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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?

#261

Post by capableweb »

> we settled on $11,000 per month as a baseline salary for working full-time on open source.

> For now, Nicolò, Henry, and Jùnliàng will all be paid a temporary rate of $6,000 per month. This doesn't solve the problem,

I used to donate to Babel, before they made it apparent they are just interested in funneling the money to one developer. 11K per month?! That is absolutely bananas and same reaction I had the last time this came up, but this time I cannot do anything as a reaction as I've already pulled my funding.

But my guess is that a lot of people feel the same way, as the donations seems to be going down. 11K per month could pay for many developers if you hire people outside of Sillicon Valley, which since you're doing open source, you should really really consider.

Open source is not "VC fueled develoment" and I don't think we should go that way either. Make your operation nimble and survive on little, otherwise you'll soon disappear. Optimize for sustainability, not for paying the one of the highest salary in the world (minus SV bubble of course).

It's not wonder Babel is going the way it's going, as the economy you've setup for yourself is nowhere near sustainable.

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

#262

Post by imtringued »

opk wrote: post #61
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…

It gets really annoying when people talk about $200k and well above because most of them are not "senior engineers" they are in some sort of technical management role and if they are engineers they are in a FAANG company where they get stock compensation.

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

#263

Post by snemvalts »

sofixa wrote: post #257
tarruda wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

$90k/year is between a good and outrageously good salary for Europe, depending on the country. So yeah, plenty of talent available for cheaper than $90k/year.

Keep in mind that most taxes and benefits are missing there, so it's better to consider US salaries as payroll costs in Europe.

In my fairly liberal country (Estonia), 75k eur a year renders around 42k eur a year take home, really great salary living costs wise but taxes still take a large chunk.

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

#264

Post by nickthemagicman »

pas wrote: post #246
nickthemagicman wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good point. Can't argue with that.

That's the problem with software, it's hard to measure productivity.

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

#265

Post by matkoniecz »

pjmlp wrote: post #226
kuschku wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they make more than senior engineers with decades of experience in Berlin? Why should customers/users of the project have to pay/donate twice or thrice as much for the same result, just because the devs want to live in the US instead of e.g. Paris?

Why should users of babel feel enttitled not to pay anything at all in contrast with other professions?

Why current Babel maintainers (not the main author who gets nothing!) would be entitled to donations?

They need to convince people/corporations to donate, default is that they get nothing.

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

#266

Post by js8 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #142
js8 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, a solution. They privatize it, and then companies will say to their webdevs, we don't want to pay extra for a profit of some capitalist, write the website without it. So each webdev will end up with their own half-baked solution. Tragedy of the lack of commons! I hear you cry, but that's irrational! Precisely, but so is not caring about the commons and letting them die. I am not under an illusion that under capit…

Companies make those sort of trade offs all the time, whether to buy or build. It doesn't take many to decide to buy to fund a small project like Babel. Not only that but you are likely to see competition driving the whole thing forward.

My point was that framing this as a tragedy of the commons problem, and here's the standard solution, can itself be disputed. The hidden assumption is that the capitalist will take the responsibility to take care of the thing, and provide it for a fair price, but it is by no means given. Certainly, there are examples of economic failures of this type as well. (Even in software, Unixes/Lisps..)

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

#267

Post by sokoloff »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #184

Donations are nice but not really scalable as a revenue model. Planning to live of that is not a plan. There are a couple of revenue models that do work in the OSS community: - Just doing things part time. I have a few projects like this. It's fun, it's apparently useful for others. I obviously limit time I spent on this. I don't financially benefit from this and I don't mind. Lots of stuff I use falls in this catego…

I agree with your categories, but the first category doesn’t seem like “a revenue model” (other than in a null sense).

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

#268

Post by jwr »

bengale wrote: post #208
jwr wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

First, this isn't a zero-sum game.

And second, seriously? I should worry that my competitors will be meaningfully boosted ahead (to the point of having a better shot a beating me) by me supporting a bunch of libraries that I use?

The world would be so much better if we all just did the right thing. It really isn't difficult to know what the right thing is at any given moment.

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

#269

Post by imtringued »

lbriner wrote: post #166

Isn't it an obvious problem that lots of OSS people have? If your project is non-trivial and effective, millions of people want to use it but it takes a lot to maintain it. In most cases, without vetting, it is hard to accept PRs from random people because you pretty much have to review the entire code and in most cases, it would probably take ages to understand enough about something like Babel to be a useful contri…

The problem is the contradictory nature of commercial open source.

You want everyone to have access to the code but you also want to charge businesses. You can't have both. So OSS companies split the code base in to a community and a business edition. The business edition builds on top of the community edition which requires the community edition to either be GPL licensed with a CLA or a permissive license with the risk of competitors building their own business edition.

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

#270

Post by capableweb »

tarruda wrote: post #216
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.

> that's more 90k/year which allows for a decent living in most places

Not only a decent living, but that's a very good salary in most places in the world. As an anecdote, I've always worked in private sector IT (as a developer and manager), have around 20 years of experience and worked in both small and big enterprises and startups, and I've never had that high salary. If you'd offer me that for working on open source full-time, I'd be surprised. My expectation would be that there is a ton of people willing to work for much less, so why Babel had to go with that person?

> Probably not enough for San Francisco though

Good thing Babel, Open Source and everything else related to this has nothing to do with San Francisco but still the group somehow want to have SF salaries. Yeah, I wonder why?

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