Datastar Response to Misunderstandings
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Datastar, a developer tool, faced backlash after introducing a paid 'Pro' version, sparking debate about open source, monetization, and community expectations.
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The original one was submitted by me. And I have no relation to them, I saw it as some alternative HTMX worth announcing.
The 2nd one was submitted as original of the project, and also know as discover because of my submission article. Well known effect on HN.
This one is a reply on controversy. Not surprised it ends up on HN also.
There's nothing wrong with charging for your work, but it's common courtesy to be clear about pricing.
I think it would be more misleading to put pro on the front page, because that would make people think it's a subpar experience without it.
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.
"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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The site guidelines tell you not to say things like that.
Which you said earlier in this comment thread which got flagged and deleted so I don't know why you are back saying it again.
If you did read it, where did your comment come from, given that allegation was never used in it?
Perhaps the original sin is the title for this post broke the rule that says to use the original title
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.
Meanwhile, at https://data-star.dev/essays/greedy_developer
> For v1, we moved a handful of convenience plugins into Datastar Pro.
So it's yet another rugpull, and the project is now Open Core. No sympathy from me.
---
From their own essay, the plugins are simple. They even give examples. They claim maintenance, sure. But they also claim the core API is stable and shouldn’t see changes.
Which is it?
----
I talked about them getting paid above, that’s fine. The rug pull and then coming up with these arguments are the parts that don’t sit right with me.
If you're speaking of a comment towards the top of the last thread on HN about it, that comment was a sarcastic one. If not, please ignore.
Does seem that way.
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?
---
As an outsider it just looks as a way to justify Pro. But it's not a technical explanation or explains the maintenance policy.
> 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?
I assume it is because charitable organizations need accountants and other things (along with all the other stuff like web hosting and the like).
It's less than 10 fields? Things like name, ein, fiscal start, end, etc.
If they make more than $50k, they can fill the EZ form. Sure, hire an accountant if you want. Most is how they earned the money, assets, expenses, where they spent the money. They need to declare officers too.
If they earn I think it's $200k, then they need to fill the IRS 990 form. Sure, get an accountant.
There's another requirement thrown in the above if they have more than X in assets...
The datasets of IRS 990's are available online.
I don't have a big problem with the "paid bonus features" business model in general, but when you're removing features from the open-source version, at least be honest about it. And it's open source: if it breaks you get to keep both pieces, so where's the support burden supposed to come from?
I have no problem with paid features. I have no problem with them making money. I have no problem with them monetizing it this way. I have no problem with the 501c3.
I think that moving things from free to paid is them forcing the hand of users to pay, which is sweeping the rug under them. This is more on _how they did it_, more than the fact that it's paid.
I just don't like how they did it and it's not a good argument to justify it.
The article literally says that they consider core complete after numerous rewrites and optimizations. The whole point of a plugin architecture is that extensions don't have to touch core source code, so development on Datastar, open or closed source, is all about the community of plugins.
But by their own admission, plugins are not needed.
> _even if we don’t think you need them._
So, to them, which is it?
You're probably a lot more fully baked than I am, so this path may not work for you.
[0] https://github.com/longwalkwoodworking/angle-dangler#what-if...
I don't have an opinion on Datastar, as I'd never heard of it until this article, but over the past year or two there have been a _lot_ of open source projects that have been converted to proprietary licenses, very often after being invested by VCs or PEs. It's happened to me a number of times now where the license for the features we were using went from open source to proprietary with 5-6 figure cost.
Developers gotta eat, I get that. But often the reason I'm using one of these components is it's a hobby or low value project where it simply doesn't bring in the income to justify paying for a license. If I had known this would happen, I would never have used it in the first place, used an alternative, or maybe just never bothered with the project. But now you're in an awkward position where the choice is either pay-up or re-do a bunch of work.
You can keep using your current version! You can even fork at that version. Calling it a rug pull is so entitled.
Forking is often impractical in reality as a solo dev or small team rarely has the resources to keep up with security fixes.
