I think it’s not fair that we expect every developer tool to be OSS. Most things that are fully OSS like react, typescript, etc. and even Linux to a large degree are supported by humongous amounts of cash from large tech companies. When a smaller firm devoted to developer tools like datastar decides to monetize, moreover, they are doing so without leaning on ad monetization, which many big firms rely upon, or other means that are not particularly nice. I think it’s really important we cut folks working on paid dev tools a break. The alternative is that we end up in a world that is largely merely defined by huge tech companies.
The problem is the rug-pull itself, not that the rug isn't there.
I don't have an opinion on Datastar, as I'd never heard of it until this article, but over the past year or two there have been a _lot_ of open source projects that have been converted to proprietary licenses, very often after being invested by VCs or PEs. It's happened to me a number of times now where the license for the features we were using went from open source to proprietary with 5-6 figure cost.
Developers gotta eat, I get that. But often the reason I'm using one of these components is it's a hobby or low value project where it simply doesn't bring in the income to justify paying for a license. If I had known this would happen, I would never have used it in the first place, used an alternative, or maybe just never bothered with the project. But now you're in an awkward position where the choice is either pay-up or re-do a bunch of work.
There was no rug pull! (And the term isn't even being used correctly) They talked in their community decided the set of features caused a support burden and for versions later on they would put them behind a pro tier to help pay for the extra costs for supporting them.
You can keep using your current version! You can even fork at that version. Calling it a rug pull is so entitled.
Like I said, I haven't heard of this project until now, so I don't know the wider context, but it may be that some of the people who are reacting negatively to it have been burnt in the past by the many other projects that have gone down this route: project starts as open source, then it goes open-core, then over time more of the dev effort naturally moves into the proprietary part, then sometimes eventually they change the license for the open part too.
Forking is often impractical in reality as a solo dev or small team rarely has the resources to keep up with security fixes.
I'm entirely happy to pay for things, do pay for many things, as well as donate to the authors of projects I use, and whatever this library is seems reasonably priced. Nevertheless, I'm pretty reluctant now to use open source libraries unless they're backed by a foundation, given how many times I've been badly burnt.
> There was no rug pull! [...] You can keep using your current version! You can even fork at that version. Calling it a rug pull is so entitled.
This is a dishonest perversion of the commonly accepted definition of a "rug pull".
I'll copy what I said in a previous thread:
When Redis changed licenses to SSPL/RSAL, users were also free to continue using the BSD-licensed version. Was that not a rug pull? Same with MongoDB, Elastic, HashiCorp, etc. These are quintessential examples of the "OSS rug pull".
The idea is that users were relying on a functionality to be maintained (the "rug"), and the Datastar developers decided to continue maintaining it behind a paywall (the "pull").
Nobody is claiming that developers physically took the feature away from users, as that would be ridiculous. But users of these features are now forced to either maintain it themselves, wait for someone else from the community to fork and continue maintenance (which has its own set of issues), or pay up.
You can argue how it's "only" a few hundred lines of code; criticize "incapable" developers who can't check out a Git commit or do maintenance work they previously didn't have to; that the features don't require maintenance at all; and come up with other defensive arguments. But none of it matters. The size of the "rug" doesn't matter. It's the principle and precedent it sets for any users who were potentially interested in the project.
To say nothing about putting essential features like a bundler and debugging tool behind a paywall. These are not "Pro" features.
> It's happened to me a number of times now where the license for the features we were using went from open source to proprietary with 5-6 figure cost.
In those cases, prior to the project going commercial, did you contribute nontrivial code to the project and/or financially sponsor the project?
I could see being upset in those situations, but in most cases I find the answer is no.
> If I had known this would happen, I would never have used it in the first place, used an alternative, or maybe just never bothered with the project.
If you had used an alternative, the same scenario could have played out with the alternative.
Realistically, what are the "never have used it" / "never bothered" scenarios? Presumably you chose the project because you needed it for something; that implies the never-bothered alternative is essentially just writing something from scratch instead. Which you can still do now. And you can use the last FOSS version of the project as a starting point, which saves a tremendous amount of time. So how exactly were you burnt by a supposed "rug pull"?
If the rug isn’t there, how can it possibly be pulled?
All free licenses make each commit free - forever. If a library does what you need today, use it! If the terms become unacceptable in future, fork it and maintain it yourself, or hope someone else will. Note this can even happen with free software (GPL2 to 3, for example).
No one is entitled to the future work of someone else without paying though. You very definitely are the entitled one here.
I think it's totally normal and correct to have a license where a company like Amazon can't come in, steal the volunteer work of hundreds of developers, slap their logo on it and sell it.
I'm sure open source purists do not like this, but the world is the 1980 anymore. It's been 45 years. Things need to adapt. Open source needs to adapt.
Yeah we really need to normalize licenses that protect against that. Even GPL doesn’t because everything is SaaS now and companies will just isolate the GPL code to one micro service. AGPL might prevent this but there aren’t a lot of cases that have been litigated. And if they don’t modify the source then then it doesn’t do much IIRC.
But “open source” was in control of big business from the start. The open source consortium was a late 90s attempt to co-opt the free software movement and turn it into something business friendly.
Tim O’Reilly funded it to start and now it’s funded by big tech companies.
> I think it's totally normal and correct to have a license where a company like Amazon can't come in, steal the volunteer work of hundreds of developers, slap their logo on it and sell it.
Why shouldn't this to apply to every company - including the one ostensibly shepherding the open source project? I would argue that employing a bunch of core developers doing 10% of the work doesn't entitle you to be the sole entity to monetize the work of the other 90% of the community, but I don't think anyone has come up with a proper license to defend against that yet.
Open source indeed needs to adapt, but I don't think the source-available or open-core models we are seeing these days is the right solution. If you really want to prevent third-party entities to profit off your work you'd need to go for something like the AGPL, but that is for obvious reasons not exactly a popular choice.
> Why shouldn't this to apply to every company - including the one ostensibly shepherding the open source project?
