Most of the developers are familiar with the popular Javascript style guide library called Standard — which also serves as a linter and automatic code fixer.
However, in a move which is now being questioned by many developers, Standard has begun to show ads when installed through NPM.
In a GitHub post published last week by Standard developers, it was announced that whenever developers would install Standard 14.0.0 through NPM JavaScript package manager, they would also see a giant banner advertisement in their terminal.
Ads introduced in a JavaScript library for the first time
Standard JS library is downloaded about three million times each month. However, developers were finding it difficult to keep the library up to date due to the lack of funds.
Feross Aboukhadijeh, a developer of Standard, says that companies usually hesitate to fund OSS directly: “When it does happen, it’s never enough and it never reaches packages which are transitive dependencies.”
“Fortunately, there exists a funding model that usually works for public goods like this – ads.” He further explored the possibility of using ethical ads for funding — ads that don’t track users or collect data.
Developers are unhappy with the ads
It’s no surprise that several developers are against the idea of seeing ads in their terminal.
But there are some who understand the need to find a sustainable model that can facilitate new features, bugs fixes, answering user questions, and improving documentation.
Meanwhile, some are hoping to find a better way to support FOSS developers without seeing ads on the terminal.
But most of the criticism against Standard and the new ad-supported model comes from developers who are worried that the ad banners will make their way into logs and in turn make app debugging unnecessarily complicated.
However, this isn’t the first instance of ads showing up on an open-source platform. Developers really hate ads so much to the extent that they have made the world’s first ad blocker that blocks adverts on command-line interface.
