Standard, a Javascript Style Guide Library With 3M Downloads Per Month, Now Showing Ads When Installed Via NPM

Standard, a popular Javascript style guide library that is downloaded about three million times each month, is beginning to show ads when installed through npm, a developer announced this week. The move, which has been pegged as an experiment, comes as the developer looks to find sustainable ways to support contributions to the open source development. In a post, Feross Aboukhadijeh, a developer of Standard, said whenever Standard 14 is installed, “we’ll display a message from a company that supports open source. The sponsorship pays directly for maintainer time. That is, writing new features, fixing bugs, answering user questions, and improving documentation.” The announcement has sparked a debate in the community with some suggesting that there should be a better way to support the FOSS developers without seeing ads on the terminal.