74 ms·

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

• _the_inflator 5y ago
  BabelJS's idea is so simple, yet huge. BabelJS, or, as I like to call them in my talks, is the "Age of transpilers". The idea of having some sort of meta layer that you compile from to another source is old, but totally underrated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler With my team we optimized render processes using transpilers/meta language and this totally rocks. I hope that BabelJS will continue to follow their vision and gets more sponsorship from company-side. For me, they popularized the idea of Compilers in unexpected areas.
  • baybal2 5y ago
    Transpilers are bad. They add to the already giant mess of unnecessary JS tooling. How much of them is really needed, and how much is there just for webdevs to show their "street cred?" Not a lot at all. Not only the debugging is breaking down because of them, but they often introduce bugs on their own which are very hard to find. Framework authors force involuntary decision to use transpilers on people downstream, and everything suffers from that: "feature A breaks with transpiler B 1.2.3," but because end users simply don't use them, and thus don't file bugs, devs don't know that either.
    • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
      Babel has allowed developers to write modern JS without having to worry about older browsers - which, granted and thankfully, is now much less of an issue thanks to evergreen browsers and Microsoft having stopped with IE. Typescript and Flow allow for much higher quality software without having to add complexity to browsers (like Dart initially was intended to).
    • switz 5y ago
      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 less valuable, however for the past decade they have allowed us to grow and improve our javascript without sacrificing portability.
      • baybal2 5y ago
        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 50/50 chance to introduce own problems.
        • ilkkao 5y ago
          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.
    • mort96 5y ago
      Being anti-transpiration seems really weird to me? It just lets developers write code using new standards without requiring all users to be on bleeding edge browsers. What do you think should happen instead? Should web applications just exclude anyone who's using a browser that doesn't implement all the newest web standards? Or should developers just unnecessarily use old versions of JavaScript? You might not be aware, but writing in ES5 feels incredibly awkward once you get used to the newer standards. If I can write in a nice language (ES2020) but transpire my code into a more widely supported language (ES5) I don't see why I wouldn't do that.
      • baybal2 5y ago
        First, wringing code which is debuggable, and experience less perturbations will alone add to better code longevity, and maintainability. I lost count to cases when old code is unsalvageable because the tooling combination used to "build" it simply refuses to work with modern nodejs, distro, or some other dependency. There were very few vital features introduced since ES6, and some of them were in browser earlier than major ES releases. Browser APIs did change, but those have no bearing on the JS/ECMA language support And the few remaining things are so hard to polyfil, and so hacky that I see myself no point in using them: 1. ES6 Proxy - possible to polyfill, but hacks involved are just terrible. Basically the only way to do it is to re-implement half of Javascript VM inside the your Javascript. 2. Async/await - possible to polyfil, but all polyfills are of extremely low performance, and high memory consumption. They send desktop PCs fans' spinning, and I don't want them. 3. Intl API - what's the point of using a system INTL functionality, if you yourself polyfill it? Just implement the string substitution in the code. And so on, and on
    • majjgepolja 5y ago
      Compilers are bad. They add to the already giant mess of unnecessary assembler tooling. How much of them is really needed, and how much is there just for embedded developers to show their "street cred?" Not a lot at all. Not only the debugging is breaking down because of UB, but they often introduce bugs on their own which are very hard to find. Library authors force involuntary decision to use compilers on people downstream, and everything suffers from that: "feature A breaks with compiler G* 5.0," but because end users simply don't use them, and thus don't file bugs, devs don't know that either.
• Saint_Genet 5y ago
  Saying you're used by millions when you're a javascript library is a bit disingenuous. It's not like whoever happens to hit a website using your scripts is a user in the common sense of the word.
  • MrRiddle 5y ago
    Babeljs has ~29 million weekly downloads via npm. If users counted it would probably be billions.
    • _pdp_ 5y ago
      Yah that includes also any random automated job too… and there are many of them.
      • matzab 5y ago
        I'd say that also counts as "using it".
      • mirekrusin 5y ago
        And doesn’t include cache hits.
      • alpaca128 5y ago
        Even if those 29 million weekly downloads were all automated it would still imply 29 million users have setup automated jobs for building software with Babel.
        • HajiraSifre 5y ago
          That does not follow. There are definitely many CI pipelines that download all packages every time they're triggered. For those pipelines you'd be looking at tens of installs per day (or more).
        • physicsguy 5y ago
          No it doesn't. For e.g. how many stupid CI pipelines are set up to download it on every run? You could easily be 2 or 3 orders of magnitude out on actual number of direct users.
