Developer Funding Tools Added to NPM 6.13 Package Manager

Published package manager release NPM6.13, included with the Node.js distribution and used to distribute JavaScript modules. The new version features emergence commands "fund” and funds to organize a collection of donations from developers involved in package maintenance.

After installing a package, NPM now displays information about the number of dependency-related packages whose maintainers accept donations (the "--no-fund" flag is provided to hide such information). By running the “npm fund” command, the user can get detailed information about the methods of collecting donations in each of the dependencies for the current project and get links to the corresponding services (Patreon, Librapay, OpenCollective and GitHub Sponsor, etc.). Information about accepting donations is defined in the package using the new "funding" field in the package.json file.

Recall that in August Feross Aboukhadijeh, NPM package author standard (about 200 thousand downloads per week) and platforms webtorrent, posted in the NPM repository module "funding", displaying text ads after installing the package. To display ads in the console, the module substituted the handler in the script automatically launched after installation (post-install). In a similar way, it was proposed to monetize the work of package maintainers (to participate in the monetization program, you had to add this module as a dependency to your package).

After backlash community and the perception that monetization in the form of ads would benefit good marketers more than good developers, the experiment was abandoned. Later NPM administration запретила such activity and promised to block packages that display ads during installation, during execution, or at various stages of development.

At the same time, the director of NPM Inc, which oversees the development of NPM, He pledged create a working group and work out a solution to stimulate the motivation of the maintainers. The first step was the implementation of the “fund” command, but in the future it is possible to create your own donation platform, which can also be useful for funding the NPM repository itself.

Source: opennet.ru