Because that's simply not how copyrights and trademarks work. The licensor doesn't need to abide by the terms of the license, by definition. The purpose of a license is to grant rights from the licensor to the licensee.
> employing a bunch of core developers doing 10% of the work doesn't entitle you to be the sole entity to monetize the work of the other 90% of the community
Very few of these cases are 10% company / 90% community. If anything, it's usually the other way around. Not to mention the huge amount of time spent on code review and ongoing maintenance of third-party contributions.
> I don't think anyone has come up with a proper license to defend against that yet.
That wouldn't really make sense; a software license isn't going to remove rights from the licensor. More realistic solutions are things like intentionally not having a CLA (effectively preventing the project creator from relicensing) and/or reassigning copyright and trademarks to a foundation.
I have to work with some closed source external tech at my job right now and I hate it so much. Probably more to do with the specific tech than the open/closed factor, but it feels really bad whenever there's an issue or an improvement that could be made but I'm not allowed to fork or directly change the dependency.
I honestly feel so burned by it that I will think strongly about ever joining another company that isn't using more open source tech.
I have no opinion on datastar, and I support things like tailwind selling pre built tailwind components to make money (not that I use either, but idea wise I'm happy for them). But sometimes working with closed source is a real pain.
Yeah, it is weird to me how many people expect free stuff, and when they get it, they act entitled to all of the developer’s time and get angry if they don’t get it. No other industry operates this way.
And the whole “the developer gave me so much for free for so many years that I am now entitled to never pay for their work in the future” attitude. It’s bizarre.
I will post again what I wrote ( slightly eddied ) earlier in the Datastar thread.
There is a mainstream generation divide in open source ideology over the past 15-20 years.
The modern one is what lots of younger generation agree upon. It should always be open source and continue to be supported by the community. For the interest of Public Good. Some of these project where basics living cost are met money mostly driven by VC, or zero interest rate phenomenon. Preferably GPL or APGL, no body owns the code or even rights, the project belongs to the community. Everything is or should be OSS. When money is involved, donation is the preferred method. At one point Open Core were fine, I believe Sidekicq works on that model for at least 10 years. But I guess now even Pro version of anything is borderline unacceptable as it is "bait and switch".
The old folks are basically and mostly take it or leave it. Fork it into my own while taking the maintenance burden too. Sometimes they charge for it, sometimes they dont. They are just sharing something they did to the rest of the world in the hope some may enjoy it. Mostly started out as just a hobby, not something big or professional.
It's true for things other than developer tools. I built a free utility that became popular and people started asking for more features. I spent several months working full-time on building out improvement and put 10% of the new features behind a paywall. I took nothing away and made 90% of the new features free too. The stuff I put behind a paywall is stuff I thought would only apply to professional business users. Just the fact that I had paid features made people upset. I got a ton of angry emails asking why the tool was no longer free. I also used to make some money via donations through BuyMeACoffee and those nearly completely stopped.
If I throw code up on GitHub, I try to be real clear that if it's good enough for me, it's done as far as I'm concerned[0]. I'm also licensed under WTFPL. I figure if that scares off any commercial interests, so much the better.
You're probably a lot more fully baked than I am, so this path may not work for you.
Sorry to hear that man. It does really sour the ideas of the MIT license especially. It's a social problem and won't be solved by tech. My response now is a pretty hard line, cool... then fork it. Anything softer doesn't matter cause if they really cared they'd already be actively helping.
I agree in theory, but the problem is that I have been burned over and over again by proprietary tooling. The interests of the dev tool makers often do not align with my interests as a developer, and that's a problem.
Proprietary tool vendors are just trying to create shareholder value. If that means firing the entire dev team and never doing another release, they will do that. If it means switching from "pay once, use forever" to "pay $20 / month", they will do that. If it means going from $20 / month to $2000 / month, they will do that. If it means putting ads inside my IDE, they will do that. Just look at what Broadcom is doing to VMware to see what this can look like in practice.
OSS developer tooling is usually made by and for the community. The interests of the dev tool makers align with the interests of the developers using it, because they are the same people. There are no incentives to enshittify my developer experience, so I can safely rely on the tooling without worrying about whether it'll still be usable next year. And even if the core team decides they want to make some wildly unpopular changes, the rest of the community can still fork it and continue on their own direction!
I really wish it wasn't the case, but there are very few proprietary tool vendors I'd be willing to believe if they promised they wouldn't ruin my day a few years from now by doing a rug pull. Some small just-started firm I've never heard of? Probably not in that list. I would love to cut them a break, but trust has to be earned.
Internet drama aside, if you develop applications for the web, know Go, and are at all curious about what you can do with Datastar I have a boilerplate / template project that I've had much success with called northstar. In it you'll find a TODO app, and some smaller examples that show off some patterns of success when using Datastar. It's intended to be hacked on / apart, so bring your own patterns of success and put on your hacker hat.
From what I can tell this seems like a classic example of devs just not communicating. On mobile I don't see any mention of a "Pro" option on the front page, and I don't see any "essays" about it either. Perhaps its buried in one of the essays, or maybe it's been communicated elsewhere, but if you're planning to launch a paid service around an open source app it's really a good idea to communicate the intent clearly BEFORE it's launched. If it just comes out of no where it feels to the community like they're getting rug pulled. On top of that terms like "Pro" and "Premium" and "Plus" have been ruined by predatory subscription models. Similar thing happened to Hyperland a while back and I think a lot has to do with the language used.
That said, the terms seem perfectly reasonable, and a life long license is great. Though 300 dollars is going to cause sticker shock to a solo dev I think.
Edit:
To the devs I would recommended adding something like "All features of Datastar are free and open source. If you would like to support us consider donating or purchasing a lifetime license for access to <insert stuff here>", to the home page, maybe under the intro to the project" And drop the "Pro" branding.
Yeah, I get their motivation for putting it all together, not wanting people to have FOMO and keeping the purchase options simple. But 300 bucks is a lot for an individual to spend. I feel like maybe breaking it up a bit and letting people pick what matters to them, but then you have to be careful not to let it feel like nickel and diming people. It's a tough line to walk.
