In the package , which is a JavaScript style guide, linter, and auto-correct tool, implements what appears to be the first advertising system for JavaScript libraries.
In the early 20th of August of this year, developers who installed Standard through the npm package manager were able to see a hefty advertising banner in their terminals.
Advertising banner in the terminal
This advertisement was created by means of a new project - . The developers of the Standard library are engaged in it. The Funding library was included in Standard 14.0.0. This version of the Standard is out . It was then that advertising began to appear in the terminals.
The idea behind the Funding library is that companies advertising space in user terminals, and the Funding project then distributes revenue between open source projects that have agreed to cooperate with it and show ads to their users.
Unsurprisingly, this idea has sparked fierce controversy in the developer community. For example - ΠΈ .
Some of the debaters believed that advertising in the terminal is a good way to finance important open source projects that are always in trouble with money. Others found the idea of ββwatching ads in their terminal completely unacceptable.
βThe bottom line is that those who support [open source software] need money,β says Vincent Weavers, a developer from the Netherlands. βBetter solutions to this problem may appear in the future: and as long as they do not exist, you can come to terms with advertising. It's not that bad. Although I personally do not particularly like seeing banner ads in the terminal, I understand the need for them and fully support this idea,β he continues.
βMy terminal is the last fortress, the last oasis of calm that does not show me continuous streams of advertising from business leaders. I am categorically against this idea, because I am sure that it fundamentally contradicts the spirit of open source, which we have been nurturing for decades, βsays Vuk Petrovich, a developer from the USA.
Most of the negative comments against Standard and the new open source funding scheme come from developers who are unhappy with the fact that banner ads that appear after installation will now end up in logs, which will make debugging applications unnecessarily difficult.
βI don't want to see ads in my CI logs, and I don't want to think about what will happen if other packages start doing the same. Some JS packages have dozens, hundreds, or even more dependencies. Can you imagine what would happen if they all showed ads?β said Robert Hefner, a developer from California.
Now only the Standard library shows ads, but over time, the Funding project, by means of which this is done, may become more popular. This may be similar to how the popularity of the OpenCollective project has grown over the past year.
is a project similar to Funding. But instead of displaying banners, it displays donation requests in the terminal, in which developers are invited to transfer funds to a certain project. These requests are also displayed in the npm terminal after installing various libraries.
OpenCollective messages
Since last year, OpenCollective messages have been added to many open source projects. In such, for example, , , , , , and in many others.
Just like in the case of Funding, the developers expressed dissatisfaction when they saw these messages in the terminal. However, they were willing to accept them, since they only contained requests for donations, and not full-blown advertisements.
However, in the case of Funding, it seems that this project has crossed a certain line in the minds of some developers who do not want to see ads in their terminals under any pretext.
Some of these developers put pressure on Linode, one of the companies that agreed with Funding to show ads. The company, in the end, decided not to escalate the situation and from this idea.
Moreover, some developers have gone even further, channeling the energy of their anger into creating the world's first advertising for the command line interface.
Results
Advertising in the terminal is an attempt to solve a serious problem of financing open source projects. But a lot of people don't like it very much. As a result, the question of whether this phenomenon is destined to become widespread can now be answered more negatively than positively. In addition, it has recently become known that npm will most likely be , which show ads in the terminal.
If you are interested in this topic, take a look at , which was written based on the results of the "Funding" experiment.
Dear Readers, How do you feel about advertising in the terminal? What ways of funding open source do you think are the most appropriate?
Source: habr.com