I'm entirely happy to pay for things, do pay for many things, as well as donate to the authors of projects I use, and whatever this library is seems reasonably priced. Nevertheless, I'm pretty reluctant now to use open source libraries unless they're backed by a foundation, given how many times I've been badly burnt.
Right, then as you've stated your recourse is not to use the library! That's fine and good and means the ecosystem works as intended.
This is a dishonest perversion of the commonly accepted definition of a "rug pull".
I'll copy what I said in a previous thread:
When Redis changed licenses to SSPL/RSAL, users were also free to continue using the BSD-licensed version. Was that not a rug pull? Same with MongoDB, Elastic, HashiCorp, etc. These are quintessential examples of the "OSS rug pull".
The idea is that users were relying on a functionality to be maintained (the "rug"), and the Datastar developers decided to continue maintaining it behind a paywall (the "pull").
Nobody is claiming that developers physically took the feature away from users, as that would be ridiculous. But users of these features are now forced to either maintain it themselves, wait for someone else from the community to fork and continue maintenance (which has its own set of issues), or pay up.
You can argue how it's "only" a few hundred lines of code; criticize "incapable" developers who can't check out a Git commit or do maintenance work they previously didn't have to; that the features don't require maintenance at all; and come up with other defensive arguments. But none of it matters. The size of the "rug" doesn't matter. It's the principle and precedent it sets for any users who were potentially interested in the project.
To say nothing about putting essential features like a bundler and debugging tool behind a paywall. These are not "Pro" features.
Why were the users so entitled to free ongoing maintenance that its end is worth describing using a term from financial fraud?
Nope, at least following a common definition of "rug pull" outside of FOSS. A "rug pull" refers to a specific type of scam where the rug-puller absconds with funds. Wikipedia even redirects "rug pull" to "exit scam": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/rug_pull
If you're standing on a rug that you didn't pay for in any way, and you're nonetheless surprised and angry when the rug-owner eventually decides it is no longer practical for them to continue maintaining the rug for free, that's just entitlement.
Nothing in FOSS licenses says anything about future maintenance expectations, and in fact nearly all of them contain all-caps clauses shouting at you that the software is delivered as-is.
> These are not "Pro" features.
If you didn't create a piece of software, or pay for it, or directly contribute to it, then you certainly don't get to decide which features are "Pro" features. Instead, you can vote with your feet and your wallet and decide not to use it, that's fine; that's the model with all other products in life. Why should software be any different?
Simply using a piece of free software doesn't entitle to you have any control over the future activities of the software's creators!
The current context is within FOSS, however. And it has a widely known definition[1].
> If you're standing on a rug that you didn't pay for in any way, and you're nonetheless surprised and angry when the rug-owner eventually decides it is no longer practical for them to continue maintaining the rug for free, that's just entitlement.
So, let me get this straight. You're saying that because users didn't pay for the software, they're not allowed to be surprised and angry when they're forced to either continue using unmaintained versions, take over maintenance themselves or wait until someone from the community does, or pay up? And you're saying that paying for the software buys you these privileges?
So, essentially, if the author of cURL decided tomorrow that it's no longer "practical" for him to support ancient and obscure protocols like Gopher and Telnet for free, and he decided to put them up behind a paywall, that the people depending on these features don't have any right to be upset about it? And if they are, they're being entitled?
Or, from a social perspective, if the people making meals at a community kitchen decide that it's no longer "practical" for them to supply eating utensils for free, and start selling them at $10 a pop, that the people relying on those meals are being entitled if they're upset about this change, because they're not paying customers?
Don't you realize how hostile this is?
Forget about open source. This has nothing to do with licensing. The libre software philosophy is orthogonal to monetization practices, and every author can choose how they wish to make development sustainable, if at all. As I've said before[2], I'm in favor of F/LOSS projects having commercial tiers or subscriptions, as long as it's done fairly.