Everything on the site is part of the core library which is free and open source, except for the stuff clearly marked as part of pro, which has a link to the pricing. (Plus, you really don't need pro, all the good stuff is free.)
I think it would be more misleading to put pro on the front page, because that would make people think it's a subpar experience without it.
They think most folks should avoid Pro (it is just convenience fluff and some potential anti-patterns). Putting it on the front page would cause more harm than good?
Discoverability is key, especially if you're charging for features, so placing them in reference is a bit odd. Calling it Pro doesn't help either if it's just a fancy donor button with some convenience sprinkled in. In any case, the general tone of the discussion on HN over the last three days and of the linked post doesn't make me want to use the product anyway. Everyone involved seems to like a bit of drama in their lifes.
Yeah, "allegation" is almost exclusively used for crimes nowadays. In fact, I automatically associate the word to sexual misconduct accusations. I know that's not even remotely implied in the word's actual definition but it's just not a good idea to use it for an article like this, because I know I'm not alone in making that connection lol.
People who are inclined to take offense at true statements are going to find ways to complain or take offense no matter what. We shouldn’t bend over backwards to accommodate that sort of behavior.
Datastar author here. I'd really have rather it be about the tech or perf numbers. We pride ourselves on being fast and simple to a silly degree. The drama seems to be about anything but the underlying implementation. It makes me sad but eyeballs and hype so tend to bring people that do care in the long run.
To be honest, for me it's the opposite, judging by the developer's comments in other threads about the topic. He's not as nice as his responses in this one would suggest.
Edit: Just some examples to not make empty statements.
likening this to photomatt - who has been doing shady, extortionate, illegal stuff for 10+ years, and then actively spent 4+ months doing everything he could to ruin himself and wordpress - is laughable
As a Datastar user who uses the free version I don't want the Pro features to be made free as they would just add bloat to the bundle. It's already borderline massive at 10-11kb. Like preact is 3kb.
At some point, computation use main interface will move away from screens. We expect it to go invisible, hopefully. Then I wonder the fate of all UI solutions.
Why? The original title is "Greedy Developer?" and HN's rule is to "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
I just don’t understand how (presumably) adult men with bank accounts and families and medicine cabinets have the energy to have such strong opinions about this kind of stuff. Or even people who don’t have any of those things...
Some credit is due to the lead Datastar developer though, who like the guy behind HTMX has a particular way of confronting obtuse criticism that I find amusing to some degree and in a way appropriate if only I didn’t find the tenor of some of his responses to be playing down to the level of his detractors and obscuring the greater theme that I think is software discourse being a proxy for political ones.
Hoping that the personalities behind Datastar and HTMX are a few good notches to the left of DHH.
The breathless outrage is something that has no place on HN.
As for the developer’s tone - I don’t know if there is a right way here. It’s an asymmetrical situation where making an unfounded allegation is effortless and does real harm, but responding to it in a measured way is ineffective and legitimizes the allegation.
I am getting really mixed signals here. First the Pro features used to be free (libre), but now they no longer are. The features are supposedly not really needed, but then they being sold. What's with the Pro bundler? Why do we need a bundler in the first place, what is it supposed to do that a regular bundler like Vite cannot? And now there are two more frameworks (Rocket and Stellar) that won't be Free and Open Source at all?
If this is just about providing monetary support for the project then just do what everyone else is doing: sell support or pre-built copy&past examples. If the plugins are nothing special and can be replaced by a one-liner I would be even more pissed after paying 300$ for them.
Either these guys are really, really bad at communication, or this smells really fishy. If anything, this blog post makes me trust them even less that they won't enshittify Datastart by moving more stuff to Pro and having the FLOSS version be the ghetto version.
> I am getting really mixed signals here. First the Pro features used to be free (libre), but now they no longer are.
That's not my understanding. From what I read, the open source "features" were incomplete, the Pro versions are polished products.
I don't understand the rest of your post, don't use a bundler if you don't see the point. Datastar is tiny and modular, any proprietary features could be replaced by open source version, you don't need to depend on anything proprietary. What's the risk you're worried about here?
Finally, selling support for a tiny library that's well tested, robust and fast is not viable. What do you see as the business case here?
The author is very aggressive and pushy, he makes fun of people who disagree with him on Discord and now even here on hackernews. Notice the pattern of his comments/responses - he tends to belittle people. On Discord he use vulgar language - here he is more careful to maintain image. But it still permeates through his comments no matter how hard he tries to mask his true self.
I hadn’t heard about Datastar until this brouhaha started, but having read everything, I’ve come to the conclusion that many people are entitled primadonnas.
I really do not understand the outrage. Nothing has been taken away, it hasn’t been relicensed, etc. I saw someone complaining that extracting the commit prior to the change was “an arcane git command.” Are you serious? If you can’t figure out how to get the parent of a given commit, I have no idea how you stay employed in tech.
I applaud the library author for making some money while also not rug-pulling. I personally think the license should be more copyleft, but if anything, the fact that it isn’t should negate anyone’s complaints.
It’s almost as if there is a disturbingly large percentage of the community that has no idea how to code, doesn’t have the drive to learn - much less produce something original and market it - and just fakes it by vibe-coding on top of libraries and frameworks.
> It’s almost as if there is a disturbingly large percentage of the community that has no idea how to code, doesn’t have the drive to learn - much less produce something original and market it - and just fakes it by vibe-coding on top of libraries and frameworks.
From their own essay, the plugins are simple. They even give examples. They claim maintenance, sure. But they also claim the core API is stable and shouldn’t see changes.
Which is it?
----
I talked about them getting paid above, that’s fine. The rug pull and then coming up with these arguments are the parts that don’t sit right with me.
I don't really have an opinion on DHH either, but that speech nails it. Open Source Devs need to eat - stop flooding them with unrealistic demands and whinging when they ask to get paid.
I don't think anyone would be pissed at projects that ask to get paid upfront. When you provide a product for free, then switch the features to a paid model, it's normal that people will talk about it and won't be super happy about the situation. Sure they aren't entitled to anything, but maintainers aren't entitled to a criticism-free discussion of their project just because the project is open source (in part) either.