• fxtentacle 5y ago
  Because it is too easily replaced with something else [1]. I'd say it's the exact same reason why almost nobody can make a living wage off self-publishing app store apps. There's always an endless stream of volunteers who will clone your idea for next to nothing. Plus the homepage doesn't explain at all WHY one would want to use this. So from a marketing point of view, you need to better demonstrate your value, i.e. what makes Babel useful and unique. [1] for example Google's Traceur: https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler
  • Jweb_Guru 5y ago
    If you think Babel is really easily replaced with something else, I'm fairly confident you are not in its target audience. Beyond the tool itself being far less trivial than you're making it out to be (most companies don't have Google's resources), it's an incredibly essential part of the JavaScript ecosystem, with tons of widely used extensions and plugins--including extremely central stuff for integrating projects like Typescript and Flow with basically any other form of compilation in the JS world. I chose these two because they are funded by Microsoft and Facebook, respectively; they are certainly not companies that can't afford to fund development for projects like this. Moving that ecosystem to another project would conservatively take years and that's assuming everyone actually wanted to do it.
  • arp242 5y ago
    That project hasn't seen any updates in almost five years. I'm not a JS guy and familiar with Babel, but I find it hard to believe that the amount of investment required to replace Babel is less than $10/month? You can fund Babel for ~40 years for the same costs as one month of developer time.
• captainmuon 5y ago
  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 amount for this. Wish more people would do that!) For me, another data point why our current economic system is not optimal, and we need at least more coordination, or maybe a better system.
  • okamiueru 5y ago
    How big of a problem is it to change from babel to some alternative? I'm thinking of a possibly bigger disadvantage should that need to happen. I'm genuinely asking, since I'm not familiar with js tool chains.
    • captainmuon 5y ago
      True, I guess if a big company used it they probably could fund it from pocket money, rather than spending more money on switching. Sad that people have to write a "we're running out of money" blog post to make that happen.
      • okamiueru 5y ago
        There is also a separate aspect, that this also has do with unawareness, and not just excess stinginess. I might speak for only myself, but to a much larger extent that I'd like to admit, I take work and maintenance of open source projects for granted. Maybe it's the disconnect caused by large businesses properly funding some of them, with an erroneous assumption of the level of maintenance others require. If something is core to a major tool chain then I just, sad to say, assume it's well funded, either by larger companies or universities. Trying to think of an example, LLVM seems integral to a lot of progress on web functionality, just EMSCripten alone makes that case. This in turn is sponsored by most of the major tech companies [1]. Whether the same foundation also funds emscripten, I couldn't find out. https://foundation.llvm.org/docs/sponsors/ https://foundation.llvm.org/docs/sponsors/ I think my point is, if anything, if you have a open source project that requires having several full times employees, it might be high time to create a non/profit and work on getting funding. The post they wrote, and the visibility it gets can be an example of a doing just that, albeit maybe just a temporary fix.
• holistio 5y ago
  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.
  • jiofih 5y ago
    Presumably they have jobs, that’s extra income.
    • alpaca128 5y ago
      The article literally mentions full time work in the first sentence, and multiple times later.
      • genezeta 5y ago
        The one person who is full-time has a very different salary: > we settled on $11,000 per month as a baseline salary for working full-time on open source The people getting $2,000 per month are part-time: > a "part-time" rate: we could initially afford $2,000 USD per month. It is also explained that if possible, they would go full-time and the salary would then be raised to "the full-time rate". > Our hope was by announcing this plan and continuing our fundraising efforts, we would be able to increase the budget and raise them to the full-time rate.
        • roofwellhams 5y ago
          I think it's pretty good deal
        • toyg 5y ago
          There’s something to be said for those salaries being too “Valley”. $121k per year is a lot of money; you’d likely be able to find good JS developers in the UK for half that and in continental Europe for even less (in Eastern Europe you could probably get away with $30k…).
• jiofih 5y ago
  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?
  • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    I don't think it works in 99% of cases. There almost always seems to end up being a few people who do 90% of the work.
    • arp242 5y ago
      In most cases it's just a few people who do >99% of the work. Project with significant contributions outside of the "core dev(s)" are much rarer than people think, and so are the number of contributions. I really need to finish my site which visualizes this ... But here's some data on ElasticSearch I did a while ago: https://lobste.rs/s/qtsjh1/elasticsearch_does_not_belong_elastic#c_hbttgr https://lobste.rs/s/qtsjh1/elasticsearch_does_not_belong_ela...
  • hatmatrix 5y ago
    Who defined the original spirit of OSS? I thought OSS just meant that the code is open to the world.
  • mpeg 5y ago
    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.
