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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?

#211

Post by fireattack »

akmittal wrote: post #105

See what creator of Babel has to say >Babel used by millions, so why are we running out of money? Bluntly: Because funds were misallocated for years, and the project has been too slow to improve. >The reason there's no money is because someone took a $130k annual salary and didn't actually work on the project. https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 - So donating money because of this post may not be a…

From https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors it looks that Henry did work on the project heavily after the creator left/went inactive, but stopped being active himself after 2019.

There probably is more, but not going to speculate.

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

#212

Post by NiekvdMaas »

akmittal wrote: post #105

See what creator of Babel has to say >Babel used by millions, so why are we running out of money? Bluntly: Because funds were misallocated for years, and the project has been too slow to improve. >The reason there's no money is because someone took a $130k annual salary and didn't actually work on the project. https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 - So donating money because of this post may not be a…

Looking at the the commit activity of some maintainers, that seems to be correct:

7 commits in a year: https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=hzoo&since=202...

$110k invoiced: https://opencollective.com/left_pad/transactions

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

#213

Post by daliwali »

Open source is not a business model, and I think the expectation to get paid for open source is a bit disingenuous. There is also the ideological aspect of free as in freedom licensing, while it doesn't exclude monetization, often detracts from the incentive to pay for software.

To play the devil's advocate, I would suggest that there is price discovery at play here and people + corporations are willing to pay for what they get value out of. Which is suggesting that many companies don't get much value out of Babel or it is one of many tools utilized in a toolchain. The value proposition is to be able to run new JS in old JS runtime, which may be less valuable now than it was 5 years ago, since evergreen browsers exist and outside of stale corporate environments, most browsers are auto-updating now.

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

#214

Post by 0x000000E2 »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #206
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.

Yes, it goes back to ES3.

Babel does have a neat automatic polyfill system typescript doesn't. But both can target real old JS versions. Most JS packages you'll find on NPM are still ES5.

Transpilers are quickly making JS a compiled language where the bytecode format is ES5 :)

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

#215

Post by [deleted] »

akmittal wrote: post #105

See what creator of Babel has to say >Babel used by millions, so why are we running out of money? Bluntly: Because funds were misallocated for years, and the project has been too slow to improve. >The reason there's no money is because someone took a $130k annual salary and didn't actually work on the project. https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 - So donating money because of this post may not be a…

[deleted]

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

#216

Post by tarruda »

tren wrote: post #154

Can someone explain to me what I'm missing with regards to how much they're currently earning? Looking at their base support sponsors (of which there are 4), they are each paying a minimum of $24,000 each ($96,000/year). There are 5 gold sponsors of at least $1000/month ($60,000/year) and 24 silver sponsors of at least $500/month ($120,000/year). That's already $276K without including the bronze/backer tiers.

If you split by 3 full time devs, that's more 90k/year which allows for a decent living in most places. Probably not enough for San Francisco though.

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

#217

Post by filleduchaos »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #206
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.

tsc produces ES3, yes.

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

#218

Post by foldr »

mpeg wrote: post #41
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?

Rome, which is founded by the creator of Babel, just raised $4.5m - so either the current maintainers of Babel are not doing a good job fundraising or their work is not considered as interesting as these guys who are creating a new unified toolchain.

Rome is able to raise VC funding because it's a product that doesn't exist yet.

Babel has the key advantage that you can actually use it now to do real work.

It's not unreasonable for the developers of a real, currently-existing product to want to be paid for the work that they're doing on it, rather than for some pie-in-the-sky business proposition.

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

#219

Post by cycomanic »

jeltz wrote: post #159
golergka wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other comments are right, $11k a month is a very high engineering salary anywhere in Europe. However, during the last year there's been more and more american companies that offer these kind of rates remotely. So, a good developer could make this, and even more, while living in Europe, although you might have not consider him "working" here (whatever this means in terms of remote work anyway).

Yeah, $11k is a very high salary in Sweden. Almost the only way to make that as a developer is to be an independent contractor.

But he essentially is an independent contractor, that's the point. And talking about Sweden, you miss the pension, health insurance and the employer contribution to the taxes.

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

#220

Post by PaywallBuster »

akmittal wrote: post #105

See what creator of Babel has to say >Babel used by millions, so why are we running out of money? Bluntly: Because funds were misallocated for years, and the project has been too slow to improve. >The reason there's no money is because someone took a $130k annual salary and didn't actually work on the project. https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 - So donating money because of this post may not be a…

I can see it backfire

Maybe some donors will donate to other projects

So many other OSS projects barely getting even 100 USD a month and Babel is complaining they're unable to work with over 300k a year and a number of corporate sponsors which have been supporting the project for a long time.

And the nodejs ecosystem already seems like an outlier getting more funding than most other languages/systems/projects.

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