> For v1, we moved a handful of convenience plugins into Datastar Pro.
and
> Nothing you can build was taken from you; we set a support boundary
If it was available on core, it was supported by them. If they moved it to Pro, isn't still supported by them?
Not sure what the 'support boundary' is. If they didn't want to provide official support for it, wasn't 'core' the better solution for them anyway? Wouldn't pay require them to officially support it?
----
The ability to build is separate from the convenience of prebuilt. It is paywalling things. This is like saying, 'you can send electrical pulses to your computer, no need for an OS or tooling'.
If everything is achievable through the same api, then the plugins wouldn't do anything. If they simplify things, then do they do add something, convenience. This is what plugins do, which they say aren't needed? But if they're not needed, what's Pro for?
Yes, it's a 501c3... it's still commercial since they're selling...
If it's stable, no v2, plugins aren't needed, it's a 501c3, there's no shares, equity... what's the point of Pro? "The goal is to fund the work and draw a clear support boundary," What are they funding?
By adding a Pro subscription, what's the incentive to work on core?
---
As an outsider it just looks as a way to justify Pro. But it's not a technical explanation or explains the maintenance policy.
I completely agree. The "nothing was lost because you can still build it yourself" argument could just as well be used to make the entire thing proprietary. You still have your Turing Machine, so you didn't lose anything!
I don't have a big problem with the "paid bonus features" business model in general, but when you're removing features from the open-source version, at least be honest about it. And it's open source: if it breaks you get to keep both pieces, so where's the support burden supposed to come from?
I have no problem with paid features. I have no problem with them making money. I have no problem with them monetizing it this way. I have no problem with the 501c3.
I think that moving things from free to paid is them forcing the hand of users to pay, which is sweeping the rug under them. This is more on _how they did it_, more than the fact that it's paid.
I just don't like how they did it and it's not a good argument to justify it.
The data attributes they moved to Pro was mostly a result of watching folks use Datastar and seeing the anti-patterns develop. Those anti-patterns have been moved to Pro.
> If it's stable, no v2, plugins aren't needed, it's a 501c3, there's no shares, equity... what's the point of Pro? "The goal is to fund the work and draw a clear support boundary," What are they funding?
I assume it is because charitable organizations need accountants and other things (along with all the other stuff like web hosting and the like).
If they make less than $50,000 USD, they need to file the 990-N postcard, online.
It's less than 10 fields? Things like name, ein, fiscal start, end, etc.
If they make more than $50k, they can fill the EZ form. Sure, hire an accountant if you want. Most is how they earned the money, assets, expenses, where they spent the money. They need to declare officers too.
If they earn I think it's $200k, then they need to fill the IRS 990 form. Sure, get an accountant.
There's another requirement thrown in the above if they have more than X in assets...
Ironically Non-profits have to show profits. We don't particularly want devs money as much as Teams/Enterprise to pay for tooling. Inspector make life easier and more stuff (like Stellar is in route).
> By adding a Pro subscription, what's the incentive to work on core?
The article literally says that they consider core complete after numerous rewrites and optimizations. The whole point of a plugin architecture is that extensions don't have to touch core source code, so development on Datastar, open or closed source, is all about the community of plugins.
"You don't need plugins to do useful work with Datastar", and "You don't need these plugins for most work" are both perfectly reasonable interpretations.
Pretty typical for people to start campaigns for "open source developers must be compensated" while simultaneously losing their shit about this. Hahaha.
Oh yeah, please make it donorware so that I can then give you $5 every ten years and say "I donate to open source projects I like". Haha.
Probably because there's a huge chasm between "open source developers shouldn't starve" and "any form of monetization, no matter how hostile to the community, is completely acceptable".
Yeah, and apparently completely optional features that are entirely new are "hostile to the community". LOL
Hey, OSS dev, would you mind putting only features no one would ever want behind a paywall? No no, I know you could put convenience ones that could be replaced with a one-liner behind a paywall and no one would be hurt but that would be hostile to the community.
Ideally, exactly zero people should want the thing you make a pro feature.
The whole OSS support model people are suggested Datastar adopt is bad as it actively encourages you to write less good software so you can offer paid support.
I think it’s not fair that we expect every developer tool to be OSS. Most things that are fully OSS like react, typescript, etc. and even Linux to a large degree are supported by humongous amounts of cash from large tech companies. When a smaller firm devoted to developer tools like datastar decides to monetize, moreover, they are doing so without leaning on ad monetization, which many big firms rely upon, or other means that are not particularly nice. I think it’s really important we cut folks working on paid dev tools a break. The alternative is that we end up in a world that is largely merely defined by huge tech companies.
The problem is the rug-pull itself, not that the rug isn't there.
I don't have an opinion on Datastar, as I'd never heard of it until this article, but over the past year or two there have been a _lot_ of open source projects that have been converted to proprietary licenses, very often after being invested by VCs or PEs. It's happened to me a number of times now where the license for the features we were using went from open source to proprietary with 5-6 figure cost.
Developers gotta eat, I get that. But often the reason I'm using one of these components is it's a hobby or low value project where it simply doesn't bring in the income to justify paying for a license. If I had known this would happen, I would never have used it in the first place, used an alternative, or maybe just never bothered with the project. But now you're in an awkward position where the choice is either pay-up or re-do a bunch of work.
There was no rug pull! (And the term isn't even being used correctly) They talked in their community decided the set of features caused a support burden and for versions later on they would put them behind a pro tier to help pay for the extra costs for supporting them.
You can keep using your current version! You can even fork at that version. Calling it a rug pull is so entitled.
Like I said, I haven't heard of this project until now, so I don't know the wider context, but it may be that some of the people who are reacting negatively to it have been burnt in the past by the many other projects that have gone down this route: project starts as open source, then it goes open-core, then over time more of the dev effort naturally moves into the proprietary part, then sometimes eventually they change the license for the open part too.
Forking is often impractical in reality as a solo dev or small team rarely has the resources to keep up with security fixes.