What I am arguing for is having basic decency to treat all users of your software with respect. The moment you decide that users not paying for your work are not worth listening to, that they're entitled, etc., and that your attention and respect can only be bought, you've corrupted the entire ideal of why we build freedom-respecting software in the first place.
The sad irony is that I'm 100% sure that most people arguing against this, including Datastar authors, rely on tools like `curl`, `grep`, and other libre software whose authors never have and never will pull these shenanigans. So they're quite happy to "leech off" other people's work, but not happy to let others do the same off theirs. This double standard is what's ruining open source, not entitled users.
I won't bother responding to the other comments, as they boil down to this same point. And I'm really repeating myself here, so feel free to talk amongst yourselves.
[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45536000#45540307
Surprised maybe depending on how long the software has existed, but angry? 100% they are not allowed to be angry.
Anyone who thinks that a maintainer of open source software is required to maintain that software for free forever is an entitled brat.
Yes, and my argument is that definition is wildly inappropriate. It takes the perfectly-legal actions of software authors and equates them with an illegal financial scam.
> You're saying that because users didn't pay for the software, they're not allowed to be surprised and angry when they're forced to either continue using unmaintained versions
Correct, except no one is "forced" to do anything. That includes the software authors, who are not forced to continue maintaining their software, for free or at all, if they so choose.
> And you're saying that paying for the software buys you these privileges?
Potentially, yes. But that depends entirely on the terms of the license, product offering, payment method, etc. Just like anything else you buy, if the product is deficient (potentially within a set timeframe), you may have some recourse available but it varies.
> if the author of cURL decided tomorrow that it's no longer "practical" for him to support ancient and obscure protocols like Gopher and Telnet for free, and he decided to put them up behind a paywall, that the people depending on these features don't have any right to be upset about it?
Correct. If you are not the employer of the author of cURL, and you are not a customer of the author of cURL, why do you think you have any right to tell him what he can or cannot do with his software or his free time?
> And if they are, they're being entitled?
Absolutely, 100% this is unquestionably extreme entitlement.
> if the people making meals at a community kitchen decide that it's no longer "practical" for them to supply [...]
Open source developers are not even remotely similar to soup kitchens, and open source software users are not impoverished starving people.
> Don't you realize how hostile this is?
After the previous analogy, perhaps you should ask yourself that.
> I'm in favor of F/LOSS projects having commercial tiers or subscriptions, as long as it's done fairly.
The issue here is that your definition of "fairly" is completely subjective, and seems to involve you having a say in what other people do with their time and intellectual property.
> The moment you decide that users not paying for your work are not worth listening to
That simply isn't what I said, nor what any of the sibling comments said.
> So they're quite happy to "leech off" other people's work, but not happy to let others do the same off theirs.
I believe this is a complete logical fallacy, as I don't see the Datastar authors (or anyone else in this thread) complaining about leeching anywhere. But please link me to this if I'm mistaken.
Your attitude ignores the real financial and time constraints that OSS has been facing forever and people are rightly starting to get tired of this shit.
We're well past the stage where its little well meaning communities trading cool bits of code with one another OSS is a completely economy defining thing now and people shouldn't settle for being worked to the bone, they should be setting proper safeguards, like Datastar has done here, to ensure their project does not burn them out and they can continue to grow and direct it in a way that accords with their own interests and desires.
There is literally no obligation to support you at all. Sucks if it puts you in a bad position that's not on the maintainer, there's no legal or social contract they broke in fact that's entirely in the spirit of what OSS is supposed to be. It's not so a bunch of mediocre free loaders can demand continued access to a library they never contribute to and only consume.
The correct way to look at this is you have the privilege of consuming the hard work of another person for free and you should be greatful they put in work to make your life easier in an open way when they did not have to ever and at all and understand when the burden on a small team makes it hard for them to continue to support a feature set. There isn't a sacred duty to people who consume something another group opened because they wanted it to exist.
That's what the licenses and all the legal bits say. They do it because they want to and if they stop wanting to you can all get bent. Instead they looked for a sustainable middle ground.
