Couldn't be more appropriate as today's news,
"When software depends on a project thanklessly maintained by a random guy in Nebraska, is open source sustainable?"
https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/untangling_open_sourc...
Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
241–250 of 729 posts
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#242Do they pay anything to the maintainers of the packages they depend on?
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really don't understand this logic. .. Very few engineers make 9k in Germany, simple. Why compare net wages to gross wages?
Its 9k cost to employer. Its 6.5k gross salary which translates to 78k gross salary a year for the employee. A lot of engineers make that salary. If you are receiving money as a freelancer you need to earn at least 50% more to get a similar net salary as an employee therefore a employee salary of 78k gross is roughly equal to a freelancer making 120k a year. You have to compare net income as everything else does not…
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Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#244HackerNews 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.
Looks like you're out $100 then.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Are FOSS "donations" for on-going or past work, though? I'd lean towards a mixture of both. However, by that measure the original creator should also be compensated for their past work, given that they wrote about an order of magnitude more code than the second most prolific contributor, at least in the main babel repository.[0] (I have no way to easily measure other equally important contributions, such as shepherdi…
> dealing with issues and PRs
According to the original tweets by @sebmck there were only 25 comments in PRs by said contributor in the last year, so even that didn't happen, apparently.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
600 open issues https://github.com/babel/babel/issues
That doesn't seem to mean much nowadays. (Or maybe ever.) It's an old popular complex project, there are a lot of ongoing discussions. For example the TypeScript repo has 5K issues. And it's a flagship MS project, so it's not about funding, quality, etc.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#247See 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…
Open source projects funded by donations need accountability. Regular reports about how much money is available, how it's being spent, and what the results are. If I saw that this guy, getting a full-time salary, creating fewer PRs in a year than me in a week, I'd be pissed, and the project certainly wouldn't get my donations.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Are FOSS "donations" for on-going or past work, though? I'd lean towards a mixture of both. However, by that measure the original creator should also be compensated for their past work, given that they wrote about an order of magnitude more code than the second most prolific contributor, at least in the main babel repository.[0] (I have no way to easily measure other equally important contributions, such as shepherdi…
> I'm just going to be explicit. In 2020, Henry created 12
> issues, commented 25 times, and created 29 pull requests.
> This is across all Babel orgs.
>
> https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392053448892469250
It seems like a gravy train. Open-source contributors of other projects are currently carrying the torch of uncompensated work.
If they want to get paid, they need to think about how they currently fit into the ecosystem.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#249See 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 think this is an important point. How do I know donating money will end up actually going to the project.
For some reason I believe donating to The Blender Foundation actually pays for devs to work on blender (and I donate).
I have a friend working on an open source project. I know he works full time on it. I donated because I knew he was working full time and because I like the project and want to see it succeed.
I have no reason to believe sponsoring random npm package asking for funding does anything other then maybe make some person feel good that they decided to post some code on npm and/or github.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#250See 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
These are the commits of another of the paid contributors, for that same time period:
https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=nicolo-ribaudo...
Looking at https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors, github.com/nicolo-ribaudo has been, for about the last year, the most active contributor on Github, but as recently as March 2021 was only being allocated $24,000 (annualised) from the collective.
Another interesting thing I found digging around is that the creator of Babel (https://twitter.com/sebmck) is relegated to the very bottom of:
With a link to some odd throw-away Github account: https://github.com/kittens (edit: the link is fixed now, github.com/nicolo-ribaudo merged my PR almost immediately)