I'm entirely happy to pay for things, do pay for many things, as well as donate to the authors of projects I use, and whatever this library is seems reasonably priced. Nevertheless, I'm pretty reluctant now to use open source libraries unless they're backed by a foundation, given how many times I've been badly burnt.
> Forking is often impractical in reality as a solo dev or small team rarely has the resources to keep up with security fixes.
Right, then as you've stated your recourse is not to use the library! That's fine and good and means the ecosystem works as intended.
> There was no rug pull! [...] You can keep using your current version! You can even fork at that version. Calling it a rug pull is so entitled.
This is a dishonest perversion of the commonly accepted definition of a "rug pull".
I'll copy what I said in a previous thread:
When Redis changed licenses to SSPL/RSAL, users were also free to continue using the BSD-licensed version. Was that not a rug pull? Same with MongoDB, Elastic, HashiCorp, etc. These are quintessential examples of the "OSS rug pull".
The idea is that users were relying on a functionality to be maintained (the "rug"), and the Datastar developers decided to continue maintaining it behind a paywall (the "pull").
Nobody is claiming that developers physically took the feature away from users, as that would be ridiculous. But users of these features are now forced to either maintain it themselves, wait for someone else from the community to fork and continue maintenance (which has its own set of issues), or pay up.
You can argue how it's "only" a few hundred lines of code; criticize "incapable" developers who can't check out a Git commit or do maintenance work they previously didn't have to; that the features don't require maintenance at all; and come up with other defensive arguments. But none of it matters. The size of the "rug" doesn't matter. It's the principle and precedent it sets for any users who were potentially interested in the project.
To say nothing about putting essential features like a bundler and debugging tool behind a paywall. These are not "Pro" features.
> It's happened to me a number of times now where the license for the features we were using went from open source to proprietary with 5-6 figure cost.
In those cases, prior to the project going commercial, did you contribute nontrivial code to the project and/or financially sponsor the project?
I could see being upset in those situations, but in most cases I find the answer is no.
> If I had known this would happen, I would never have used it in the first place, used an alternative, or maybe just never bothered with the project.
If you had used an alternative, the same scenario could have played out with the alternative.
Realistically, what are the "never have used it" / "never bothered" scenarios? Presumably you chose the project because you needed it for something; that implies the never-bothered alternative is essentially just writing something from scratch instead. Which you can still do now. And you can use the last FOSS version of the project as a starting point, which saves a tremendous amount of time. So how exactly were you burnt by a supposed "rug pull"?
If the rug isn’t there, how can it possibly be pulled?
All free licenses make each commit free - forever. If a library does what you need today, use it! If the terms become unacceptable in future, fork it and maintain it yourself, or hope someone else will. Note this can even happen with free software (GPL2 to 3, for example).
No one is entitled to the future work of someone else without paying though. You very definitely are the entitled one here.
I think it's totally normal and correct to have a license where a company like Amazon can't come in, steal the volunteer work of hundreds of developers, slap their logo on it and sell it.
I'm sure open source purists do not like this, but the world is the 1980 anymore. It's been 45 years. Things need to adapt. Open source needs to adapt.
Yeah we really need to normalize licenses that protect against that. Even GPL doesn’t because everything is SaaS now and companies will just isolate the GPL code to one micro service. AGPL might prevent this but there aren’t a lot of cases that have been litigated. And if they don’t modify the source then then it doesn’t do much IIRC.
But “open source” was in control of big business from the start. The open source consortium was a late 90s attempt to co-opt the free software movement and turn it into something business friendly.
Tim O’Reilly funded it to start and now it’s funded by big tech companies.
> I think it's totally normal and correct to have a license where a company like Amazon can't come in, steal the volunteer work of hundreds of developers, slap their logo on it and sell it.
Why shouldn't this to apply to every company - including the one ostensibly shepherding the open source project? I would argue that employing a bunch of core developers doing 10% of the work doesn't entitle you to be the sole entity to monetize the work of the other 90% of the community, but I don't think anyone has come up with a proper license to defend against that yet.
Open source indeed needs to adapt, but I don't think the source-available or open-core models we are seeing these days is the right solution. If you really want to prevent third-party entities to profit off your work you'd need to go for something like the AGPL, but that is for obvious reasons not exactly a popular choice.
> Why shouldn't this to apply to every company - including the one ostensibly shepherding the open source project?
Because that's simply not how copyrights and trademarks work. The licensor doesn't need to abide by the terms of the license, by definition. The purpose of a license is to grant rights from the licensor to the licensee.
> employing a bunch of core developers doing 10% of the work doesn't entitle you to be the sole entity to monetize the work of the other 90% of the community
Very few of these cases are 10% company / 90% community. If anything, it's usually the other way around. Not to mention the huge amount of time spent on code review and ongoing maintenance of third-party contributions.
> I don't think anyone has come up with a proper license to defend against that yet.
That wouldn't really make sense; a software license isn't going to remove rights from the licensor. More realistic solutions are things like intentionally not having a CLA (effectively preventing the project creator from relicensing) and/or reassigning copyright and trademarks to a foundation.
I have to work with some closed source external tech at my job right now and I hate it so much. Probably more to do with the specific tech than the open/closed factor, but it feels really bad whenever there's an issue or an improvement that could be made but I'm not allowed to fork or directly change the dependency.
I honestly feel so burned by it that I will think strongly about ever joining another company that isn't using more open source tech.
I have no opinion on datastar, and I support things like tailwind selling pre built tailwind components to make money (not that I use either, but idea wise I'm happy for them). But sometimes working with closed source is a real pain.
Yeah, it is weird to me how many people expect free stuff, and when they get it, they act entitled to all of the developer’s time and get angry if they don’t get it. No other industry operates this way.
And the whole “the developer gave me so much for free for so many years that I am now entitled to never pay for their work in the future” attitude. It’s bizarre.
I will post again what I wrote ( slightly eddied ) earlier in the Datastar thread.
There is a mainstream generation divide in open source ideology over the past 15-20 years.