    • foldr 5y ago
      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.
• todd3834 5y ago
  This makes me think about Rails, how successful it was/(is?). Basecamp or formally 37 signals showed how to not only give back to the open source community but also greatly benefit from it. They are funded by their own service and the success of Rails is complimentary. Babel feels like it could live at a big corp with deep pockets or at least a small indie corp with deep pockets. Does it need 3 full time engineers or are there enough volunteers to keep it successful? Maybe incentivizing people to donate in order to achieve milestones that they can see making their companies more money could work too.
  • syl_sau 5y ago
    On OSS projects, I think that we need to find a more robust model than what we have in most cases. To me, the most successful and efficient models when it comes to building open, capable, stable and friendly software (all those four) seems to be delegating all the work to a team of a few but very experienced developers. I'm thinking Blender, GIMP, Csound, Ardour, many video codecs, etc. It also seems all these projects have in common highly technical fields (3D, audio or video), which implies a far steeper learning curves than your average github project. Maybe we could even infer that one solution to drive contributions up is to make it less easy and less ostensibly accessible. I personally pay for Blender because I want them to improve some features. Plus I'm not sure if getting pull requests from random strangers all the time is a good way to take a software in the serious direction -- I'd wager reducing complexity by lowering the amount of people involved and the extensive need for communication is what keeps the core dev team focused, fast and flexible. Anyway, my 2 cents.
• testaaajxjd 5y ago
  11k salary lol
  • esquire_900 5y ago
    I was going to give a similar comment here. I get that this is more common in the US compared to Europe or asian countries, but I'd expect that 5-6k a month would be a far more reasonable salary. You're not in open source for the big payout I assume.. And then again, 2k just to help on the side, that's about minimum wage here for full time employment.
    • dmingod666 5y ago
      Same thoughts. If the dev moved to a nice SEA country he could live a very comfortable life with that kind of money.
      • intev 5y ago
        So in order to work for product you're passionate about and used by millions, instead of being paid well you should consider moving to a different part of the world just to live well? Your work should not be rewarded in proportion to the impact you are having? This is ridiculous. Great engineers should be incentivized to work on open source projects. Would you rather the engineer and project get absorbed into a company like google? Because that's what will eventually happen if the developers don't feel like they are being rewarded for their work. They'd rather go somewhere where they feel more valued.
        • imtringued 5y ago
          I don't see it. Either you run a company and earn money and deserve every penny or you get donations and be thankful for every penny.
        • dmingod666 5y ago
          - Had they figured out how to monetize it, you and me would not have had to try to solve this problem - monetizing is part of long term project sustainability cause time is money and living is not free.. - I don't hold any opinion on how to solve this problem or if they should get paid or not... consider this, 11K is the Yearly / Half yearly salary of a mid-level developers in most parts of Asia, double it and you can hire a decent senior developer for that price.. I can understand the dilemma the person is in, but, making 11k a month, this person is part of the top 10% of the richest people worldwide.. little hard to care too much.
• frobisher 5y ago
  I wonder if the community would be a better source of funding than corporate donors? Something like Gitcoin. Not sure if anyone has any data on this...
  • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    Individuals have a few $ a month to spend on charity like this. Companies, you know, the ones that make millions and billions off of open source software, have a lot more. If I'm ever in a position where I can manage funds or chat with a manager, I'd have my company donate a lot more to OS products.
• moonbug 5y ago
  > we settled on $11,000 per month I think I spot the problem.
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  • intev 5y ago
    Well done Sherlock. You've cracked the case. The authors of an extremely popular product should not be paid well! Let's incentivize them to quit and find a job with FAANG.
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• PaywallBuster 5y ago
  Good work so far but why does an OSS tool have to be supported by Silicon Valley salaries? USA and it's biggest cities are already hugely competitive even for profit making enterprises. Even a company like Mozilla with real commercial partnerships and solid income every year can struggle, let alone a tool which is barely noticeable by 90% of users.
  • axguscbklp 5y ago
    Babel is one of the most popular and widely-used tools in the history of web development. Why should its developers and maintainers not make at least as much money as entry-level Silicon Valley developers?
    • kuschku 5y ago
      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?
      • pjmlp 5y ago
        Why should users of babel feel enttitled not to pay anything at all in contrast with other professions?
        • _dibly 5y ago
          Because it's free?
          • pjmlp 5y ago
            Until it is gone as developers look for a proper source of income. https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/untangling_open_sources_sustainability_problem/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/untangling_open_sourc...
        • 5y ago
• Toutouxc 5y ago
  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?
