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

babeljs.io

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

#31

Post by qPM9l3XJrF »

hnbad wrote: post #24
captainmuon wrote: post #6

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 a…

Your last sentence is worth emphasizing. Many people misunderstand the tragedy of the commons as an argument why a commons can't work, but the only possible conclusion is that the commons can't work under the current economic system (and specifically the dominant school of economic thought of the past half century). The usual example given is a pasture shared by shepherds who are each going to optimize their use of t…

Capitalism represents a solution to the tragedy of the commons: Privatize it. You guys are interpreting this as a takedown of capitalism when it's the exact opposite. Capitalism represents a solution to this issue. You might not like that solution, but this circumstance just goes to show that naive attempts to reinvent capitalism are unlikely to work.

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

#32

Post by captainmuon »

okamiueru wrote: post #20
captainmuon wrote: post #6

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 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.

True, I guess if a big company used it they probably could fund it from pocket money, rather than spending more money on switching. Sad that people have to write a "we're running out of money" blog post to make that happen.

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

#33

Post by greenpresident »

captainmuon wrote: post #6

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 a…

I’d classify it as a public goods problem. The difference is rivalry in consumption. You compete over fishing grounds but you don’t compete over use of Babel. It makes a difference in user strategy too: with the tragedy of the commons, your personal marginal gain is higher than the individual share of the social cost. This leads to overconsumption. In a public goods problem, you fully benefit without contributing. As a result, you maximize utility by not contributing. There is also an incentive to understate the the utility you derive from the public good in order to avoid being forced to pay, making it hard to estimate the utility generated by the public good. It’s also called the freerider problem.

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

#34

Post by esquire_900 »

testaaajxjd wrote: post #17

11k salary lol

I was going to give a similar comment here. I get that this is more common in the US compared to Europe or asian countries, but I'd expect that 5-6k a month would be a far more reasonable salary. You're not in open source for the big payout I assume.. And then again, 2k just to help on the side, that's about minimum wage here for full time employment.

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

#35

Post by baybal2 »

_the_inflator wrote: post #2

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…

Transpilers are bad. They add to the already giant mess of unnecessary JS tooling.

How much of them is really needed, and how much is there just for webdevs to show their "street cred?" Not a lot at all.

Not only the debugging is breaking down because of them, but they often introduce bugs on their own which are very hard to find.

Framework authors force involuntary decision to use transpilers on people downstream, and everything suffers from that: "feature A breaks with transpiler B 1.2.3," but because end users simply don't use them, and thus don't file bugs, devs don't know that either.

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

#36

Post by alpaca128 »

_pdp_ wrote: post #19
MrRiddle wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if those 29 million weekly downloads were all automated it would still imply 29 million users have setup automated jobs for building software with Babel.

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

#38

Post by culturestate »

captainmuon wrote: post #6

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 a…

> Unless I was flush with cash, I probably wouldn't donate from company funds if I were an entrepreneur.

I specifically budget a small amount (~$100/mo) of company cash for this purpose. Some of it's donated to OSS, and some if it goes to pay for low-cost freemium products where we don't necessarily need the premium features but want to support the team[1].

I stole this idea from someone else so I know I'm not the only one, but more entrepreneurs really should do it.

1. https://mailsac.com/ is a good example where our usage would fit fine in the free tier but we subscribe anyway.

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

#39

Post by emilsedgh »

captainmuon wrote: post #6

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 a…

While I agree with your general point, I still think crowd sourcing open source projects is still doable. All we need is to centralize it.

I work for a very small startup that uses hundreds of big or small open source projects. And we never pay a penny for any of them.

And I don't think I can go to my boss and ask for a meaningful contributions to any of these. We are not profitable and there's no reward for that contribution.

However, if there was a way for me to subscribe to micro payments for a few projects, given some easy trivial incentive, we definitely would've.

I can easily subscribe to $5/m payments to like 5-10 projects that we use. Would've meant nothing for us. But economics of scale would've kicked in for them.

Allow $1-10 monthly subscriptions, give the backers a badge or something they can use when hiring. Maybe show a badge next to their usernames on github or whatever. Maybe show a badge to the issues the backers create so they get a sense of priority. slowly you can build a small habit of people/companies subscribing small amounts to projects they use.

If there was such small incentives I would've immediately subscribed $5/m to following project:

* Nodejs

* Postgres

* Node-Pg

* Rabbit MQ

* Grapesjs

* Esbuild

* Webpack (Which I badly need to improve it's killing us everyday)

* Dokku

* Metabase

* MJML

It's in my company's benefit for each of these to survive/thrive and keep improving. I am afraid that once/if some of them stop that'll hurt us. $5/m and potentially getting some attention from maintainers (in smaller ones) if we had issues would be enough of an incentive for these all.

The incentives I suggest:

* Badges on Issue tracking on the issues created by backers

* Badges next to usernames on Slack/Discord/Irc/Whatever

* Badges on Github profiles for backers

An example: Docker. They started rate limiting their free tier, asking for $5/m. I don't care about the $5/m at all. My biggest problem with that change was not the $5/m, but the time I had to spend on our different tools setting up auth environment variables.

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

#40

Post by guerrilla »

captainmuon wrote: post #6

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 a…

The first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics worked on studying systems where the tragedy of the commons does not hold and determining under which conditions[1] such arrangements do work. Adopting open source to that system seems like a very difficult task to me though.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Design_principle...

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