I truly don't understand how the same folks that champion accessibility and humane ideals while humble bragging about working for $5/hour to help get local businesses online can throw so much shade on people who are urgently trying to figure out a way to get paid, often just to keep the projects that they created alive so that these people can continue to use them for free.
I don't know if it's entitlement, projection or just wanting to have it both ways, but I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage to keep the magic coming instead of being shitty about people doing their best to find a forever home before their burnout finally kicks in.
I am hard line on not feeling sorry for projects going away, being taken over by organisations, when it mattered people should have actually sponsored them, instead of bosting how great is to get it all for free/gratis.
Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so.
On the plus side, at least there wasn't that many magpie development, and rewrites just because.
Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
If you're trying to make people cheer for the pirates, you're succeeding.
I'm not so sure. If they can't pay for a one-time purchase, they won't be able to afford a subscription. Subscriptions are always more expensive in the end, that's why they exist in the first place. I don't see how people not using the software while still not becoming customers is a fix to anything.
As for being able to afford them, yes it cuts people out, many of whom would pirated anyway.
Digital stores, API keys, and SaaS seem to be doing alright
Want people to pay for your tools? Don't offer them for free.
This is related to my usual point here, that if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it because corporations profit without paying or AI companies use it for model training, that person is an entitled liar who released proprietary software while using openness and generosity as a marketing strategy.
Proprietary software is fine. Lying about it and using good ideals as marketing strategy is not. That applies as much to "released as MIT so it be useful to many, then unreleased because author realized it might end up in training data of some LLMs (and in so doing, actually become useful to many people)" software, as it does to blogs and all the whining about AI denying them credit (and pre-AI, search engines, except then the developer community was on side of search and not free-but-with-ads/credit publishers).
> Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so.
That comes from some combination of the project looking not worth a cent, probably not working (at least not for the use case intended), payments being a big step starting a real multi-party relationship, much distinct from just looking at a webpage or playing with code locally, and the poster being a student or younger.
I too strongly favored MIT over everything when I was a kid. Didn't have money to pay for anything, and GPL was complicated and my slightly older colleagues (with probably more business sense than I) didn't like it.
Why do you think it’s the same folks? People tend to be louder when they don’t agree with something, and many topics will divide a community mostly in half. The end result is that you will more than likely hear complaints and subtle digs/insults no matter what happens.
It feels like there is entitlement on both sides. People who do OSS work feel entitled to financial benefits, despite explicitly choosing to give their work away for free. And people who consume open source software feel entitled to unpaid labor in perpetuity. It kind of sucks on both ends.
Rich Hickey wrote an essay titled "Open Source is Not About You" [0], where he states "As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation."
This is true. Unequivocally. What is also true is that OSS is also not about the contributors. They aren't owed anything by the consumers. They aren't entitled to any compensation, and they aren't entitled to others putting effort into making their contributions sustainable, helping them make a living wage, or alleviating burnout. We're all adults here, we can stop working on something if it's causing us pain or suffering. And we can freely fork a project if it's going in a direction we don't agree. That is the nature of open source. It's just a licensing model, which only exists because of certain laws. Otherwise, it's just a decision on what is public and private. Nothing more.
So if a project isn't going in the direction you want? Shut up and fork it. Not getting paid for your work? Find a way to monetise it or move on. Don't whine about either of these things on the internet.
0: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...
I know you don't want to hear the obvious, but making your passion your paycheck is a one-way ticket to burnout. Even your heroes are still human.
The passion is the magic, and keeping it going requires contrast with something else as a day job. You really don't want to know the pain of losing both because they're one and the same. Burnout is not inevitable nor inherent to age or experience. It's actually the opposite if you set proper boundaries and get a grip.
That said, what's the deal with this topic coming up over and over? Is it just coming from young people too afraid of the broader working world, or is it something more sinister? Is this opinion being propagated by bad actors trying to take advantage of young people wanting to work this way (the "rockstar" delusion)?
Eleventy might not receive new features, your website will still work.
The beauty of SSGs, in one sentence, folks.
I'm not aware of any CVEs in HTML, either.
> “We believe that open source should be sustainable and open source maintainers should get paid!”
> Maintainer: introduces commercial features “Not like that”
> Maintainer: works for a large tech co “Not like that”
> Maintainer: takes investment “Not like that”
<a href="there">description</a>
When I really needed a landing page that looked like it fell off a UFO I did it in Vite-React (such a joy to use semantic components, like write
<Event date="2026-04-18">Earth Day Parade Ithaca Commons</Event>
That is, SSG has no commercial potential because any individual or organization which is capable of maintaining and customizing an SSG can create one from scratch that does exactly what they need with less cost and effort and success is only possible through hypnotizing people into thinking otherwise -- in many fields of software this happens every day but I think not SSG, like those people are going to stay asleep and dream of Drupal and Wordpress.
