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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?

#71

Post by IshKebab »

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…

> $11,000 per month

I think I know why they're running out of money!

Seriously that's an amazing salary in 99% of the world for working on commercial software where you don't get to decide what to do, can't remote work, probably aren't working on your passion project, etc. etc.

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

#72

Post by okamiueru »

captainmuon wrote: post #32
okamiueru wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is also a separate aspect, that this also has do with unawareness, and not just excess stinginess. I might speak for only myself, but to a much larger extent that I'd like to admit, I take work and maintenance of open source projects for granted.

Maybe it's the disconnect caused by large businesses properly funding some of them, with an erroneous assumption of the level of maintenance others require. If something is core to a major tool chain then I just, sad to say, assume it's well funded, either by larger companies or universities.

Trying to think of an example, LLVM seems integral to a lot of progress on web functionality, just EMSCripten alone makes that case. This in turn is sponsored by most of the major tech companies [1]. Whether the same foundation also funds emscripten, I couldn't find out.

https://foundation.llvm.org/docs/sponsors/

I think my point is, if anything, if you have a open source project that requires having several full times employees, it might be high time to create a non/profit and work on getting funding. The post they wrote, and the visibility it gets can be an example of a doing just that, albeit maybe just a temporary fix.

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

#73

Post by ylyn »

Toutouxc wrote: post #66

There are many services that people only use as long as they're free or cheap, but stop using when a price tag appears or the price increases. Is it heresy now to propose that Babel maybe isn't THAT valuable?

Most people aren't even fully aware that Babel is part of their toolchain.

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

#75

Post by emilsedgh »

gioele wrote: post #70
emilsedgh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

Debian's case is so complicated. Many of these complexities and dynamics don't exist in other software projects.

Most of the project's I'd support have central figures that can use the money and don't have such difficulties. Babel could've used my $5/m donations. Debian's theoretical and moral dilemmas are not universal.

I used to be involved in a similar project for KDE [0] and it was KDE e.V that received the money. How they allocated their money is an entirely different question that depends on each one.

[0] https://relate.kde.org/

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

#76

Post by jsmith99 »

guerrilla wrote: post #45
greenpresident wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for your analysis but isn't the share of the social cost the fact that Babel will stop updating when these people can't support themselves? It's just delayed in this case, no?

When something is too obviously a good thing, there is a game of 'chicken' where no one feels the need to contribute because the item is so obviously advantageous they are sure someone else will.

At the extreme, this is the opposite of a normal public good, which are characterised by a cost above any individual's marginal utility. Here, there are any number of organisations who probably have marginal utility from Babel above the cost of provision. See the snowdrift dilemma.

Prisoner's dilemma or tragedy of commons has a dominant strategy (defect), but chicken does not - your best strategy is to do the opposite to the other.

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

#78

Post by syl_sau »

todd3834 wrote: post #14

This 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…

On OSS projects, I think that we need to find a more robust model than what we have in most cases.

To me, the most successful and efficient models when it comes to building open, capable, stable and friendly software (all those four) seems to be delegating all the work to a team of a few but very experienced developers. I'm thinking Blender, GIMP, Csound, Ardour, many video codecs, etc. It also seems all these projects have in common highly technical fields (3D, audio or video), which implies a far steeper learning curves than your average github project. Maybe we could even infer that one solution to drive contributions up is to make it less easy and less ostensibly accessible. I personally pay for Blender because I want them to improve some features. Plus I'm not sure if getting pull requests from random strangers all the time is a good way to take a software in the serious direction -- I'd wager reducing complexity by lowering the amount of people involved and the extensive need for communication is what keeps the core dev team focused, fast and flexible. Anyway, my 2 cents.

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

#79

Post by axguscbklp »

PaywallBuster wrote: post #63

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.

Babel is one of the most popular and widely-used tools in the history of web development. Why should its developers and maintainers not make at least as much money as entry-level Silicon Valley developers?
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