It was like Mozilla, who paid 2 million for the CEO when revenue down like 80%.
Is there any OSS model that is financial sustainable. A foundation like Apache?
Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
671–680 of 729 posts
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#672Eh, my take, Typescript won. Does the same thing as Babel but supports static types and inference in regular JS.
on the contrary - tsc is so slow that most people use babel to strip out types in production.
The types aren't real anyway, what is there to strip out? Do you mean don't type check for production builds?
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#673> 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 tim…
Exactly, I thought the reason that US developers are so highly paid compared to everywhere else in the world was to offset the high cost of living in silicon valley. $132,000 is almost double my salary is the UK. They could easily get 2 full time UK devs for that, or even more in many EU countries with lower cost of living
There are many cities in the USA, outside of the Bay Area, in which $132k would be a reasonable salary for that job. Just west of the Mississippi: Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, possibly even Salt Lake City, Phoenix, probably Minneapolis, Honolulu, etc.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#674Savage of Sebastian to call out Henry like that on twitter. Are you on drugs or something? https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 Publicly accusing Henry of not actually working on the project seems short sighted. Only looking at a one year slice of contribution rather than the lifetime of the project masks the full picture of Henry's contributions. Also in Henry's defense, the past year has been a ter…
I don't think "Are you on drugs or something?" Is ever appropriate for a HN comment.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#675Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the people who are working on these projects are talented and can command high salaries, $11k/mo is realistic. It's already a large pay cut. > 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? Are all those people capable of managing Babel? I think the real question is: do you need top talent for important open source projects, or are aver…
You somehow seem to think that amount someone earns is somehow related to how good they are. > $11k/mo is realistic. It's already a large pay cut. Yes, sure, in Silicon Valley anything is possible but for the 99% rest of the world, 11K USD per month is ridiculously high and even people with decades of experience won't collect that unless there is a specific situation. It's definitely not normal outside of Silicon Val…
Mind introducing me to some of these people? My company is actively hiring experienced JS devs and I’ve yet to find any senior enough to maintain Babel for under $200k
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#676This whole thread is basically a testament as to why the OSS model, unfortunately, is broken. Very competent people are expected to write widely used software for a salary that basically merely guarantees subsistence. It never ceases to amaze me how great software engineers allow themselves to be exploited in such a way. If you consider the societal impact that some of these projects have and the skill set that some…
> pretty much dwarfs the skill sets of people in other well paid professions such as lawyers or doctors
I don't know how you could possibly measure this except by years of training, which would put both doctors and lawyers ahead of software developers. But really, it's apples and oranges.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#677Is there any commercial alternative to Babel?
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#678This whole thread is basically a testament as to why the OSS model, unfortunately, is broken. Very competent people are expected to write widely used software for a salary that basically merely guarantees subsistence. It never ceases to amaze me how great software engineers allow themselves to be exploited in such a way. If you consider the societal impact that some of these projects have and the skill set that some…
117 million downloads every month. 1 cent a download = 117,000,000 cents = $1,170,000. So the project is dying because they cannot get every downloader to pay 1 cent for every download. Even at 1/10 cent it would still come to $117,000 This is how screwed up open source is. An advanced technological industry which doesn't have infrastructure in place to collect fractions of cents per product delivery. Why can't the s…
I can't understand why there are 117 million downloads every month. I doubt there are 117 million programmers using Babel and why download it every month?
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#679Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can send a PR with 1 million lines of code, or 3 lines of code. You can send PRs updating typos in documentation, or PRs affecting the core aspects of a project. You can send 100 PRs full of tech debt or 1 that makes the thing run 100x faster. PR counts suck as a way to measure work.
it's insane Github reports PR stats. I always knew this would happen. But never so publicly. You just assume that your management is looking at it constantly and basing their decisions on it. Because why wouldn't they. Their entire philosophy is "never let a metric go to waste." All this does is encourage bad behavior. Not squashing commits, throwing up tons of one line changes. Remember that contest Digital Ocean di…
Technically you can do and undo the same thing a trillion times and have a trillion commits. In the end your net impact in the code will be zero, yet you will be the PR champ.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#680This whole thread is basically a testament as to why the OSS model, unfortunately, is broken. Very competent people are expected to write widely used software for a salary that basically merely guarantees subsistence. It never ceases to amaze me how great software engineers allow themselves to be exploited in such a way. If you consider the societal impact that some of these projects have and the skill set that some…
> This whole thread is basically a testament as to why the OSS model, unfortunately, is broken This blog post for me is evidence that we can make crowdfunded open source work, as long as the people receiving the money know how to effectively use it. The team handling the economy of Babel right now, does not, hence Babel is not sustainable. But, if you'd make the salaries a bit more realistic, Babel would have money o…
$130k is quite low for someone of Henry's skillset. Especially in US. Especially for Babel