[1] ... and if I want to move to some similar platform I just implement it instead of struggle with "plugins" and "modules" and other overcomplicated extension mechanisms
As a learning exercise, I wrote my own little SSG in ocaml, and man I forgot how nice a language it is. Tooling is still a bit rough but lots better than it used to be
My little blog (in my profile) is built using it: https://github.com/girvo/jgirvin_blog_ocaml
Horrible Ocaml I’m sure, but between YOCaml and Soupault, the best SSGs are all written in this language. Fascinating really
This was the beauty of 11ty. It just puts together HTML files from templates, and maybe handles sitemap and RSS if you need. That will probably change now.
[1]: Just be sure to set `htmlTemplateEngine` to false in the config, if you don’t want to use templating features in your posts: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/languages/html/ https://www.11ty.dev/docs/template-overrides/
It's somewhat counterintuitive, but the added complexity leads to simpler projects that are easier to maintain long term. I have simple markdown files, and a separate, code-based conversion process that works well for me.
Also the documentation for eleventy was always confusing to me. I almost got the impression that "it's so simple, we don't have to explain it". Whereas astro's documentation is much more accesible; there were a handful of cases where there was something I wanted to do and astro had an example of exactly that. I didn't have to do guesswork, just follow the examples in the way the creators intended. Stuff like that is important.
But 11ty really was so much simpler if all you need is to put together some templates, and don’t want to deal with component stuff. That said, the docs really are lacking in some parts.
For those who post regular updates on those sites, there are great and cheap WP plugins that export the whole site as static to something like FTP or S3, so you can just firewall the actual WP behind an IP restriction and host the actual public-facing site from S3/whatever.
- WYSIWYG editor is table stakes. The lovely folks at marketing once thought I was hacking when I `ps -eaf`-ed in an unresponsive Macbook.
- They "put" images in their post. They don't "upload the image and position it with CSS".
- It's the marketing department so they have to have all sorts of bells and whistles. At the very least tracking, at most some obscure integration plug-in that as an engineer I have no kind words for. Social integrations and "You may also like..." sections also come to mind.
> cheap WP plugins that export the whole site as static to something like FTP or S3, so you can just firewall the actual WP behind an IP restriction and host the actual public-facing site from S3/whatever.
Not that I have extensive WP experience but unless you can name me an actual plugin that has good street cred for being used in the wild wild west, I'm gonna say this is not as easy as you make it sound. For one you just described a very rudimentary data pipeline which someone has to support and maintain even infrequently. Also, speaking from experience, plugins don't always play nice with other plugins. I once tried to export my very basic personal site out of WP to find the footnotes all messed up (I don't know now but back then I handled footnotes with a plugin).
Every few years I go looking for something that's not Wordpress that you could hand to a marketing department, but there is no viable alternative (that's not Drupal).
It's wild to me that this post's timeline makes no mention whatsoever of Movable Type, and at one point it links to another author's post titled "A Complete History of Static: The Beginning to WordPress Headless" which also makes no mention whatsoever of Movable Type. Now I feel old :/
So bye bye Hugo.
I could understand someone might refuse learning LaTex but markdown is so simple.
RTF editing sucks badly if you have to include it in your project. No one wants to specifically pay for implementing it but they also expect it to be there.
But each editor also has its issues with generating "backend html" doing bunch of wonky stuff so it works for this editor — using that text in various other places and when you have multiple rich text fields and not single big one to edit whole document is always a major PITA.
Then you get whatever they write to PDF report so for example you have to render HTML correctly there. Amount of ways it can break is basically infinite, getting paragraphs page breaks is non trivial amount of work, especially when customer wants their own layout for the report and not generic looking or just broken layout. So problem is mix and match display of whatever they write in different places.
Not to mention, everyone wants prefilled templates, so they don't start from scratch, oh and your templates need to have dynamically filled in placeholders, now you have to put something like tags that will be updated by your back end.
Maybe you need to send it via API and all kind of companies have WAF on incoming/outgoing data then you have to strip tags.
Yes you can encode/decode, limit options, white list allowed tags, and I was doing that for years now, but amount of things that break is still big and another customer wants you to enable lists when you wanted to support just italic, bold, then you have whole blast radius and feature creep is real.
ROI is just not there, as I mentioned no one wants to specifically pay for all that, we have a really good run telling customers to just use plain text, amount of regressions to be tested, amount of expectations of things to work out of the box once you go with rich text is really high.
