Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

BabelJS's idea is so simple, yet huge. BabelJS, or, as I like to call them in my talks, is the "Age of transpilers".

The idea of having some sort of meta layer that you compile from to another source is old, but totally underrated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler

With my team we optimized render processes using transpilers/meta language and this totally rocks.

I hope that BabelJS will continue to follow their vision and gets more sponsorship from company-side. For me, they popularized the idea of Compilers in unexpected areas.

Because it is too easily replaced with something else [1].

I'd say it's the exact same reason why almost nobody can make a living wage off self-publishing app store apps. There's always an endless stream of volunteers who will clone your idea for next to nothing.

Plus the homepage doesn't explain at all WHY one would want to use this. So from a marketing point of view, you need to better demonstrate your value, i.e. what makes Babel useful and unique.

[1] for example Google's Traceur: https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler

This is another case of tragedy of the commons. Individually, it doesn't make sense for a company to donate. I can't even resent them, since it puts the company at a (slight) disadvantage. Unless I was flush with cash, I probably wouldn't donate from company funds if I were an entrepreneur. But collectively, we would all benefit to fund something like this. (Edit: I like culturestate's response of budgeting a small amount for this. Wish more people would do that!)

For me, another data point why our current economic system is not optimal, and we need at least more coordination, or maybe a better system.

I was horrified and humbled to see that the people making this amazing stuff are making considerably less ($2k/month) than I do... or frankly, than most of us here on HN do.

Their impact is so much bigger and I aspire so much to have as a deep understanding of the Javascript world as they do.

They explain in the article that they get downloaded 117 millions of times per month from npm. When someone visits a website they don't download libraries from npm, those download numbers come from developers and build scripts but not from users.

So while it can be argued that a percentage of those 117M/month are on automated scripts, even with a very conservative number saying of 1% of them being genuine installs this still leaves them at millions of installs per year. So yes, it's definitely not disingenuous to say it's used by millions.