17
kiki
1y

@zloirock, the main maintainer of core-js (the library that holds the web together and has the usage just shy of jQuery) went to prison. He now has a fucked-up health for life. He survives off of $400/mo.

His library gained absolutely massive adoption, yet remained relatively unknown, and brought in little to no support from the huge companies using it. On top of that, he “enjoys” a LOT of hate messages from people who don't care and just expect open source maintainers to work for free.

https://github.com/zloirock/...

Comments
  • 1
  • 1
    like this
  • 2
    "The endless stream of hatred decreased slightly over time but continued. However, most of it moved from something like GitHub issues or Twitter threads to my mail or IM. Today, one developer wrote to me a message. He called me a parasite on the body of the developer community that makes a lot of money spamming and doing nothing useful. He called me the same murderer as Hans Reiser, but who bought the judge and went unpunished. He wished death on me and all my relatives. And there is nothing unusual here, I get several such messages a month. In the last year, this has been added that I am a "Russian fascist"."
  • 2
    quick question, what does core-js do?

    The name literally doesn't give me any clue to what use it can have.
  • 5
    @thebiochemic it polyfills a lot of modern standards and makes them work consistently across browsers. By its very nature it requires constant maintenance
  • 8
    @thebiochemic probably a ton of utility functions lacking from the "standard lib".

    Nobody deserves that kind of hate and hostility. This is disgusting.
  • 1
    @kiki ah okay that makes sense, thanks.
    Then again, polyfill.js already exists, which is mainly for CSS Polyfills, so i guess that's why the name is so nondescript
  • 4
    It highlights problems with FOSS very well.

    But from positive news he got at least one time usefull donation https://blockchain.com/explorer/...

    Today, after publishing it.

    So that should be enough fuel for at least time being
  • 0
    @DubbaThony wow, really?
  • 1
    @kiki You can validate Im not bullshitting -> go to his repository, copy btc address, plug into blockchain explorer of your choice, see today BTC history.

    E1

    1 BTC is big dono in my book

    E2

    Still, IMHO that's temporary, people got the memo for 5 minutes, after few months it will likely cool off, there are many unfunded critical FOSS contributors, his personal situation is just drop in the sea.
  • 1
    @DubbaThony I'm not doubting you. I'm not that familiar with crypto, and when I opened your link, I saw a whopping $500,000 transaction

    I figured it out in the end that this transaction was some kind of a multipart one, and zloirock got 1 BTC

    thank you
  • 1
    @kiki whoa whoa whoa that's not that... In bitcoin when you spend you often spent to many outputs, and usually one of outputs is all of your money - transaction. Someone had 20-something btc and spent one of them. The dev got +- $20 000. Think of me taking all of my money from my wallet, paying from it, and putting rest of my money to second wallet - totally i transfered all of my money, but spent not all of it.

    Edit: sorry, I've read first sentence and was like "opsie Ive made someone mistaken let me fix it" than read that you figured it out.
  • 8
    I've seen the messages whenever installing with npm that he was looking for a job, also that A LOT of downstream libraries use an outdated version of core-js which he also explicitely issues a WARN message that the newer one is 10x faster

    People who insult maintainers, and fill github issues threads with stupid things like "doesnt work" and "pls fix" and "pls help" are idiotic clowns who don't even deserve to be called programmers. at best, they're copy pasters, and a worst clueless npcs who don't even understand the tech that their jobs are based off of
  • 1
    @MeowHeart did you read the court documents? because I did
  • 4
    @fullstackclown While core-js primary goal has always been to encourage adaptation of modern browser features and APIs, it's primary use has been to maintain support for obsolete browsers and APIs instead of dropping them for good. That gap between the real goal and users' expectations is the reason for most of the hate, and also why I think core-js development should simply stop and force users to finally do something about their legacy software that relies on it.
  • 2
    Lesson don't do shit for free.

    People have this face when they want free shit: 😊😊😊

    When you asked to be paid its: 😡😡😡
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