  • ylyn 5y ago
    Most people aren't even fully aware that Babel is part of their toolchain.
    • WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
      And I thought that such awareness was a part of being good at one's job.
      • majjgepolja 5y ago
        Most people are not good at their job.
      • andrew_ 5y ago
        The dependency chain of modern Node projects is bewildering, and I wouldn't expect most developers to sift through the lockfiles and take note of every single dependency in the tree. (And I acknowledge this is an issue with the ecosystem)
      • rk06 5y ago
        babel is a very popular build tool, so most js build tool authors are aware of it. The problem is that they are very few. With tools like CRA, vue-cli, angualr cli, babel is even less visible.
  • arp242 5y ago
    If you run a company with a monthly labour costs of $100k, and Babel increases efficiency by just 0.1%, then you get $1k of value from Babel every month. I'm no really involved in JS, but many people talk very highly of Babel, and I'm going to guess the actual efficiency increase is more than 0.1% for a lot of companies. $100k/monthly is perhaps 10-25 devs (depending on where it's located). So just $5/month sounds like a spectacular ROI to me; and 5,000 companies doing this already adds up to $50k/month. And that's just Babel, not talking about all the other tools and libraries people use for free; people build literally their entire businesses on stuff like Python. Surely Python provides value, no? Yet how much money flows back to Python from the average business?
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• chris_wot 5y ago
  $11,000 per month? Hang on, what are the average salaries of devs these days?
  • jameshush 5y ago
    $132k/year is the going rate for pretty much anyone with 5+ years experience in California for a non-FAANG job. That's even if you're not amazing. In LA I've gotten offers for $150k when doing job interviews. This is at no name companies. That's not including health insurance and other benefits (e.g. the absolute basics like a company laptop.) I haven't interviewed in a year but I doubt this range has decreased. That's pretty high compared to "average" for the rest of the world yes, but you can get that or more if you have a strong referral with the hiring manager, even in a lower cost of living area. Strong referrals are the key to getting this kind of money outside of California and outside of a FAANG offer.
• cycomanic 5y ago
  I find the comments here fascinating. So the lead developer was paid $11k a month, and somehow many start calling this a problem. Apparently, if you work on OSS you should be working for something slightly above the poverty line. People are comparing it to other salaries, but seem to forget that this salary likely does not include any other benefits (health insurance, stock options ...). I mean he is the lead developer for a "product" that is used by millions of people, what would a person like that earn in industry? Significantly above that salary, even in most of Europe. If we want to create a sustainable OSS infrastructure, we definitely want that developers make a good living from it. But it seems the dominant notion is that developers should donate their time/money and live close to the poverty line, so that companies can rake in billions in profits, without paying for the tools they use.
  • dandellion 5y ago
    I seriously doubt the lead developers of a team of 4 make more than $11k in most of Europe.
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • justmedep 5y ago
      Usually the product of a team of 4 is not that well known nor successful. And you can't really compare the average developer with the three developers mentioned since they are clearly outstanding and could get hired by almost any company.
      • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
        This is the thing I don't think people get. They are treating these devs as though they are just run of the mill when it's highly likely they're very skilled.
      • watwut 5y ago
        The salaries of engineers don't scale that much with success of the product. He can get hired by almost any company, but those companies will pay standard pay for lead developers of a team of 4. (But also no, his salary is not what bankrupts Babel. It is too low for that.)
• tmsbrg 5y ago
  Sorry, but as someone who doesn't live in the USA, I have a hard time feeling bad for someone for not being able to earn "$11,000 per month as a baseline salary for working full-time on open source." Sure, it's nice to be able to make a living from open source based on donations. That doesn't have to be comparable to Silicon Valley salaries that are fueled by huge ad money and other dubious sources. I know many people here are from Silicon Valley so they might even think it's a low salary, but I'd ask you guys to get some perspective. If I know my donation would be used to fund someone's (in my eyes) incredibly high salary, I'd prefer spending it on somewhere where it would have more impact. You know, people who are actually struggling to make ends meet.
  • mssundaram 5y ago
    132k is not that much for a US salary. And besides, I'd rather see the engineers of such an important project be well paid.
    • anshumankmr 5y ago
      It depends on where you live though, right.
    • mattmanser 5y ago
      The median salary for a senior software engineer in the US is $133k. And that'll be heavily skewed upwards by SV, so yes, it is actually quite a big figure, given that it's a charity-type job which generally pay less.
      • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
        > And that'll be heavily skewed upwards by SV That's highly unlikely given how a median is calculated.
      • arp242 5y ago
        I wouldn't consider it a "charity-type job" though. It's a tool that companies are literally using to make money; that's not the same as helping homeless people or working for Oxfam or whatnot.
