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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?

#61

Post by opk »

holistio wrote: post #8

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.

I'm always shocked at how high these US salaries quoted on here are. I don't know if that's just FAANG companies or people inflating figures. They do quote $11k for a full-time position as others have pointed out. What I make is much nearer to the $2k figure but I am in Europe.

Maybe they'd do better operating out of of somewhere cheaper. Many older open source projects including those I contribute to aren't owned by a single company, aren't trying to build a business and still manage to be popular and useful.

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

#62

Post by kasperni »

jiofih wrote: post #13

If 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?

> Can we go back to the original spirit of OSS where everybody donates a little of their time instead?

That's a nice goal. But you don't create non-trivial high quality software in 2021 by random people chipping in a handfull of hours a week. (Yes I'm sure that are exceptions)

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

#63

Post by PaywallBuster »

Good work so far

but why does an OSS tool have to be supported by Silicon Valley salaries?

USA and it's biggest cities are already hugely competitive even for profit making enterprises.

Even a company like Mozilla with real commercial partnerships and solid income every year can struggle, let alone a tool which is barely noticeable by 90% of users.

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

#64

Post by captainmuon »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #31
hnbad wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In some cases that applies, but I don't think a paid version of babel would be viable. Electronic goods resist commodifying. It only works sometimes (like in streaming music), but you need to put in a lot of technological and legal effort.

I believe that societies develop in lockstep with technology. The industrial revolution was only possible with the beginning civil society and capitalism; capitalism as we know it was only possible at the end of feudalism and absolutism. It is intertwined. New technologies tend to disrupt societies, you can go where the tech leads you (e.g. content can be copied without effort), or you can go the other way and adapt the tech to the society (say, not using machines in order to save jobs). That is why I think we are due for a big change in our political and economic system. What that is going to look like, and how much it will still look like capitalism, I don't know.

(Sorry for derailing the thread...)

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

#65

Post by toyg »

genezeta wrote: post #28
alpaca128 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article literally mentions full time work in the first sentence, and multiple times later.

The one person who is full-time has a very different salary: > we settled on $11,000 per month as a baseline salary for working full-time on open source The people getting $2,000 per month are part-time: > a "part-time" rate: we could initially afford $2,000 USD per month. It is also explained that if possible, they would go full-time and the salary would then be raised to "the full-time rate". > Our hope was by anno…

There’s something to be said for those salaries being too “Valley”. $121k per year is a lot of money; you’d likely be able to find good JS developers in the UK for half that and in continental Europe for even less (in Eastern Europe you could probably get away with $30k…).

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

#67

Post by axguscbklp »

esquire_900 wrote: post #34
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.

$11k / month is pretty close to an entry-level Bay Area salary. Given that Babel is one of the most popular and widely-used tools in the history of web development, I am surprised that all the creators can afford to pay themselves is one near-entry-level Bay Area salary and a few intern-type salaries.

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

#68

Post by mort96 »

baybal2 wrote: post #35
_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, a…

Being anti-transpiration seems really weird to me? It just lets developers write code using new standards without requiring all users to be on bleeding edge browsers.

What do you think should happen instead? Should web applications just exclude anyone who's using a browser that doesn't implement all the newest web standards? Or should developers just unnecessarily use old versions of JavaScript?

You might not be aware, but writing in ES5 feels incredibly awkward once you get used to the newer standards. If I can write in a nice language (ES2020) but transpire my code into a more widely supported language (ES5) I don't see why I wouldn't do that.

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

#69

Post by mekkkkkk »

holistio wrote: post #8

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.

$2k is a part time salary, for an unknown amount of hours. The full time salary that they are going to get going forward is $6k. Still not close to competitive, but enough to make a decent living.

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

#70

Post by gioele »

emilsedgh wrote: post #39
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 con…

> If there was such small incentives I would've immediately subscribed $5/m to following project: Nodejs, Postgres, Node-Pg, [...]

Who would receive that money? Only the core developers? Anybody with "commit access"? In which share? Will it detract voluntary contributions? How should other companies working on the same code-base be treated? Are they allowed to contribute at all? Do they get some shares of the funds?

All these questions (and many others) that have been discussed in the Debian project for a long time and nobody has yet found an answer that is acceptable to everybody.

Some sources:

* "Debian + Dunc-Tank.org = dissent" (2006) https://lwn.net/Articles/201488/

* "Paying (some) Debian developers" (2019) https://lwn.net/Articles/790954/

* "DPL: Debian project has plenty of money but not enough developers" (2020) https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/10/debian_project_addres...

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