The experiment is over – read the recap here!

Hey folks! 👋

I've already spoken to a few of you about this idea, but I'd like to share it with the broader community now that standard 14 has shipped.

Background: I think that the current model of sustaining open source is not working and we need more experimentation. This is one such experiment.

What's the experiment? Whenever standard 14 is installed, we'll display a message from a company that supports open source. The sponsorship pays directly for maintainer time. That is, writing new features, fixing bugs, answering user questions, and improving documentation.

What's the goal? My goal with this experiment is to make standard healthier. If we learn that the experiment works, perhaps we can help make all open source healthier, too. For complex reasons, companies are generally hesitant or unwilling to fund OSS directly. When it does happen, it's never enough and it never reaches packages which are transitive dependencies (i.e. packages that no one installs explicitly and therefore no one knows exists). Essentially, we have a public good which is consumed by huge numbers of users, but which almost no one pays for. Fortunately, there exists a funding model that usually works for public goods like this – ads. The goal of this experiment is to answer the question: Can we use ethical ads – ads that don't track users or collect data – to fund open source software?

What does the code do? The code for this experiment is available here: feross/funding. Essentially, it calls console.log() on some text. There is no tracking, data collecting, or unexpected behavior. You can look at the code to verify – indeed, this is the beauty of open source!

What will the funds be used for? The funds raised so far ($2,000) have paid for Feross's time to release Standard 14 which has taken around five days. If we are able to raise additional funds, the next thing I'd like to focus on is out-of-the-box TypeScript support in StandardJS (one of the most common feature requests!) and modernizing the various text editor plugins (many of which are currently unmaintained). If others in the community are interested in taking the lead on any of these issues, I'd like to direct some funds to you.

Feedback welcome!

EDIT: This thread is now locked 🔒

For why + next steps, scroll to the end >>

EDIT: The experiment is over – Feross posted a recap on his blog