• akmittal 5y ago
  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 https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 - So donating money because of this post may not be a good idea
  • fireattack 5y ago
    From https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors 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.
  • NiekvdMaas 5y ago
    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=2020-05-01&until=2021-05-01 https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=hzoo&since=202... $110k invoiced: https://opencollective.com/left_pad/transactions https://opencollective.com/left_pad/transactions
    • gnomewascool 5y ago
      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 shepherding other contributors, dealing with issues and PRs, so I'm ignoring them.) [0] https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors
      • ratww 5y ago
• underwater 5y ago
  I work for a startup that benefits from open source. I can and do make the case for spending a lot of money on SaaS products and hiring people. But there is no way in the world I can stand in front of company leadership and ask for money to spend on something that I already get for free. I'd look out of touch with the realities of running a business and the request would be roundly shouted down. If there's some value I can get then it's a much easier sell. For example, if there is a Babel job board then I can choose to use that over alternatives when I next hire. Jed Watson proposed https://budgetforopensource.org/ https://budgetforopensource.org/, which puts this type of thing in the employee perk category so that I can justify it using hiring as a goal. These are things where I can make a business case for spending real dollars, rather than a philosophical argument.
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  • plasma 5y ago
    > But there is no way in the world I can stand in front of > company leadership and ask for money to spend on something > that I already get for free. I'd look out of touch with > the realities of running a business. The request would be > roundly shouted down. I agree, at minimum, the its free but seeking sponsorship model is making it hard. Looking at their Sponsorship options on GitHub [1] I see there's a useful perk at the $2,000/month price point, a Support Tier. It would be interesting to investigate offering "Paid support" for $50-100/month (something easier to put on a development team's corporate credit card), that gives you "priority" in response to GitHub Issues. Something tangible that the company gets back. [1] https://github.com/sponsors/babel?o=esb https://github.com/sponsors/babel?o=esb
    • bsder 5y ago
      Yeah, that jump from $20/month to $500/month is too big. JetBrains asks for $500 per year--that's probably right about the discretionary spend of a decent engineer. $500/month means you're going to have to generate me an invoice and that invokes a whole bunch of corporate machinery that you don't want activated if you want a donation.
• cryptica 5y ago
  This is a genuine problem for all open source projects but I think in this case it's warranted because Babel doesn't add any value to projects. Transpiling new code into old code is an ill-conceived idea; it's not worth the complexity overhead it introduces into the project. These days, I've even run into cases where babel's configs actually prevented me from using new browser features and I could not find documentation online on how to enable it (none of the settings I tried work; maybe it depends on the babel version?)... Kind of Kafkaesque to think that a tool would do the opposite of what it was intended to do. Kind of like many ideas which are forced onto people (in this case riding on top of Facebook's monopolistic network effects), they sound great at first, but they end up making things worse.
• AshleysBrain 5y ago
  It seems to be a recurring problem with open-source/pay-what-you-want services that donations are hard to come by. I think that if you don't have to pay, than about 90% of potential customers who would have paid just won't. Sometimes it's because they think "hey, it's free". But I think in some cases there's even a desire to pay, but the organisation isn't geared for it. For example maybe the company's payment process is just too arduous to go through if you don't have to. Or maybe someone proposes it and is countered with "what's the business case?", which is hard to answer if it's free. I think the answer is just make some kind of optional paid service that some of your bigger customers will need. It might be an anathema to open source folks, but having an optional proprietary add-on, or some kind of paid maintenance service or something like that, may well solve the problem.
• DoctorNick 5y ago
  The ecosystem for for node is literally this goddamn comic from xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ Really, my advice is to start holding the node ecosystem hostage until you get properly compensated. Leftpad 'em.
  • Ayesh 5y ago
    > literally this goddamn comic Isn't this about Daniel, the Curl project maintainer? Don't think curl is used heavily in Node. I think Daniel started Curl in 1997, but if there is one person who thanklessly held a large part of software industry like this, that is Daniel. Such a brilliant and humble person!
    • nallerooth 5y ago
      I'm sure there are a lot of Daniels out there. (The combination of "Nebraska" and "2003" tells me that there's at least one more, since Daniel Stenberg (a.k.a. Mr cURL) is living in Sweden.) And I agree - we all owe him a lot. I'm sending him $5 every month via github sponsorship. That itself will not make him rich, but if all users of cURL did.. ;-)
• tannhaeuser 5y ago
  Babel is used by React, Typescript, Webpack, and other high-profile projects. Should we be worried and return to vanillajs?
