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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?

#201

Post by ncallaway »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #199

If you don‘t enjoy it, stop working on it. Eventually others will step up, one way or another. Either by working on your project or by making a new one. This is not about saving the world, but about some nice to have software we can do without. That‘s the nature of open source. „I want to work on #specific_thing and get paid for it!“ -that‘s usually not how the world works.

> "I want to work on #specific_thing and get paid for it!" -that‘s usually not how the world works.

Not usually, no, but I also don't blame people for trying to find a way to make that work. For some people it _does_ work that way.

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

#202

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

mft_ wrote: post #194
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #190

HackerNews should make each such topic a fundraiser. Want to comment on it? This will be $10. An upvote? $1. A downvote? $50. A snarky comment could cost $100 to be overlooked by the moderators.

$5 to enable an emoji?

$5 is a tiny one from the Basic Multilingual Plane. Complex ones are $5/byte, calculated from encoding each emoji into its own UTF-8 sequence.

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

#203

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

ylyn wrote: post #73
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.

And I thought that such awareness was a part of being good at one's job.

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

#204

Post by andoma »

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…

> * Badges on Issue tracking on the issues created by backers

This can be a slippery slope. It could easily be mis-interpreted as "Hey, I payed $3 last month so I want you to prioritize my bugs". Generally I think for these kind of sums it should be clear that you donate and pay as a thank-you for what's already there, not for what (in your opinion) should come. Using it to highlight issues would work against that IMHO.

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

#205

Post by uncomputation »

It’s not really a matter of what he “deserves” as the thread is making it about. Point blank: the project cannot sustain that salary and the original developer of Babel said funds were being misappropriated. [^1] Perhaps the lead developer of the project does “deserve” a competitive salary, but the project cannot afford to compete with Silicon Valley salaries, which for an open source project is not surprising. It’s a good first step towards funding, but clearly not ready to support competitive rates. This reminds me in a weird way of Vine’s demise. It was used by millions too, but without a monetization strategy, popularity doesn’t pay the bills (or salary in this case). They should take a look at Linux Foundation for inspiration. If there’s not enough industry support for that, then I think the market has spoken.

[^1]: https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522

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

#206

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

0x000000E2 wrote: post #187

Eh, my take, Typescript won. Does the same thing as Babel but supports static types and inference in regular JS.

Can it produce JavaScript runnable on Safari from iOS 9.3.6?

Those old iPads and iPhones just won't die... As well as a number of Macbooks that will never go past OS X 10.11.

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

#207

Post by febeling »

It might be the best approach is to offer a commercial license alongside the open source one, in a subscription model. It's just what fits into the preconceptions of a business. They get an invoice, they get a something in return, case closed. There's probably not even a need for extra support. Only thing necessary is some viable way to pay them. Then there's no need of developers talking to managers about justice, how things should be, and all this fruitless stuff. It really doesn't matter that you could obtain it legally and for free, often times.

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

#208

Post by bengale »

jwr wrote: post #86
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 am a solo entrepreneur with a self-funded business and I set aside a percentage of revenue to be paid in developer sponsorships, through Github sponsors, Clojurists Together, and directly. I sort the libraries that my code uses by "indispensability" and fund the top 8 or so. It's not much, but if everybody did t…

The problem is if you're competing with someone else, all things being equal, that invests the money you give away they now have a better shot at beating you. From a purely selfish perspective it's better to allow people like you to fund it while everyone else gets it for free.

Bear in mind I do agree with you, it would be better if we supported these libraries properly. But it seems like the majority are willing to allow a few to carry them. It makes the idea of running these projects on sponsorships seem unsustainable.

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

#209

Post by tick_tock_tick »

mschuster91 wrote: post #181
opk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. US salaries are higher than European ones, but that is mainly because Americans need to account for healthcare and (especially in SV) extremely high cost of living. I have a ~62 m² 3 room flat in somewhat center of Munich and pay only 1.000€ a month in rent, whereas in the US…

All FAANG companies pay 100% of the employee's health care in addition to the salary. When people talk about total comp for these FAANG companies they mean base pay + stock the 100% health coverage is just assumed. I will say coverage for the full family often isn't free but it's still pretty cheap.

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

#210

Post by ilkkao »

baybal2 wrote: post #83
switz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Transpilers have been misused at times in the javascript community, but overall they have played a *massive* role in modernizing javascript and enabling us to write much sounder, more robust, and bug-free code that runs everywhere, including on older devices and runtimes. Society as a whole has benefited immensely from babel and other transpilers. As time goes on, transpilers may ultimately become slightly…

Baseline ES6 been supported for many years now. There are very few things a transpiler will do for you today. Some critical langauge features are completely impossible to substitite, or emulate. Given this, what's the point? The few non-critical features can be more reliably polyfilled manually than relying on transpiler which will mangle the rest of your code which has nothing to do with that function, and with 50/5…

I was able to remove babel few weeks ago in one of my projects when webpack started to support class properties natively. The project in question only supports evergreen browsers. So nice to have super simple build config.

I have nothing against babel. I think it's great especially in maturing TC39 drafts.

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