I'm curios why do you think that. If the codebase is a fruit of his efforts, why shouldn't he do as he wants with it?
I would understand that in cases where a maintainer adds malicious code - but that's not the case here. Author asks for donations, the only negative effect of it is NPM logs getting longer. I think he's well within his moral rights here.
Who decides who can, and cannot advertise? There are many ways to solicit donations - the problem here is he chose to go against convention and put those ads in a common space. Does every other contributor of JS packages not have this right to advertise?
Perhaps NPM requires specific rules against advertisement, but the moral aspect wrt is "this is why we can't have nice things", or in this case, why we need explicit rules.
Misrepresenting the argument, and name-calling, also don't help.
There is also the fact that not including ads would require less labour than including them, even if removing them requires further labour. being "entitled" to correct behaviour isn't unreasonable. IS it OK for me to spam you, because I don't owe you shit either. morality is a society/community-level contract. It doesn't matter what is owed at a labour level, quid-pro-quo is you don't put adds in npm, we all don't put ads in npm. Breaking a social convention should require community consensus.
Why should an individual contributor not be allowed to partake in that, when the people who are using his work are making money off it?
A social convention, who put you in charge of that? There are plenty of bad conventions in this world, no one should be obligated to follow them.
Despite the fact that big tech makes money selling ads - none of those companies exhibited such trashy behavior.
Asking for a piece is not the problem. If I asked you if I could marry your daughter - no problem asking that right? But if I asked you while I was banging her right in front of you that would be a bit trashy. See the difference?
Personally, I've used this piece of software - but if it didn't exist, there are many, many other options for me and I wouldn't lose one wink of sleep over it.
Not the same thing at all.
No one "put me in charge" of social convention, they are established naturally, And this one was not a bad one.