At least the controversy is making them even more popular.
I'm sure open source purists do not like this, but the world is the 1980 anymore. It's been 45 years. Things need to adapt. Open source needs to adapt.
Why shouldn't this to apply to every company - including the one ostensibly shepherding the open source project? I would argue that employing a bunch of core developers doing 10% of the work doesn't entitle you to be the sole entity to monetize the work of the other 90% of the community, but I don't think anyone has come up with a proper license to defend against that yet.
Open source indeed needs to adapt, but I don't think the source-available or open-core models we are seeing these days is the right solution. If you really want to prevent third-party entities to profit off your work you'd need to go for something like the AGPL, but that is for obvious reasons not exactly a popular choice.
Because that's simply not how copyrights and trademarks work. The licensor doesn't need to abide by the terms of the license, by definition. The purpose of a license is to grant rights from the licensor to the licensee.
> employing a bunch of core developers doing 10% of the work doesn't entitle you to be the sole entity to monetize the work of the other 90% of the community
Very few of these cases are 10% company / 90% community. If anything, it's usually the other way around. Not to mention the huge amount of time spent on code review and ongoing maintenance of third-party contributions.
> I don't think anyone has come up with a proper license to defend against that yet.
That wouldn't really make sense; a software license isn't going to remove rights from the licensor. More realistic solutions are things like intentionally not having a CLA (effectively preventing the project creator from relicensing) and/or reassigning copyright and trademarks to a foundation.
But “open source” was in control of big business from the start. The open source consortium was a late 90s attempt to co-opt the free software movement and turn it into something business friendly.
Tim O’Reilly funded it to start and now it’s funded by big tech companies.
All free licenses make each commit free - forever. If a library does what you need today, use it! If the terms become unacceptable in future, fork it and maintain it yourself, or hope someone else will. Note this can even happen with free software (GPL2 to 3, for example).
No one is entitled to the future work of someone else without paying though. You very definitely are the entitled one here.
In those cases, prior to the project going commercial, did you contribute nontrivial code to the project and/or financially sponsor the project?
I could see being upset in those situations, but in most cases I find the answer is no.
> If I had known this would happen, I would never have used it in the first place, used an alternative, or maybe just never bothered with the project.
If you had used an alternative, the same scenario could have played out with the alternative.
Realistically, what are the "never have used it" / "never bothered" scenarios? Presumably you chose the project because you needed it for something; that implies the never-bothered alternative is essentially just writing something from scratch instead. Which you can still do now. And you can use the last FOSS version of the project as a starting point, which saves a tremendous amount of time. So how exactly were you burnt by a supposed "rug pull"?
Proprietary tool vendors are just trying to create shareholder value. If that means firing the entire dev team and never doing another release, they will do that. If it means switching from "pay once, use forever" to "pay $20 / month", they will do that. If it means going from $20 / month to $2000 / month, they will do that. If it means putting ads inside my IDE, they will do that. Just look at what Broadcom is doing to VMware to see what this can look like in practice.
OSS developer tooling is usually made by and for the community. The interests of the dev tool makers align with the interests of the developers using it, because they are the same people. There are no incentives to enshittify my developer experience, so I can safely rely on the tooling without worrying about whether it'll still be usable next year. And even if the core team decides they want to make some wildly unpopular changes, the rest of the community can still fork it and continue on their own direction!
I really wish it wasn't the case, but there are very few proprietary tool vendors I'd be willing to believe if they promised they wouldn't ruin my day a few years from now by doing a rug pull. Some small just-started firm I've never heard of? Probably not in that list. I would love to cut them a break, but trust has to be earned.
That’s the case for the vast majority of projects. Most of them are made and controlled by 1 person. And many that are controlled by more than one person are de facto or even de jure controlled by a single large company.
99.99% of the “community” will never contribute meaningfully to a project.
Sure you can fork OSS projects, but for anything remotely complicated doing so will turn into a full time job.
