> As a side note — and I write this without bitterness — I do find it a bit strange that extremely well-resourced companies like Dropbox, GitHub, CircleCI, Trello, Airbnb (and many, many more) would write so many hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lines of CoffeeScript without ever attempting to contribute changes or fix the issues that they wanted to fix. It’s open source! They probably would have been able to quickly and cheaply make most of the changes they wanted.
This is the heart of a really important issue in OSS that affects everything good and bad about the scene.
There are companies that pretty much waste millions on poorly managed projects but won't donate the few thousand needed to make a lot of OSS projects succeed while still using the software.
It doesn't help that a lot of the culture just accepts fragile dependencies (who cares if this semi-crucial dependency is managed by the equivalent of newman from jurrasic park), and that a lot of the biggest OSS projects are usually made by people working at some big company. Maybe copyleft licenses would've prevented some of these issues, but I am not sure individual users like those restrictions even if, in some ways, it would benefit the community as a whole.
Its absolutely disgraceful how little financial support some really commonly used libraries get.
This is the heart of a really important issue in OSS that affects everything good and bad about the scene.
There are companies that pretty much waste millions on poorly managed projects but won't donate the few thousand needed to make a lot of OSS projects succeed while still using the software.
It doesn't help that a lot of the culture just accepts fragile dependencies (who cares if this semi-crucial dependency is managed by the equivalent of newman from jurrasic park), and that a lot of the biggest OSS projects are usually made by people working at some big company. Maybe copyleft licenses would've prevented some of these issues, but I am not sure individual users like those restrictions even if, in some ways, it would benefit the community as a whole.
Its absolutely disgraceful how little financial support some really commonly used libraries get.