The modern one is what lots of younger generation agree upon. It should always be open source and continue to be supported by the community. For the interest of Public Good. Some of these project where basics living cost are met money mostly driven by VC, or zero interest rate phenomenon. Preferably GPL or APGL, no body owns the code or even rights, the project belongs to the community. Everything is or should be OSS. When money is involved, donation is the preferred method. At one point Open Core were fine, I believe Sidekicq works on that model for at least 10 years. But I guess now even Pro version of anything is borderline unacceptable as it is "bait and switch".
The old folks are basically and mostly take it or leave it. Fork it into my own while taking the maintenance burden too. Sometimes they charge for it, sometimes they dont. They are just sharing something they did to the rest of the world in the hope some may enjoy it. Mostly started out as just a hobby, not something big or professional.
It's true for things other than developer tools. I built a free utility that became popular and people started asking for more features. I spent several months working full-time on building out improvement and put 10% of the new features behind a paywall. I took nothing away and made 90% of the new features free too. The stuff I put behind a paywall is stuff I thought would only apply to professional business users. Just the fact that I had paid features made people upset. I got a ton of angry emails asking why the tool was no longer free. I also used to make some money via donations through BuyMeACoffee and those nearly completely stopped.
If I throw code up on GitHub, I try to be real clear that if it's good enough for me, it's done as far as I'm concerned[0]. I'm also licensed under WTFPL. I figure if that scares off any commercial interests, so much the better.
You're probably a lot more fully baked than I am, so this path may not work for you.
[0] https://github.com/longwalkwoodworking/angle-dangler#what-if...
Sorry to hear that man. It does really sour the ideas of the MIT license especially. It's a social problem and won't be solved by tech. My response now is a pretty hard line, cool... then fork it. Anything softer doesn't matter cause if they really cared they'd already be actively helping.
I agree in theory, but the problem is that I have been burned over and over again by proprietary tooling. The interests of the dev tool makers often do not align with my interests as a developer, and that's a problem.
Proprietary tool vendors are just trying to create shareholder value. If that means firing the entire dev team and never doing another release, they will do that. If it means switching from "pay once, use forever" to "pay $20 / month", they will do that. If it means going from $20 / month to $2000 / month, they will do that. If it means putting ads inside my IDE, they will do that. Just look at what Broadcom is doing to VMware to see what this can look like in practice.
OSS developer tooling is usually made by and for the community. The interests of the dev tool makers align with the interests of the developers using it, because they are the same people. There are no incentives to enshittify my developer experience, so I can safely rely on the tooling without worrying about whether it'll still be usable next year. And even if the core team decides they want to make some wildly unpopular changes, the rest of the community can still fork it and continue on their own direction!
I really wish it wasn't the case, but there are very few proprietary tool vendors I'd be willing to believe if they promised they wouldn't ruin my day a few years from now by doing a rug pull. Some small just-started firm I've never heard of? Probably not in that list. I would love to cut them a break, but trust has to be earned.
Internet drama aside, if you develop applications for the web, know Go, and are at all curious about what you can do with Datastar I have a boilerplate / template project that I've had much success with called northstar. In it you'll find a TODO app, and some smaller examples that show off some patterns of success when using Datastar. It's intended to be hacked on / apart, so bring your own patterns of success and put on your hacker hat.
- https://github.com/zangster300/northstar
From what I can tell this seems like a classic example of devs just not communicating. On mobile I don't see any mention of a "Pro" option on the front page, and I don't see any "essays" about it either. Perhaps its buried in one of the essays, or maybe it's been communicated elsewhere, but if you're planning to launch a paid service around an open source app it's really a good idea to communicate the intent clearly BEFORE it's launched. If it just comes out of no where it feels to the community like they're getting rug pulled. On top of that terms like "Pro" and "Premium" and "Plus" have been ruined by predatory subscription models. Similar thing happened to Hyperland a while back and I think a lot has to do with the language used.
That said, the terms seem perfectly reasonable, and a life long license is great. Though 300 dollars is going to cause sticker shock to a solo dev I think.
Edit:
To the devs I would recommended adding something like "All features of Datastar are free and open source. If you would like to support us consider donating or purchasing a lifetime license for access to <insert stuff here>", to the home page, maybe under the intro to the project" And drop the "Pro" branding.
Definitely drop the "Pro" branding. Also, sub-$200 is pretty standard disposable income threshold to consider.
Yeah, I get their motivation for putting it all together, not wanting people to have FOMO and keeping the purchase options simple. But 300 bucks is a lot for an individual to spend. I feel like maybe breaking it up a bit and letting people pick what matters to them, but then you have to be careful not to let it feel like nickel and diming people. It's a tough line to walk.
Reminds me of the Rich Hickey post Open Source is Not About You.
https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...
All this fuss because there was no pricing link on the front DS page. There still isn't.
There's nothing wrong with charging for your work, but it's common courtesy to be clear about pricing.
Everything on the site is part of the core library which is free and open source, except for the stuff clearly marked as part of pro, which has a link to the pricing. (Plus, you really don't need pro, all the good stuff is free.)
I think it would be more misleading to put pro on the front page, because that would make people think it's a subpar experience without it.
They think most folks should avoid Pro (it is just convenience fluff and some potential anti-patterns). Putting it on the front page would cause more harm than good?
They're not charging for the core, just for some plugins that many will not even use. I really don't see the problem.
Discoverability is key, especially if you're charging for features, so placing them in reference is a bit odd. Calling it Pro doesn't help either if it's just a fancy donor button with some convenience sprinkled in. In any case, the general tone of the discussion on HN over the last three days and of the linked post doesn't make me want to use the product anyway. Everyone involved seems to like a bit of drama in their lifes.
Yeah Pro is a terrible name.
"Allegations" implies criminal wrongdoing.
"Response to entitled grumpy people" is probably more the mark.
I would not tar my own project with the word "allegation" cause now you sound like a crim.
I think the suggested alternative is a considerably less professional way for one to conduct themselves.
Are you aware that "allegations" is never used in the actual post?