• Dah00n 5y ago
  If you have a problem paying a high salary then don't base the company in a high salary area. Any other place would be just as good and way cheaper. Also the origial author says someone is misappropriating money[1] on top of this! They definitely don't deserve more funding before they fix those two problems. 1: https://mobile.twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 https://mobile.twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522
  • wrnr 5y ago
    This seems to be overlooked, I was wondering why the original author is no longer involved. Babel, Rome, Deno, are all transpilers the tech isn't as unique as it once was. Things come and go in JS land, and Babel will go the way of Dodo.js
    • rough-sea 5y ago
      Deno is a full server-side JavaScript VM - it doesn't even solve the same problem as Babel...
      • ericlewis 5y ago
        Technically Deno supports TS and I assume that is a transpilation step to JS. Not sure if they use TSC or their own “compiler” however. But it is baked into Deno at some point.
      • wrnr 5y ago
        Idiot
        • simlevesque 5y ago
          Come on, you were in the right, but now you've lost the argument. This is not the place for this kind of discussion.
          • wrnr 5y ago
• tren 5y ago
  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.
  • tarruda 5y ago
    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.
    • sofixa 5y ago
      $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.
      • snemvalts 5y ago
        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.
        • hiram112 5y ago
          75K EUR / year is a legit salary in Estonia now? Wow, you guys are really catching up fast. I would have assumed former Soviet bloc countries were still down there at $30K or so (even less in Ukraine, Moldova, etc.). Is this something special with Estonia, or are salaries catching up in the rest of Baltics, Poland, etc?
          • snemvalts 5y ago
• lbriner 5y ago
  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 contributor. The obvious solution is to charge a small amount ($10?) for a licence to use on a single site/application. You can't entirely enforce it but with some basic registration process, you could tie a licence to the code so that an internet scanner could potentially find people violating the rules. Minor updates included, major updates cost another $10. If only 500K projects are using it, that is still $5M, which would go some way to helping. I understand that licences can be a problem if the code is/was open source since people might just fork it and use their own version but that is not a 100% easy workaround and requires time and maintenance to keep it up to date.
  • imtringued 5y ago
    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.
    • danuker 5y ago
      Another option is to offer the code for free, but charge for support and a managed instance. I can provide an example: NextCloud. https://nextcloud.com/ https://nextcloud.com/
• heldrida 5y ago
  There's a lot of greedy selfish people out there. This past year I was mostly unemployed, and wasted countless hours, days and weeks, months doing tech interviews. A complete waste of my time that I'll never get back. I live in London and it's stupidly expensive. Although all of my problems, I've kept sending my donations to people, projects to show my support, appreciation, and also charities and family in need. I got some short contract work in-between, luckily, but nothing much.q I think we should give back, have at least some empathy to others and respect the ones that've been here for longer, that are truly talented.
  • ferzul 5y ago
    I don't want to disagree with your sentiment, but it's for the companies who benefit from Babel to donate, not individual techies.
  • runald 5y ago
    For some people, being unemployed (even mostly) means living on the streets and eating scraps of food to get by, so I do not understand what you are trying to signal here when you say can still be generous and donate despite being mostly unemployed. Unless of course, you have a several years worth of savings or a stable source of food and shelter, in which case you being unemployed is irrelevant. I understand the desire and passion to help, but speaking of empathy, some people may have a very different idea of what unemployment means.
• XGeneral 5y ago
  I think companies profiting OSS should really start paying their fair share to pay some permanent workers. It's completely unsustainable for OSS to depend on volunteers
• loremipsium 5y ago
  The salary discussion aside. That's what I have always been ad odds with OSS. Nobody is forcing you to put it up for free. Put a price tag on it an sell it. If it doesn't sell, lower the price. If it still doesn't sell, good. Stop trying to force adoption on software that cannot sustain itself. Nobody ever heard oracle scrambling for cash.
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    that would require a total shift in the industry. closed source isn't different, tons of startup are unsustainable and only vie for adoption
  • mids_hn 5y ago
    Under the OSIs definition of open-source, and under the definition of free software, anyone can buy your software and redistribute it to others for free. This effectively limits you to earning money only off the labor of your work, not the work itself, and makes your business model effectively useless. This is such a huge difference yet the FSF, as always, confuse people (maybe even intentionally) by saying that free software can be commercial. No, it cannot. The services you provide can be, the labor you provide can be, but the software - no. You can remove that freedom to the user. After all, the source is available, it can still be tested for malware, but your work won't be open-source.
