Maker of Chrome extension with 300,000+ users tells of constant pressure to sell out In the past nine years, Oleg Anashkin, a software developer based in San Jose, California, has received more than 130 solicitations to monetize his Chrome browser extension, Hover Zoom+. The latest of these proposals, which generally involve adding code from a third-party partner that gathers data or places ads, arrived by …
Bash.org seems down at the moment. But you can use the wayback machine to view one of the all-time beauties how you are sure to become an internet gazillionaire: https://web.archive.org/web/20230709031914/http://bash.org/?4281.
The fact a whitelist was even added was enough for me, whether on or off by default. As you say it shows the author has decided to sell out. You can't be "only a little bit" of a sell out. It is like being pregnant, either you are or you aren't. The fact he wasn't "showing" his sellout status too much at first doesn't mean that won't change in another metaphorical eight months.
Once you give in the greed and want to monetize something you had originally created as a public good you are likely to become more greedy in the future.
I used to use a ruler for web dev.
It got sold and malware was hot dropped.
So it was forked into ruler redux.
It was sold.. and again, malware.
This would be solved if we knew who is signing the software. As we could just put them behind bars.
Also, hot download of features? Nope.
I seem to recall that this has been an ongoing problem from the earliest days of the web.
What I don't quite get is how all this is supposed to generate a viable business. You make web pages unusable by filling them with meaningless tracking code and pointless advertising but it only holds together by a sort of Emperor's New Clothes phenomenon -- the entire ecosystem is held together by the belief of its participants because ceasing to believe would destroy a huge part of the Internet economy. So we as users are forced to endure this, being constantly exhorted to upgrade our hardware and software to support this festering mess.
I don't see how it all works. The ads served up are meaningless. Like junk phone calls they only catch the unwary or the distracted. They don't sell anything useful. Maybe Elon Musk was onto something when Twitter's headcount was slashed -- all those technology workers were doing what, exactly?
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