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title, description, date, tags, synopsis, imageURL, imageAlt, mastodon_id
| title | description | date | tags | synopsis | imageURL | imageAlt | mastodon_id | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eleventy Becomes, *Sigh*, Build Awesome | Sustainability? Enshittification? I have some feelings about this. | 2026-03-11 |
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Sustainability? Enshittification? I have some feelings about this. | /img/eleventy-becomes-sigh-build-awesome/eleventy-logo.png | The old Eleventy logo. |
In case you haven't heard, Eleventy, the excellent static site generator that I use for this very website has been acquired by Font Awesome. As a result, it has been renamed to, sigh, Build Awesome. After seeing what happened to Shoelace, I'm apprehensive and very much not looking forward to seeing what features get locked behind a paywall. But beside the enshittification likely to follow, I thought we'd stopped appending "awesome" to everything at roughly the same time bacon memes, curly moustaches, and stomp-clap music went out of style. It seems like I'm not the only one who feels this way either.
While disappointed with this state of affairs, I'm not terribly surprised. Beyond the matter of funding, as W. Evan Sheehan of The Darth Mall put it :
…the vibe of open source in the JavaScript community is a little bit different than what I think of as the broader open source movement. Open source JavaScript projects often feel a little more tied to corporations than Linux, or Python, or NeoVim.
I wholeheartedly agree. There's a big difference in philosophy between "free software" and "open source," and many JavaScript projects seem to be firmly in the latter camp.
The choice of the MIT license for Eleventy in the first place speaks volumes—it's antithetical to the free software movement. The MIT license allows corporations to snatch up free and open source software, insert whatever malicious functionality they please, lock down the source code, and abuse the users they extort with their rent-seeking pricing schemes. On the other hand, code licensed under a strong copyleft license such as the GPL ensures that software always remains free (as in speech). Under a strong copyleft license, anyone can use the software for any purpose. They may study, change, improve, and redistribute it. But unlike permissive licenses such as the MIT license, they may not strip these rights from users at any point.
The goal of the free software movement is to create a commons of software that anyone is free to use, study, redistribute, and improve so that abusive software ceases to be competitive. In terms of how MIT licensed software helps this cause, it's a bit like putting a soldier on the battlefield with no armor. They may do some damage, but they're a cinch to eliminate from the field. At this point, I see MIT licensing as a red flag on all but the very few projects where it makes sense (such as programming languages). When you decide to rely on MIT-licensed software for your day to day activities, you never know when it will be enshittified, put behind a paywall, or EEE'd out of existence.
I'm not saying that these things are going to happen to what we knew and loved as Eleventy. Who knows what the future may bring. But I am saying that this move is certainly not in the spirit of Free / Libre and Open Source Software. I fear that the age-old pattern that befell Standard Notes is going to happen once again here: first attractive new features appear behind a paywall, then old features you relied on get put behind a paywall, using the software without paying is slowly made increasingly difficult, and, before you know it, they pull the ol' switcheroo on the license (even if they revert from embarrassment later).
At the same time, despite my misgivings, I'm happy that Zach Leatherman is (I assume) going to be properly paid to continue his work on the project. It shouldn't be so damned hard to make a living while performing a public good. Zach seemed pretty happy about all of this during his appearance on, sigh, Podcast Awesome. He strikes me as someone who really cares about his work, and seems a lovely man, always willing to jump in help someone even when the problem is between the chair and the keyboard (ask me how I know). Zach deserves, at minimum, to be paid a decent salary for his contribution to the world, and I'm thrilled that it seems he's going to get at least that.
Now I'm tempted to turn this into a screed on funding for FLOSS projects, but better informed people than I have written plenty of those already, so I'll leave it at this—the fact that NASA, Cern, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Ubuntu, JetBrains, CloudCannon, Netlify, Cloudflare, Shopify, MIT, Stanford, the governments of France, the UK, and the USA, Orange, Red Hat, Just Eat, and others didn't manage to muster between them a piddling $6,000 per month to pay the developer of a tool they use to publish their websites is disgusting. We might have avoided this situation if they had.
I developed something like a brand loyalty to Eleventy. It's a scrappy project from a talented developer who has managed to keep it alive and well for eight years. The project has become widely used because it's excellent: flexible, powerful, fast, and easy to use for web developers who are used to working with JavaScript. I'm sad to see the name go, along with the red balloon, and that scruffy possum. The clean, middle-class replacement with its stupid clothing and fancy green balloon 1 can take a hike—I can't believe they've gentrified the damn mascot!
While I have major apprehensions about where, sigh, Font Awesome is going to take the project, I suppose we'll just have to wait and see where this goes. In the meantime, let's all be sure to donate to the FLOSS projects we use, publicly shame corporations who don't give back to the projects they profit from, and pressure our representatives to fund FLOSS software!
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And green is my favorite color, too :[ ↩︎