Bar to jump to is basically re-implement MS Word — oh did I mention everyone will expect copy pasting from Word to work perfectly - just imagine how much time your customer support has to spend explaining you limited options in that field to be just bold and italic.
Is that what they call WYSIWYG? :eyes:
I crawled own website and downloaded each, and converted to markdown then used static site generator (custom in javascript)
runs on cloudflare pages for free with no downtimes or "fee".
if you want to see result: https://aretecodex.pages.dev/guides/recomposition
Couple of problems:
To edit content i've to use "image paste" plugin and configure its base directory, image path in project setting in .vscode
I lost the comment/upvote feature.
I lost "search"
I haven't found a static generator which has as nice a WYSIWYG interface as wordpress.
* the ability to schedule posts
* a ton of plugins
* a lot of people who know how to use it
* a reasonable WYSIWYG interface
As far as I know, most SSGs fall down on one or more of those dimensions.
jekyll serve --watch --incrementalIts project page doesn't seem to have a screenshot of the post/page editor, but its editor is simplemde so one can just look at it directly: https://simplemde.com/
Unfortunately I don't think anyone feels strongly enough about 11ty to fight for it when the next SSG is a few Claude Code prompts away.
I wish them the best.
Like, you can't afford to build your own Unreal Engine from scratch, but most can't afford to build their own game engine from scratch either.
But site builders are just string concatenation, and CMSs are just CRUD. We overcomplicate it to the moon and back.
And I can choose whether or not to use NPM. I've thought of moving from it a few times. But it's just better and solid.
But the other side to this coin is us having problem making money. It's muddy waters for sure. For example, Manjaro Linux was dragged through the mud after they started their company. Not to mention, On the other hand, just like SSG's like Hugo and 11ty, Netlify and Vercel and others are responsible for a ton of free sites (like mine). They need to not just eat, they should be able make a luxurious life if that's what they want.
I am not against anyone trying to make money off of their OSS projects. We need good companies to make money. I just hope it doesn't become anti-consumers. Which is what the OP's concern is. Can't blame him for thinking this as well.
Follow up (by OP) Cancelled (5 points, 1 month ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282675
Related Introducing: Build Awesome (3 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47245750
I came to the Hacker News comments thinking someone might have more information but I still don’t understand.
And if '11ty devs' aren't big fans of the change etc, then who was rushing to support the Kickstarter? Who's funding this (and why?)
And about pausing the kickstarter: only makes sense if the initial goal wasnt the real goal. A successful kickstarter raises more overall money when users jump onboard the successful campaign, so you ask for less than you need to get more than if you asked for how much you really need. Pretty common.
I left it for elixir and Phoenix and never looked back. There’s just no true ownership and direction that can come close to that of Jose Valim and Chris McCord in the JS ecosystem. It’s so fragmented that it takes the fun out of maintaining a JS codebase.
The most annoying thing I've seen in the JS ecosystem is the in-between, libraries that act more like pieces of a framework. Like you have React and foo which you'd expect to be separate libs, but everyone handles that with a react-foo package. Version compatibility becomes a puzzle once you have 2+ of those.
I don't think that claim's anywhere in the article.
Some people do take pride in how JavaScript has come a long way from the jQuery days.
I’ll probably replace it with pure HTML soon - I found that I don’t need a SSG anymore, I can just use a local LLM to generate HTML out of markdown files and I never use any fancy features anyway.
> ChatGPT responds with a fully-populated HTML template. All I have to do is copy and paste it into a new file in my project, run my custom script, and then push the changes.
This actually sounds more troublesome to me than adding a markdown file into a Git repo somewhere, and having Hugo/Astro/whatever automagically regenerate all the HTML files from markdown.
But that's probably because static site hosting services have come very far from the S3 bucket days.
Pure HTML generated from a text file just works and probably will forever.
I mean it’s just my personal website which is mostly just for me to look up things quickly / personal wiki
I'm considering letting an LLM generate a flat python script to replace what 11ty does for me. Once removed from the fracas, it should be stable for decades.
Just a static sites without JavaScript but you still get some nice things like scoped CSS, components and being able to use markdown for blog posts.
Pure HTML will work probably forever. Previously it was too much manual work for me to write it but now the LLM just spits it out, easy as
It’s basically a reimplementation of Viaweb, pg’s first startup.
I did it for fun, but I’ll probably use it for my own site. I’m not sure how fast other SSGs run, but this one only takes 15 seconds to build all ~260 essays and such.
Thinking of doing a Show HN. Not sure if it’s interesting enough. No AI except for the finishing touches (importing hundreds of essays and finding a few bugs).
