[C4stor]

I don't think it's fair to say the creator of ESLint is not making a buck out of his code. His twitter page for example is full of commercial links to his own products.

Complaining about "I do things for free" while your free product is the gateway to your paying products (in this case gaining followers and popularity to sell them other things or directing them to his ad-containing website) seems totally dishonest to me.

Doesn't mean he's not doing god's work with ESLint <3, it's just that this specific tweet is really not covering the full story. Maybe his books and website earns him pennies a month and it's a shame, maybe he does six figures with them, I won't hasard a guess.

[sbr464]

Yet, I use eslint every day, I have money, I’m willing to pay, but I’m not familiar with the owner or his products, (nor inclined to seek them out), nor will I go find their Patreon page (although I do support several YouTuber Patreon pages).

I personally feel like npm and Github are sitting on goldmines, in a financial sense and in a simple solution sense, yet they are their own worst enemy, chasing all value to $0 as fast as possible.

GitHub/npm: just charge me $10-20+/more/month and distribute it out for me. I want to support the community, but I don’t want to deal with it. I code e-very-day. It’s worth it to me to support tools and the community, but don’t leave it up to my own arbitrary choices or timing. Maybe check my package.json or code coverage with said packages to dish out funds auto-magically. Just do something-charge me!

Side note — last week Github announced free private repos, while I was gladly paying. Why not instead just charge for the repos and create a massive fund to help solve the problem? Maybe the catch is: to receive funds you have to primarily host your source code on Github. That may help retain popular libs from leaving to other platforms.

[demircancelebi]

Exactly my thoughts. Considering Github's recent numbers (300M USD/year revenue) and its recent acquisition by Microsoft, something like 30M USD/year would be enough to fund 250-1000 people a year full time. Maybe there might be an upper limit on how much you can make through the platform (like 10k USD/month), so instead of ending up with a few millionaires, a 10% revenue share would be enough to fund 250-1000 people full time, much more people half-time. With such a system in place, I think everyone would be better off, including Github - Microsoft.

[pjc50]

> chasing all value to $0 as fast as possible.

The marginal cost of distribution of software is nearly zero. Therefore the cost of software, not just OSS, gets driven to zero. Hence why so many commercial services have switched to "advertising supported", "SaaS/hosted/online-only", or cloud subscription.