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I think it’s not fair that we expect every developer tool to be OSS. Most things that are fully OSS like react, typescript, etc. and even Linux to a large degree are supported by humongous amounts of cash from large tech companies. When a smaller firm devoted to developer tools like datastar decides to monetize, moreover, they are doing so without leaning on ad monetization, which many big firms rely upon, or other means that are not particularly nice. I think it’s really important we cut folks working on paid dev tools a break. The alternative is that we end up in a world that is largely merely defined by huge tech companies.

Reminds me of the Rich Hickey post Open Source is Not About You.

https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...

All this fuss because there was no pricing link on the front DS page. There still isn't.

There's nothing wrong with charging for your work, but it's common courtesy to be clear about pricing.

From what I can tell this seems like a classic example of devs just not communicating. On mobile I don't see any mention of a "Pro" option on the front page, and I don't see any "essays" about it either. Perhaps its buried in one of the essays, or maybe it's been communicated elsewhere, but if you're planning to launch a paid service around an open source app it's really a good idea to communicate the intent clearly BEFORE it's launched. If it just comes out of no where it feels to the community like they're getting rug pulled. On top of that terms like "Pro" and "Premium" and "Plus" have been ruined by predatory subscription models. Similar thing happened to Hyperland a while back and I think a lot has to do with the language used.

That said, the terms seem perfectly reasonable, and a life long license is great. Though 300 dollars is going to cause sticker shock to a solo dev I think.

Edit:

To the devs I would recommended adding something like "All features of Datastar are free and open source. If you would like to support us consider donating or purchasing a lifetime license for access to <insert stuff here>", to the home page, maybe under the intro to the project" And drop the "Pro" branding.

Internet drama aside, if you develop applications for the web, know Go, and are at all curious about what you can do with Datastar I have a boilerplate / template project that I've had much success with called northstar. In it you'll find a TODO app, and some smaller examples that show off some patterns of success when using Datastar. It's intended to be hacked on / apart, so bring your own patterns of success and put on your hacker hat.

- https://github.com/zangster300/northstar

The amount of front page space they’ve taken over the past few days is impressive.

"Allegations" implies criminal wrongdoing.

"Response to entitled grumpy people" is probably more the mark.

I would not tar my own project with the word "allegation" cause now you sound like a crim.

Whatever slight they received has been more than recompensed with exposure. We've had three HN stories in two days on this.

As a Datastar user who uses the free version I don't want the Pro features to be made free as they would just add bloat to the bundle. It's already borderline massive at 10-11kb. Like preact is 3kb.

Lifetime licenses are great for quality software! I have one for each Beyond compare and Emedit.

Please change the title to: Datastar response to misunderstandings

I hadn’t heard about Datastar until this brouhaha started, but having read everything, I’ve come to the conclusion that many people are entitled primadonnas.

I really do not understand the outrage. Nothing has been taken away, it hasn’t been relicensed, etc. I saw someone complaining that extracting the commit prior to the change was “an arcane git command.” Are you serious? If you can’t figure out how to get the parent of a given commit, I have no idea how you stay employed in tech.

I applaud the library author for making some money while also not rug-pulling. I personally think the license should be more copyleft, but if anything, the fact that it isn’t should negate anyone’s complaints.

It’s almost as if there is a disturbingly large percentage of the community that has no idea how to code, doesn’t have the drive to learn - much less produce something original and market it - and just fakes it by vibe-coding on top of libraries and frameworks.

At some point, computation use main interface will move away from screens. We expect it to go invisible, hopefully. Then I wonder the fate of all UI solutions.

Get ready for hard forks

I just don’t understand how (presumably) adult men with bank accounts and families and medicine cabinets have the energy to have such strong opinions about this kind of stuff. Or even people who don’t have any of those things...

Some credit is due to the lead Datastar developer though, who like the guy behind HTMX has a particular way of confronting obtuse criticism that I find amusing to some degree and in a way appropriate if only I didn’t find the tenor of some of his responses to be playing down to the level of his detractors and obscuring the greater theme that I think is software discourse being a proxy for political ones.

Hoping that the personalities behind Datastar and HTMX are a few good notches to the left of DHH.

I am getting really mixed signals here. First the Pro features used to be free (libre), but now they no longer are. The features are supposedly not really needed, but then they being sold. What's with the Pro bundler? Why do we need a bundler in the first place, what is it supposed to do that a regular bundler like Vite cannot? And now there are two more frameworks (Rocket and Stellar) that won't be Free and Open Source at all?

If this is just about providing monetary support for the project then just do what everyone else is doing: sell support or pre-built copy&past examples. If the plugins are nothing special and can be replaced by a one-liner I would be even more pissed after paying 300$ for them.

Either these guys are really, really bad at communication, or this smells really fishy. If anything, this blog post makes me trust them even less that they won't enshittify Datastart by moving more stuff to Pro and having the FLOSS version be the ghetto version.

Pretty typical for people to start campaigns for "open source developers must be compensated" while simultaneously losing their shit about this. Hahaha.

Oh yeah, please make it donorware so that I can then give you $5 every ten years and say "I donate to open source projects I like". Haha.

I don't really have an opinion on DHH either, but that speech nails it. Open Source Devs need to eat - stop flooding them with unrealistic demands and whinging when they ask to get paid.

> For v1, we moved a handful of convenience plugins into Datastar Pro.

and

> Nothing you can build was taken from you; we set a support boundary

If it was available on core, it was supported by them. If they moved it to Pro, isn't still supported by them?

Not sure what the 'support boundary' is. If they didn't want to provide official support for it, wasn't 'core' the better solution for them anyway? Wouldn't pay require them to officially support it?

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The ability to build is separate from the convenience of prebuilt. It is paywalling things. This is like saying, 'you can send electrical pulses to your computer, no need for an OS or tooling'.

If everything is achievable through the same api, then the plugins wouldn't do anything. If they simplify things, then do they do add something, convenience. This is what plugins do, which they say aren't needed? But if they're not needed, what's Pro for?

Yes, it's a 501c3... it's still commercial since they're selling...

If it's stable, no v2, plugins aren't needed, it's a 501c3, there's no shares, equity... what's the point of Pro? "The goal is to fund the work and draw a clear support boundary," What are they funding?

By adding a Pro subscription, what's the incentive to work on core?

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As an outsider it just looks as a way to justify Pro. But it's not a technical explanation or explains the maintenance policy.