    • greggman3 5y ago
      How does open source get money? According to the original GNU Manifesto from the 1980s > All sorts of development can be funded with a Software Tax: The GNU Manifesto arguably concedes OSS won't make money > In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the postscarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming. https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html
  • 5y ago
• wanttobethatkid 5y ago
  Fun Fact: Babel was created by a school kid
  • wanttobethatkid 5y ago
    Come on people, why the down vote. I meant that as the compliment. Look at my user name.
    • nsonha 5y ago
      I think you're downvoted for not having a point relevant to the discussion.
• jillesvangurp 5y ago
  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 category. I make a living using that stuff; I don't mind returning the favor by putting in some time. IMHO this is the most undervalued part of OSS: people just doing the work because they can and because it needs doing. - Consulting and charging better rates by virtue of being involved with something your customers care about and thus being well positioned to provide expert advice on that. Nothing wrong with that of course but it does remove development time from your project. But then eating your own dogfood can be instructive as well. Especially for development tools. Understanding your customers is a lot easier if you are working with them and they are paying you. - Getting hired by a company to work on software. Linus Torvalds is the famous example here. Guido van Rossum is another one. This gets easier the more economically relevant your project becomes. Being involved in and associated with major OSS companies has brand value. Babel is relevant enough that there might be a company or two with some vested interest in using Babel. - Providing perks to paying sponsors in the form of logos on a website, co-branding, conferences, meetups, access to support, etc. Lots of long lived OSS projects survive like this. Conferences are also financed like this. There is no shortage of VC funded companies that need to cozy up to developers that already spend millions on all sorts of stuff to do that. All you need to do is provide them a way to get recognized for that. It's also a great way to build the relationships that you might eventually level up to employment. Your community of professional users is a valuable resource that companies want access to that you can facilitate.
  • nt2h9uh238h 5y ago
    #5: introduce a subscription fee for 'premium' tier or hosting. That works best by far in my opinion.
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    I agree with your categories, but the first category doesn’t seem like “a revenue model” (other than in a null sense).
• 0x000000E2 5y ago
  Eh, my take, Typescript won. Does the same thing as Babel but supports static types and inference in regular JS.
  • WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
    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.
    • 0x000000E2 5y ago
      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 :)
    • filleduchaos 5y ago
      tsc produces ES3, yes.
  • chadlavi 5y ago
    The only thing Babel seems to have a moat around is being react's preferred jsx transpiler
  • swyx 5y ago
    on the contrary - tsc is so slow that most people use babel to strip out types in production.
    • 0x000000E2 5y ago
      Everything is transpired to JS before it hits prod. But yeah it's slow
    • andrew_ 5y ago
      bingo. tsc for dev. sucrase for prod.
• WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  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.
  • mft_ 5y ago
    $5 to enable an emoji?
    • WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
      $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.
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    Looks like you're out $100 then.
    • tehnicaorg 5y ago
      But he should get a part of the upvote money.
• mekkkkkk 5y ago
  In OSS you offer something for free with no guarantees and few strings attached and in return hopefully get public contributions. You might get something on top of that in the form of donations, but trying to project growth, incomes and hires seems rather naive. If that kind of product development is what you want, you better sell a product.
• Tade0 5y ago
  I would have more sympathy for them if they didn't start leaning on core-js two years ago. I get that two implementations of the same thing seem suboptimal, but Denis Pushkarev's, ahem, legal situation proved that sometimes you might want to do that. Also with this move they freed up a lot of resources which previously went into maintaining their own polyfills and still there are problems? Where all that went?
• Traubenfuchs 5y ago
  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.
  • ncallaway 5y ago
    > "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.
• uncomputation 5y ago
  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 https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522
• febeling 5y ago
  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.
• daliwali 5y ago
  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.
• nt2h9uh238h 5y ago
  VueJS and Nuxt are also massively underfunded and are likely some of the highest-impact projects you can fund: https://vuejs.org/support-vuejs/ https://vuejs.org/support-vuejs/
  • 19h 5y ago
    Evan You is getting EUR 14359 (~ $17450) per month via Patreon alone: https://www.patreon.com/evanyou https://www.patreon.com/evanyou. I don't know about "underfunded" but with that you can hire at least 3 full time senior developers in Berlin ..
    • capableweb 5y ago
      + funding received from OpenCollective (annually $123K USD): https://opencollective.com/vuejs https://opencollective.com/vuejs (goes to "a fund with transparent expense models supporting community efforts and events" https://vuejs.org/support-vuejs/#Recurring-Pledges https://vuejs.org/support-vuejs/#Recurring-Pledges)
• dsirola 5y ago
  Do they pay anything to the maintainers of the packages they depend on?
