those tools are all free software.
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way better than the constant "Grammarly thinks it can write better than you"-insults on YT.
The sad fact is that Grammarly does catch a lot of style and and formatting errors. It gets a lot of stuff wrong, too, but I'd be a liar if I said it wasn't a useful tool for basic editing and proofing.
I've no doubt whatsoever that Grammarly does, in fact, write better than a lot of people.
The Hemingway Editor (hemingwayapp.com) is also useful but it's geared more towards clarity and succinctness.
With that said, get an adblocker and free yourself from the relentless tyranny of the Advertising Mafia.
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I guess one can live with that.
One can, but thankfully many others will blacklist him and it will serve as an example to others.
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Because nothing says "I want Open Source to disappear so I have to pay for every bit of software I can't write" better than getting pissed off about an ad displayed during install.
You entitled shit piles really need to find some drugs to overdose on. You aren't useful for anything more than fertilizer.
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Child, you're not powerful enough to make open source disappear.
It didn't come from you.
It wasn't written by your whim, or at your pleasure.
Nobody is going to stop writing code because you called them names on the internet.
You don't even know enough about those "computer" things to realize that there is a glut of open source software, not some shortage. Whoever the needy developer is, he could just go away and get a job since he cares so much about income, and then others from the long long line of people w
Good (Score:3)
Hopefully this will kill the mid-named âoeStandardâ project for good.
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mid-named âoeStandardâ
Whatever it is you're talking about, it is definitely mid-named. The back half of the middle, too.
Open avenue but FFS IT'S A TEXT MESSAGE (Score:2)
I know this is a sensitive topic: ads are bad, and placing them anywhere where they haven't been is opening an avenue for them hampering usability going forwards. But let's be crystal clear here: this is a message that pops ON INSTALL, in a freaking CLI, as text (as opposed to a super visually-polluting colorful JPG or an even worse auto-play video). This is to support 1 (ONE) maintainer so that he can provide some quality to the software (which is still FOSS, isn't it?), and most of all, you're still allow
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Broadly speaking, people - especially the kind on slashdot - don't like it when applications connect to the internet and do things you didn't ask it to do or are not considered necessary for standard operation.
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Oh! Fucking! No! An installer which connects to the Internet to download stuff connected to the Internet!!!!
Get over yourself.
If only there were a better way to collect a penny (Score:3)
The thing about ads and the internet is that ads are the one effective way to essentially get a penny from each user.
Way back in the day I wrote some software. It was fully functional for free. At the time, PayPal was paying $5 for referrals, so the software had a button to click so you could either a) donate $5 or b) donate for free by signing up for PayPal.
A hundred thousand people used it. ONE person donated. One person out of a hundred thousand. A hundred people emailed asking for additional
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And some of us don't mind posting hyperbole as if it were fact. What's your point?
Nobody has ever bought a Big Mac via television (Score:2)
> The customer is paying money on the understanding that the advertising will lead to sales. Advertising to me will never lead to a sale
*SO* many people say that, probably the majority.
Yet, McDonald's and Coca-Cola spend roughly $2 BILLION each every year for advertising on TV and other media. Guess why? Because it works. They know *exactly* how well it works. They spend millions ever year just analyzing how very well it works.
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The best proposal (assuming it is closed source) is just to sell the software. If you sold your software for $5, you probably would have sold 10,000 (out of those 100,000 users) and cleared $50,000. You would be surprised at how much money you can make selling $5 software.
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People will complain about being nickel-and-dimed and people will complain about even having to even just see ads. Such people get all smug about how clever they are using adblockers to cut off revenue streams like this but it just means you end up with developers flocking to walled-gardens like the Apple ecosystem and putting content behind paywalls. The vast majority of the paid developers in open source are employed by corporations and people then wonder how we end up with things like systemd, corporatio
It's ONE ad on install, so what? (Score:2)
Oh come one- it shows a single ad when you install it, so what?
I'm willing to live with that. Seriously, if you can't one single ad from the developer upon install, then you need to step back for a moment and take a chill pill.
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Your build service doesn't provide colorized logs? Maybe you should pay for a real service, instead of some shit open source that couldn't afford to write something good.
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Your build service doesn't provide colorized logs? Maybe you should pay for a real service, instead of some shit open source that couldn't afford to write something good.
Ah, I see you too have used Jenkins.Your build service doesn't provide colorized logs? Maybe you should pay for a real service, instead of some shit open source that couldn't afford to write something good.
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Ah, I see you too have used Jenkins.
Lol, the devs at my previous office used Jenkins, or rather they tried to use Jenkins.
Maybe they weren't holding it right or whatever, but Jenkins broke shit so often and so reliably that they had a standing 0900 meeting to cover stuff like "what Jenkins did/didn't do last night".
I was lucky to have nothing to do with Jenkins but it was the source of much anxiety and cursing and everyone hated it. I can't remember what they moved to (Gitlab CI, maybe?), but the 0900 meeting quickly became a snoozy coffee kl
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Think of it this way: imagine if 50 of those libraries became unmaintained and you had to start finding alternatives because the developers had day jobs.
Re: It's ONE ad on install, so what? (Score:2)
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Um that's exactly the point. The idea behind the advertising was to change trust a bit.
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The console is an oasis (Score:1)
Please keep the penis enlargement spam out of my terminal window (this is what it will eventually devolve into)
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Yeah, then it starts to look too much like IRC.
Package managers need ad standards in place (Score:1)
2. The ads should all show up in a standard place in the install such as the beginning or end of the install with a delimiter identifying ad start
3. There should be a switch to disable the ads from showing during install
Manage your own dependencies. (Score:2)
That's an ancient basic rule of software developmen.
Ignore it at your own risk.
QED.
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No shit, npm is a giant nightmare apparently for punk kids that have no idea what they are doing. But eventually it will all fall apart. I avoid that shit like the plague.
&/dev/null (Score:2)
Ibid