[oefrha]

Asking for money isn’t a problem. The problem is this person went out of their way to extract money by harassing people who rightfully use the open source Apache 2 version, switching the marketplace extension to a closed source version with obfuscated code (likely malicious according to MS), and possibly more, all this for doing a quite small amount of work. That’s after already raising $7.6k, apparently.

[hombre_fatal]

Making a theme is not minimal effort which is why 99.9999% of everyone uses preexisting themes rather than making their own.

LoC is a red herring. And the fact that thousands of people decided to introduce his LoC as a dependency in their local development environment makes the point.

I'm surprised to see supposed software engineers get this wrong. We tend to dismiss look&feel type things as low effort which is funny because very few of us could make a make a good theme if we tried, yet it's "just" a matter of picking colors.

[oefrha]

Maintaining a theme ~a decade after its creation is minimal effort. You can check the commit history yourself and see it's a one line change once in a while among auto dependency bumps thanks to a >10k line package-lock.json, at least half of which is unrelated to core functionality as demonstrated by t3dotgg.

It's also funny to see a "supposed software engineer" shit on other's tools and post veiled personal attacks based on a single Internet comment. If I were you I'd probably insinuate you've never worked on any large code base so don't know LoC definitely correlates with complexity as a rough first signal (not to mention I included a rough analysis of actual code as well), but I shouldn't do that based on a single comment. Anyway I've maintained plenty of open source code bases large and small, popular (>10k stars, yes that's not a very good metric but it's also a useful first signal) or not, so I'm pretty well equipped to evaluate maintenance burden.

[johnisgood]

Yeah, pretty much. I am actually baffled. Heck, I am impressed he raised 7k for a theme.

[homebrewer]

Almost all of the work has already been done by other people for other text editors. Porting a theme requires copying files from another project and writing a tiny bit of glue around it. The author of a niche terminal emulator I'm using on small systems was able to add around a hundred themes this way in a short amount of time. Sadly, he wasn't able to raise $7.6k×100 for all that thankless work.