Saying you're used by millions when you're a javascript library is a bit disingenuous. It's not like whoever happens to hit a website using your scripts is a user in the common sense of the word.
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Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
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Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#12I 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.
Presumably they have jobs, that’s extra income.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#13If you want to make money and pay developers a salary, you need a product. I don’t want my js tooling to be a commercial product (hi Rome). Can we go back to the original spirit of OSS where everybody donates a little of their time instead?
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#14This makes me think about Rails, how successful it was/(is?). Basecamp or formally 37 signals showed how to not only give back to the open source community but also greatly benefit from it. They are funded by their own service and the success of Rails is complimentary. Babel feels like it could live at a big corp with deep pockets or at least a small indie corp with deep pockets. Does it need 3 full time engineers or are there enough volunteers to keep it successful?
Maybe incentivizing people to donate in order to achieve milestones that they can see making their companies more money could work too.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#15Because 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.…
If you think Babel is really easily replaced with something else, I'm fairly confident you are not in its target audience. Beyond the tool itself being far less trivial than you're making it out to be (most companies don't have Google's resources), it's an incredibly essential part of the JavaScript ecosystem, with tons of widely used extensions and plugins--including extremely central stuff for integrating projects like Typescript and Flow with basically any other form of compilation in the JS world. I chose these two because they are funded by Microsoft and Facebook, respectively; they are certainly not companies that can't afford to fund development for projects like this. Moving that ecosystem to another project would conservatively take years and that's assuming everyone actually wanted to do it.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#16If you want to make money and pay developers a salary, you need a product. I don’t want my js tooling to be a commercial product (hi Rome). Can we go back to the original spirit of OSS where everybody donates a little of their time instead?
I don't think it works in 99% of cases. There almost always seems to end up being a few people who do 90% of the work.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#1711k salary lol
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#18Saying you're used by millions when you're a javascript library is a bit disingenuous. It's not like whoever happens to hit a website using your scripts is a user in the common sense of the word.
They have more than 20 million weekly downloads on npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@babel/core , i.e., they are probably used by at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions of developers (not to speak of end-users). Of course, in the JavaScript ecosystem, the same may be true for a 20 LoC package that provides a trivial function implementation, but that's a different story.
That's not a different story, that's precisely why you can't make that assumption. Many projects would download it over and over for each commit in their CI. The package also has 14k direct dependents, making it quite likely to be downloaded more than once for each project.
With this, it's not that unlikely that one company (one customers) downloads the package thousands of times a week.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#19Saying you're used by millions when you're a javascript library is a bit disingenuous. It's not like whoever happens to hit a website using your scripts is a user in the common sense of the word.
Babeljs has ~29 million weekly downloads via npm. If users counted it would probably be billions.
Yah that includes also any random automated job too… and there are many of them.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#20This 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 a…
How big of a problem is it to change from babel to some alternative? I'm thinking of a possibly bigger disadvantage should that need to happen. I'm genuinely asking, since I'm not familiar with js tool chains.