The model of Spotify in particular - paid tier alongside a free tier with ads - seems like the simplest sustainable solution I see. Having paid features is the most obvious way to make money, but you want to enable adoption as much as you can. It's the same idea as companies dangling "free trial" in front of you at every turn - in a competitive environment, you want to remove barriers for users to try your product or service. This is essentially the idea of a "loss leader" for a grocery store, or any business really.

Thanks for your making your first contribution to Cucumber, and welcome to the Cucumber committers team! You can now push directly to this repo and all other repos under the cucumber organization! In return for this generous offer we hope you will: Continue to use branches and pull requests. When someone on the core team approves a pull request (yours or someone else's), you're welcome to merge it yourself. Commit to setting a good example by following and upholding our code of conduct in your interactions with other collaborators and users. Join the community Slack channel to meet the rest of the team and make yourself at home. Don't feel obliged to help, just do what you can if you have the time and the energy. Ask if you need anything. We're looking for feedback about how to make the project more welcoming, so please tell us!

We are continuing an overhaul of our default startup editor in order to provide relevant extension-contributed tips and walkthroughs, intended to make both core VS Code features and extension contributions more approachable to new users.

A Low Bar to Entry, and then What?There is an interesting tension between making something accessible and making it boring. Lowering the barrier of entry is a good thing, but if all you do is low-bar stuff, you end up losing the people again that you managed to attract. There needs to be a path forward beyond the entry level.

Microlibraries are easier to understand, develop and test. They make it easier for new people to get involved and contribute. They reduce the distinction between a “core module” and a “plugin”, and increase the pace of development in D3 features.

Everything Lives in GitWith a Jamstack project, anyone should be able to do a git clone, install any needed dependencies with a standard procedure (like npm install), and be ready to run the full project locally. No databases to clone, no complex installs. This reduces contributor friction, and also simplifies staging and testing workflows.

Did you know that you can create a Svelte component and with almost no extra steps distribute- and use it like any classic old Javascript library through a global constructor (let myComponent = new MyComponent())?

This happens because npm makes it ridiculously easy for people to release their half-baked experiments into the wild. The only barrier to entry is the difficulty of finding an unused package name. I’m all in favour of enabling creators, but npm lowers the barriers right to the floor, with predictable results.

I think this goes against the Keep It Simple mentality and the Low Level Of Shame that we should have when we contribute.