Imagine you’re a solo maintainer of an NPM package, and you know that one of the FAANG companies uses your package. Normally, you respond to issues on weekends and cut new builds when reasonable bugs are reported.
Then, the FAANGco starts sponsoring you, a pittance for them but a solid amount for you. They put in issues and submit PRs that are intended for their own use case, or even worse, that constrain the utility of the package to that company’s use case.
Other people put in issues, but let’s be real, they’re not sponsoring you.
A maintainer can reject an issue or PR from a sponsor to keep the package pure and generalized, but would risk getting that sponsorship revoked. And if you don’t think coercion would be involved in that, think again.
It is FOSS so someone could fork it. But then, you’ve got a situation where potentially tens of thousands of projects and consumers would have to switch over.
All straw men for sure, but I am thinking that the ecosystem of FOSS might be shook by this, from both the maintainer and consumer side.
I don't know, I don't really see it as a problem. What is the difference between this and FANGco hiring the developer to specialize the product for them in-house, which is something that happens often?
Then, the FAANGco starts sponsoring you, a pittance for them but a solid amount for you. They put in issues and submit PRs that are intended for their own use case, or even worse, that constrain the utility of the package to that company’s use case.
Other people put in issues, but let’s be real, they’re not sponsoring you.
A maintainer can reject an issue or PR from a sponsor to keep the package pure and generalized, but would risk getting that sponsorship revoked. And if you don’t think coercion would be involved in that, think again.
It is FOSS so someone could fork it. But then, you’ve got a situation where potentially tens of thousands of projects and consumers would have to switch over.
All straw men for sure, but I am thinking that the ecosystem of FOSS might be shook by this, from both the maintainer and consumer side.