Comment by computerfriend
7 hours ago
Interesting that the author, Callum Locke, seems to be a real person with a real reputation to damage. Previously this would have been a trust signal to me, I figured real developers would be less likely to go rogue given the consequences.
Depends on the personal situation. An extension with 2 million users can generate a very meaningful revenue. My extension has only 300k users, but offers that I received over years [0] would have been significant in some lower-income country.
[0] https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670
Extracts from two different offers:
Surely it's reasonable to assume that a company doing some dubious 'marketing intelligence' scraping of people's data from a Chrome plugin is going to both inflate the numbers they put in offers and try to scam their way out of paying if you actually accept. I wouldn't consider them real offers. They're marketing. The real world payments, if you get them, would be lower.
The tempation is quite strong, especially for popular extensions
Here's what it can look like to an author of a popular extension:
https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670
Browser extension maintainers routinely get contacted by more or less shady directions. This is likely a case of maintainer selling out after getting a good offer.
Well, Callum Locke has certainly torched his reputation. Not “spreading Santorum” level… yet.