> Imagine if Build Awesome actually reached out to people who regularly make static sites. You know, the userbases on NeoCities or MelonLand or 32-bit Cafe?
One minute you are saying large companies use the product, the next that it was always for hobbyists and shouldn't target corporate features?
> In truth, I myself have started a business that has a near identical concept to Build Awesome. Berry House is my independent web studio
> The difference is though that my model is pay-what-you-can, or pro bono. I developed Calgary Groups for a client and charged $5/hour for my dev work.
That is not a business -- no profit motive. (Working less than minimum wage, even.) Not a good benchmark for comparing what an actual business like Font Awesome should do.
You are conflating 11ty with Build Awesome (pro)
> That is not a business -- no profit motive. It is most definitely a business, even if you don't think it will make a lot of money. Also the whole point of comparison is claiming that people will not pay that much money for Build Awesome.
Don't want to expend the effort to do so? Interesting.
Perhaps people need to be more realistic about the code they consume. Treat it as a finished product, take on dependencies you can either afford to maintain or don't need to be maintained at all. Have an exit plan. Relying on someone's unpaid labor to keep your own projects afloat is your problem.
I think a lot of less technical users would love a desktop app (or a web app integrated with their hosting provider) that lets them manage their website via a GUI, preview their changes with a split-screen view, and upload to a web host. Something similar to Microsoft Frontpage or the like.
I suspect the reason that Neocities got so popular was in part because of its web editor, and having a more powerful version of that would be fantastic. If this integrated with Git to allow version tracking and multiple authors to collaborate, even better.
I'm sad to hear that the "OG 11ty era" has ended. But, as others have noted, fortunately 11ty will live on, so long as folks keep using it and hacking away at it.
https://www.11ty.dev/blog/build-awesome/
Safe to say there's a number around HN who have used/are using 11ty and might have some interest.
Am grateful for Zach's dedication over the years and believer in what 11ty stands for (and more recently what webc brings to the table/ecosystem)
But my only thought on this is: Eleventy is an awesome name.
Way back in 2015 I was building a large static site using Jekyll and Wordpress CMS as a backend. We had 30+ content editors using it, writing Markdown and I had Jekyll Generator that would execute a SQL query against the Wordpress database to build static content. Every new post would build and deploy the whole site in 2-3 minutes. Over 50k pages of content. This powered a very large marketing website straddling multiple top 10 Google Ad keywords. Business was bringing in several hundred million in ARR.
I knew of at least 3 other similarly large businesses doing this. All the way back in 2015. My current company today builds a static site from a Wordpress backend and I was totally uninvolved in this work (or even suggesting it). The user that this author thinks is a fable is very very real. There is absolutely a market for a CMS backend for an SSG.
Not that I as a developer would have used it, but if my employers could have paid a company for what I built in a nice box instead of paying my salary, they would have.
Though I also have no idea how a static website generator can raise tens of millions of dollars.
> The truth is, there has been no successful CMS for static-site generators because the only people that give a fuck about creating static sites would much prefer to use a (free and local) IDE and a terminal.
I completely disagree with this. The main problem is that these people don't want to pay for such a solution.
There's a thriving ecosystem of headless CMS for commercial websites: multi-user, support editing landing pages, etc.
Things like Decap were too basic (running it for any complex blog is a pain) and didn't solve much for developers building a Github Pages blog (while also being useless to startups).
I run three static blog websites, two personal and one for our agency. I want a CMS on all of them. I want to be able to edit from the iPad, easily upload images, etc. But my hosting itself is basically free, so hard to justify paying for a CMS.
I'm using Sveltia for all three now, it's still in early access but in my experience is much better than NetlifyCMS/Decap or PagesCMS.
I don't want to learn your project, thank you very much. If anything, I'll create my own. Nowadays, it's super easy to do it with AI, but even before AI, I would have still prefered creating my own stuff instead od using yours. I don't want you as a dependency, I don't want you to become the master of my work, I don't want to try to understand how your pitiful "project" works since it would be 10 times easier for me to write the functionality I need from scratch myself. I don't want to do a security audit for your stuff and try to understand how it works while creating my own will always negate this problem entirely. I don't want to work for your "resume" so you could proudly put your turd "project" there seeking better employment. Not at my expense, not at the expense of my time and nerves.
I don't understand though why reader mode is not always available. The text is there.
Mostly because we don't have any standard markup to say "this is the content". Which means reader mode has to guess which tags contain the content, and this whole thing boils down to a pair of regexps[1]
[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/readability/blob/08be6b4bdb204dd3...