Musings

Funding public software is complicated. Usually.

Bypassing an entire debate, it should be less complicated when a project finds usage.

Faker.js is a popular project.

Over the course of 2021, weekly downloads increased from 1.75 million downloads per week to 2.88 million downloads. The project was recently taken offline.

While the overall situation is unclear at this time, we do have some facts.

• This seems intentional by Marak, with a commit titled “endgame”
• Total funding at the time of this writing is $20,499.54
• Marak previously quit providing free labor

Given those three claims, this seems like a financial problem.

If Marak got one cent per download, the current funding would have doubled the week of February 26th to March 4th.

Something is broken in funding public software. Maybe if we could log4j all the things, we might be able to find out how much a banana costs.