Maybe the author changed it.
nope. the title here is just a fabrication, and it doesnt seem like you read the actual article
>> "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The site guidelines tell you not to say things like that.
Which you said earlier in this comment thread which got flagged and deleted so I don't know why you are back saying it again.
I wasn't aware of that rule. I'm quite curious as to why it exists...
If you did read it, where did your comment come from, given that allegation was never used in it?
Perhaps the original sin is the title for this post broke the rule that says to use the original title
Yeah, "allegation" is almost exclusively used for crimes nowadays. In fact, I automatically associate the word to sexual misconduct accusations. I know that's not even remotely implied in the word's actual definition but it's just not a good idea to use it for an article like this, because I know I'm not alone in making that connection lol.
I would have said “response to misunderstandings”.
Agreed.
that can read as passive aggressive though
That’s fine.
People who are inclined to take offense at true statements are going to find ways to complain or take offense no matter what. We shouldn’t bend over backwards to accommodate that sort of behavior.
The amount of front page space they’ve taken over the past few days is impressive.
There is only three article on Datastar on HN.
The original one was submitted by me. And I have no relation to them, I saw it as some alternative HTMX worth announcing.
The 2nd one was submitted as original of the project, and also know as discover because of my submission article. Well known effect on HN.
This one is a reply on controversy. Not surprised it ends up on HN also.
Datastar author here. I'd really have rather it be about the tech or perf numbers. We pride ourselves on being fast and simple to a silly degree. The drama seems to be about anything but the underlying implementation. It makes me sad but eyeballs and hype so tend to bring people that do care in the long run.
Whatever slight they received has been more than recompensed with exposure. We've had three HN stories in two days on this.
Four. Pretty funny.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45536000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45536618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45537372
To be honest, for me it's the opposite, judging by the developer's comments in other threads about the topic. He's not as nice as his responses in this one would suggest.
Edit: Just some examples to not make empty statements.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540077
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540140
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45542425
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45538639
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540093
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540824
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45539376
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45539942
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45539821
Wow. This is far in excess of "Torvalds hazing" and lands solidly into the "you are uninvited to my next project" bucket, at least for me.
I thought that @photomatt taught everyone that drama-as-PR doesn't ever, ever work. Guess some people missed the message...
likening this to photomatt - who has been doing shady, extortionate, illegal stuff for 10+ years, and then actively spent 4+ months doing everything he could to ruin himself and wordpress - is laughable
As a Datastar user who uses the free version I don't want the Pro features to be made free as they would just add bloat to the bundle. It's already borderline massive at 10-11kb. Like preact is 3kb.
At some point, computation use main interface will move away from screens. We expect it to go invisible, hopefully. Then I wonder the fate of all UI solutions.
Who is we?
Lifetime licenses are great for quality software! I have one for each Beyond compare and Emedit.
Please change the title to: Datastar response to misunderstandings
Why? The original title is "Greedy Developer?" and HN's rule is to "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#:~:text=Oth...
just trying to be fair. maybe the original page title fits better.
Get ready for hard forks
I just don’t understand how (presumably) adult men with bank accounts and families and medicine cabinets have the energy to have such strong opinions about this kind of stuff. Or even people who don’t have any of those things...
Some credit is due to the lead Datastar developer though, who like the guy behind HTMX has a particular way of confronting obtuse criticism that I find amusing to some degree and in a way appropriate if only I didn’t find the tenor of some of his responses to be playing down to the level of his detractors and obscuring the greater theme that I think is software discourse being a proxy for political ones.
Hoping that the personalities behind Datastar and HTMX are a few good notches to the left of DHH.
The breathless outrage is something that has no place on HN.
As for the developer’s tone - I don’t know if there is a right way here. It’s an asymmetrical situation where making an unfounded allegation is effortless and does real harm, but responding to it in a measured way is ineffective and legitimizes the allegation.
I am getting really mixed signals here. First the Pro features used to be free (libre), but now they no longer are. The features are supposedly not really needed, but then they being sold. What's with the Pro bundler? Why do we need a bundler in the first place, what is it supposed to do that a regular bundler like Vite cannot? And now there are two more frameworks (Rocket and Stellar) that won't be Free and Open Source at all?
If this is just about providing monetary support for the project then just do what everyone else is doing: sell support or pre-built copy&past examples. If the plugins are nothing special and can be replaced by a one-liner I would be even more pissed after paying 300$ for them.
Either these guys are really, really bad at communication, or this smells really fishy. If anything, this blog post makes me trust them even less that they won't enshittify Datastart by moving more stuff to Pro and having the FLOSS version be the ghetto version.
> I am getting really mixed signals here. First the Pro features used to be free (libre), but now they no longer are.
That's not my understanding. From what I read, the open source "features" were incomplete, the Pro versions are polished products.
I don't understand the rest of your post, don't use a bundler if you don't see the point. Datastar is tiny and modular, any proprietary features could be replaced by open source version, you don't need to depend on anything proprietary. What's the risk you're worried about here?
Finally, selling support for a tiny library that's well tested, robust and fast is not viable. What do you see as the business case here?
The author is very aggressive and pushy, he makes fun of people who disagree with him on Discord and now even here on hackernews. Notice the pattern of his comments/responses - he tends to belittle people. On Discord he use vulgar language - here he is more careful to maintain image. But it still permeates through his comments no matter how hard he tries to mask his true self.
I hadn’t heard about Datastar until this brouhaha started, but having read everything, I’ve come to the conclusion that many people are entitled primadonnas.
I really do not understand the outrage. Nothing has been taken away, it hasn’t been relicensed, etc. I saw someone complaining that extracting the commit prior to the change was “an arcane git command.” Are you serious? If you can’t figure out how to get the parent of a given commit, I have no idea how you stay employed in tech.
I applaud the library author for making some money while also not rug-pulling. I personally think the license should be more copyleft, but if anything, the fact that it isn’t should negate anyone’s complaints.
It’s almost as if there is a disturbingly large percentage of the community that has no idea how to code, doesn’t have the drive to learn - much less produce something original and market it - and just fakes it by vibe-coding on top of libraries and frameworks.
