alt Hacker News“How dare a guy work on technology for 1.248 million minutes, take VC funding gambling that he can improve the ecosystem for everyone using it, and then have the audacity, the unmitigated gall, to ask me to consider his products with it only taking one minute for me to opt out!”
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It's the way he's doing it. The entire ecosystem is just one giant ad for various paid projects. It's one thing to offer paid services, there are users out there that want to use them or need to use them, that's not the issue. From my perspective Laravel became a huge ad with purposely bad documentation that ends up directing unknowing users into using features, libraries and products that will lead them into paying for things that they might not need. Everything in Laravel recently is set up so that users folow documentation and best practices to end up using whatever subscriptions and paid products they offer (and then in some case pull the plug on them and come up with something new, abandoning whatever UI library they made people buy 1 year ago).
> that he can improve the ecosystem for everyone using it [...] to ask me to consider his products with it only taking one minute for me to opt out
Seems you misunderstand the issue. Anyone not deploying to Laravel Cloud but using that project seems to be impacted by this, even going so far that agents are confused about it and keeps insisting users should deploy to Laravel Cloud instead.
Maybe I'm a grumpy old developer, but that does not sound like "improve the ecosystem for everyone using it", sounds like good old spam taken to the next level.
Free and libre and open source are all different things, and the confusion thereof can lead to mismatched expectations.
It's not wrong to beg for money, but I'm also not going to joyfully tolerate a hassle because of gratitude or appreciation for past decisions the beggar made without my input.
Tip: Nobody can meaningfully conceptualize or care about the number of minutes. "Ten years" would've been fine, and more convincing.
"How dare people want to spend a portion of their lives not being advertised to."
There are plenty of ways to promote your product. Injecting ads into agents and PR's is not the way to do it.
He didn't have to give it away for free and turn to adware.
I understand that he wants to get paid for his work, but he can charge for it like everybody else. No need to be a asshole by building the product for "free" and then bundling ad-ware.
https://x.com/taylorotwell/status/1534178479201259520
I really don't think he's hurting for funds.