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0 pointsArcHound7mo ago0 comments

And that's exactly what these companies can abuse.

If this wasn't available for free, they would gladly pay for a programmer to create it. But if it's already free, they can use it as a starting point. Maybe they'd need to internalize/extend it. But the option of paying for the work already done is gone.

Do this for each npm dependency and you're looking at huge savings.

0 comments

imtringued7mo ago

This is still illogical. You can hire the original maintainer and pay an incremental cost, or you can hire a random developer and pay the initial learning cost + higher incremental cost.

If every company using a library chose the former, then every hour of development would be paid for (from the perspective of the maintainer) and the cost would be spread out across all its users.

ArcHoundOP7mo ago

A counterproposal:

You can use what is as is. Then you can ignore all of the other issues if they don't impact your bottom line.

Don't get me wrong, I like your corporate OSS financing model. But there seems to be not enough incentive for companies to use it. Why take ownership for a small cost, when you can use an imperfect thing with no cost?

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