There's nothing wrong with charging for your work, but it's common courtesy to be clear about pricing.
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.
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.
"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 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.
Does seem that way.
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.
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.
---
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?
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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.
https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...
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?
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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?
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As an outsider it just looks as a way to justify Pro. But it's not a technical explanation or explains the maintenance policy.
> 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).
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.
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 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.
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'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...
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.
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.
You can keep using your current version! You can even fork at that version. Calling it a rug pull is so entitled.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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 $2000 / month, they will do that. If it means putting ads inside my IDE, they will do that. Just look at what Broadcom is doing to VMware to see what this can look like in practice.
OSS developer tooling is usually made by and for the community. The interests of the dev tool makers align with the interests of the developers using it, because they are the same people. There are no incentives to enshittify my developer experience, so I can safely rely on the tooling without worrying about whether it'll still be usable next year. And even if the core team decides they want to make some wildly unpopular changes, the rest of the community can still fork it and continue on their own direction!
I really wish it wasn't the case, but there are very few proprietary tool vendors I'd be willing to believe if they promised they wouldn't ruin my day a few years from now by doing a rug pull. Some small just-started firm I've never heard of? Probably not in that list. I would love to cut them a break, but trust has to be earned.
If this is just about providing monetary support for the project then just do what everyone else is doing: sell support or pre-built copy&past examples. If the plugins are nothing special and can be replaced by a one-liner I would be even more pissed after paying 300$ 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.
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?
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.
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
I thought that @photomatt taught everyone that drama-as-PR doesn't ever, ever work. Guess some people missed the message...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#:~:text=Oth...
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.
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.
dinkleberg•4h ago
sudodevnull•3h ago