> It’s almost as if there is a disturbingly large percentage of the community that has no idea how to code, doesn’t have the drive to learn - much less produce something original and market it - and just fakes it by vibe-coding on top of libraries and frameworks.
Does seem that way.
I can't even imagine the drama if it was made free but GPL.
> Nothing has been taken away, it hasn’t been relicensed, etc.
Meanwhile, at https://data-star.dev/essays/greedy_developer
> For v1, we moved a handful of convenience plugins into Datastar Pro.
So it's yet another rugpull, and the project is now Open Core. No sympathy from me.
They literally tell you to fork it, and also demonstrate how to recreate some features. I don’t know what else you think should happen.
Fork it, revert the removed things, maintain it.
---
From their own essay, the plugins are simple. They even give examples. They claim maintenance, sure. But they also claim the core API is stable and shouldn’t see changes.
Which is it?
----
I talked about them getting paid above, that’s fine. The rug pull and then coming up with these arguments are the parts that don’t sit right with me.
They literally can't prevent people from forking it. That's what open source means. Same has been true of all the rugpulls we have seen.
> “an arcane git command.”
If you're speaking of a comment towards the top of the last thread on HN about it, that comment was a sarcastic one. If not, please ignore.
I don't really have an opinion on DHH either, but that speech nails it. Open Source Devs need to eat - stop flooding them with unrealistic demands and whinging when they ask to get paid.
I don't think anyone would be pissed at projects that ask to get paid upfront. When you provide a product for free, then switch the features to a paid model, it's normal that people will talk about it and won't be super happy about the situation. Sure they aren't entitled to anything, but maintainers aren't entitled to a criticism-free discussion of their project just because the project is open source (in part) either.
> For v1, we moved a handful of convenience plugins into Datastar Pro.
and
> Nothing you can build was taken from you; we set a support boundary
If it was available on core, it was supported by them. If they moved it to Pro, isn't still supported by them?
Not sure what the 'support boundary' is. If they didn't want to provide official support for it, wasn't 'core' the better solution for them anyway? Wouldn't pay require them to officially support it?
----
The ability to build is separate from the convenience of prebuilt. It is paywalling things. This is like saying, 'you can send electrical pulses to your computer, no need for an OS or tooling'.
If everything is achievable through the same api, then the plugins wouldn't do anything. If they simplify things, then do they do add something, convenience. This is what plugins do, which they say aren't needed? But if they're not needed, what's Pro for?
Yes, it's a 501c3... it's still commercial since they're selling...
If it's stable, no v2, plugins aren't needed, it's a 501c3, there's no shares, equity... what's the point of Pro? "The goal is to fund the work and draw a clear support boundary," What are they funding?
By adding a Pro subscription, what's the incentive to work on core?
---
As an outsider it just looks as a way to justify Pro. But it's not a technical explanation or explains the maintenance policy.
I completely agree. The "nothing was lost because you can still build it yourself" argument could just as well be used to make the entire thing proprietary. You still have your Turing Machine, so you didn't lose anything!
I don't have a big problem with the "paid bonus features" business model in general, but when you're removing features from the open-source version, at least be honest about it. And it's open source: if it breaks you get to keep both pieces, so where's the support burden supposed to come from?
Same.
I have no problem with paid features. I have no problem with them making money. I have no problem with them monetizing it this way. I have no problem with the 501c3.
I think that moving things from free to paid is them forcing the hand of users to pay, which is sweeping the rug under them. This is more on _how they did it_, more than the fact that it's paid.
I just don't like how they did it and it's not a good argument to justify it.
The data attributes they moved to Pro was mostly a result of watching folks use Datastar and seeing the anti-patterns develop. Those anti-patterns have been moved to Pro.
> If it's stable, no v2, plugins aren't needed, it's a 501c3, there's no shares, equity... what's the point of Pro? "The goal is to fund the work and draw a clear support boundary," What are they funding?
I assume it is because charitable organizations need accountants and other things (along with all the other stuff like web hosting and the like).
If they make less than $50,000 USD, they need to file the 990-N postcard, online.
It's less than 10 fields? Things like name, ein, fiscal start, end, etc.
If they make more than $50k, they can fill the EZ form. Sure, hire an accountant if you want. Most is how they earned the money, assets, expenses, where they spent the money. They need to declare officers too.
If they earn I think it's $200k, then they need to fill the IRS 990 form. Sure, get an accountant.
There's another requirement thrown in the above if they have more than X in assets...
The datasets of IRS 990's are available online.
Ironically Non-profits have to show profits. We don't particularly want devs money as much as Teams/Enterprise to pay for tooling. Inspector make life easier and more stuff (like Stellar is in route).
> By adding a Pro subscription, what's the incentive to work on core?
The article literally says that they consider core complete after numerous rewrites and optimizations. The whole point of a plugin architecture is that extensions don't have to touch core source code, so development on Datastar, open or closed source, is all about the community of plugins.
I agree.
But by their own admission, plugins are not needed.
> _even if we don’t think you need them._
So, to them, which is it?
"You don't need plugins to do useful work with Datastar", and "You don't need these plugins for most work" are both perfectly reasonable interpretations.
Pretty typical for people to start campaigns for "open source developers must be compensated" while simultaneously losing their shit about this. Hahaha.
Oh yeah, please make it donorware so that I can then give you $5 every ten years and say "I donate to open source projects I like". Haha.
It's wild this comment is getting downvotes.
Probably because there's a huge chasm between "open source developers shouldn't starve" and "any form of monetization, no matter how hostile to the community, is completely acceptable".
Yeah, and apparently completely optional features that are entirely new are "hostile to the community". LOL
Hey, OSS dev, would you mind putting only features no one would ever want behind a paywall? No no, I know you could put convenience ones that could be replaced with a one-liner behind a paywall and no one would be hurt but that would be hostile to the community.
Ideally, exactly zero people should want the thing you make a pro feature.
The whole OSS support model people are suggested Datastar adopt is bad as it actively encourages you to write less good software so you can offer paid support.