There is a mainstream generation divide in open source ideology over the past 15-20 years.
The modern one is what lots of younger generation agree upon. It should always be open source and continue to be supported by the community. For the interest of Public Good. Some of these project where basics living cost are met money mostly driven by VC, or zero interest rate phenomenon. Preferably GPL or APGL, no body owns the code or even rights, the project belongs to the community. Everything is or should be OSS. When money is involved, donation is the preferred method. At one point Open Core were fine, I believe Sidekicq works on that model for at least 10 years. But I guess now even Pro version of anything is borderline unacceptable as it is "bait and switch".
The old folks are basically and mostly take it or leave it. Fork it into my own while taking the maintenance burden too. Sometimes they charge for it, sometimes they dont. They are just sharing something they did to the rest of the world in the hope some may enjoy it. Mostly started out as just a hobby, not something big or professional.
I honestly feel so burned by it that I will think strongly about ever joining another company that isn't using more open source tech.
I have no opinion on datastar, and I support things like tailwind selling pre built tailwind components to make money (not that I use either, but idea wise I'm happy for them). But sometimes working with closed source is a real pain.
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.
That's not my understanding. From what I read, the open source "features" were incomplete, the Pro versions are polished products.
I don't understand the rest of your post, don't use a bundler if you don't see the point. Datastar is tiny and modular, any proprietary features could be replaced by open source version, you don't need to depend on anything proprietary. What's the risk you're worried about here?
Finally, selling support for a tiny library that's well tested, robust and fast is not viable. What do you see as the business case here?
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.
Hey, OSS dev, would you mind putting only features no one would ever want behind a paywall? No no, I know you could put convenience ones that could be replaced with a one-liner behind a paywall and no one would be hurt but that would be hostile to the community.
Ideally, exactly zero people should want the thing you make a pro feature.
Edit: Just some examples to not make empty statements.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540077
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540140
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45542425
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45538639
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540093
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540824
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45539376
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45539942
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45539821
I thought that @photomatt taught everyone that drama-as-PR doesn't ever, ever work. Guess some people missed the message...
I choose in my own fork of my own framework to license new scratch code different from old that was deprecated. I choose to have the new code fund things like a conference is even tuition for one of our dev for college that are antipatterns. I haven't made a dime. Please show me what anyone has taken from anyone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45536000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45536618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45537372
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#:~:text=Oth...
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.
The problem with that is you go down to their level. There's no winning against a team of professional mud slingers in the mud. Even if you would win, that'd just make you one of them.
I'll push back a bit in that I'm still out here helping other devs and making cool stuff so not exactly like them. Happy to have head to head with actual code and some modicum of stakes on the line.
You seem to be a smart enough guy that can make sense of what I’m trying to say better than I can express it.
These days the worst thing to do in the face of absurdity is to draw attention to it. There’s just too many people living right now whose entire sense of self and security comes from subscribing to some absurd ideal that’s only tangentially—or at best orthogonally—rooted in a common interpretation of a the past (i.e., a tradition.)
My approach when dealing with these kinds of people used to be “When they go low, step on their backs!” but I’m beginning to realize that doesn’t leave a good impression for my opponents who are arguing in good faith nor does it set a fine example for my colleagues, particularly the more naive ones.
My favorite counter of late is something more like a barrel roll where afterwards I can either disengage or attack from a more sophisticated vantage point. Then I can only hope that a conscious observer can pick up on my attempt at being tactful, adopt it for their own use and spare themselves the troubles of the deeply troubled.
Although I’m not opposed to becoming more familiar with the tech and potentially translating some of the more memetic aspects of the Datastar community’s ideals into the robust kind of propaganda model that all open source projects thrive under and deserve in the year 2025.
As for the developer’s tone - I don’t know if there is a right way here. It’s an asymmetrical situation where making an unfounded allegation is effortless and does real harm, but responding to it in a measured way is ineffective and legitimizes the allegation.
https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...
- https://github.com/zangster300/northstar
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