• pjmlp 5y ago
  If you want to make a living out of devtools, sell them for corporations, no freebies.
  • majjgepolja 5y ago
    Found the dude who fucked up borland.
    • pjmlp 5y ago
      Nah, better look elsewhere like dudes that want to be paid but refuse to pay for the work of others.
• pjmlp 5y ago
  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_sources_sustainability_problem/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/untangling_open_sourc...
  • andrew_ 5y ago
    I'd argue all day that it's sustainable. The crux of the issue is scale; at what scale does it cease to be sustainable?
    • pjmlp 5y ago
      When one depends on donations to sustain a family.
• nicolo-ribaudo 5y ago
  Babel maintainer here (one of the two contributors going from $2k/month to $6k/month). It's the first time I write on HN. I saw different comments (here and on Twitter) about how Henry was getting $11k/month from our funds but wasn't doing much for the project, and so I want to share my view of the story. Be careful when you try to evaluate how much someone is working: even if Babel is open source and almost everything we do is on GitHub, simply looking at https://github.com/babel/babel/commits/main https://github.com/babel/babel/commits/main and counting the number of commits for each contributor does *not* tell how much someone is working. One starting point would be to at least check all the activity in the Babel GH organization: for example, you can see that: - I did about 700 contributions so far in 2021 (https://github.com/nicolo-ribaudo?tab=overview&from=2021-01-01&to=2021-05-11&org=babel https://github.com/nicolo-ribaudo?tab=overview&from=2021-01-...). - Jùnliàng did about 500 (https://github.com/nicolo-ribaudo?tab=overview&from=2021-01-01&to=2021-05-11&org=babel https://github.com/nicolo-ribaudo?tab=overview&from=2021-01-...) - Henry did about 160 (https://github.com/hzoo?tab=overview&from=2021-01-01&to=2021-05-11&org=babel https://github.com/hzoo?tab=overview&from=2021-01-01&to=2021...) The number of commits does not reflect the number of contributions, because the "writing code"/"reviewing PRs"/"issues triage"/etc tasks are not equally distributed across the team: for example, I prefer reviewing while others prefer coding. However, even according to these stats Henry is doing less than the other two paid maintainers: again, we cannot just use GH stats to measure how much we do. If you are considering sponsoring us and you want to know what we did or what we'll do, we have a "things we did" page (https://babeljs.io/docs/en/features-timeline https://babeljs.io/docs/en/features-timeline) and a roadmap (https://babeljs.io/docs/en/roadmap https://babeljs.io/docs/en/roadmap), but feel free to directly reach out to us and ask what we are working on or what we plan to do. Henry is the one who contacts companies trying to explain to them why they should support us, the one who gives most talks at their internal events: he's the one working on fundraising for the team. Even without him, many companies would probably donate, but I don't think we would have ever reached the current levels that enabled us to pay a small team. That said, there was a big problem that no one in the team was talking about: whilst we all knew that Henry was not "doing nothing", I felt that I deserved more than just one fifth (or more than one fourth, since Henry decreased what he was taking) of Henry's salary. What I was doing wasn't _less valuable_ than what Henry was doing. When some people reached out to me about it, I realized that this feeling was shared by other people in the OSS community. I thus decided to talk with the team about it: it was hard for me to do so, because I consider everyone in the team a friend and it's hard to tell a friend "you should earn less because I want to earn more". However, everyone in the team was receptive to my arguments and everyone agreed that we should have re-assessed our salaries. The main reason that Henry was earning more was that initially he was the only paid contributor, and when the remainder of us wanted to be paid, we just divided the remaining incoming money. We have now rebalanced how funds are distributed, and we will keep communicating between us how we divide the funds, so that no one in the team will feel like there is some kind of injustice in future. When we settled on $6k/month I was asked by a team member: "Do you think this is the right amount of money for you, or you might still not be happy about it in the future?". I can't speak for the future me, but for now I don't think I "need", "deserve" or "want" to earn more than the other paid team members. If we get enough money to pay the three of us $6k/month, my next goal would be to expand the number of paid people rather than paying ourselves more (but that's a discussion we'll have as a team when we'll have more money). --- Also, to address the comments about "earning X is too much" and "earning X is too low". I don't have a universal answer for "what is the right salary for working on OSS?", and I see that there are people arguing for both sides. If it helps to put things in perspective: this isn't a "side project" for any of the paid maintainers. We don't work 40 hours/week, but we still dedicate a big amount of time to the project. I can only speak for me, but: - I'm a student, and I'll graduate this summer. I currently have 12 hours of classes per week, + some time to study and to work on my final project. - I dedicate about 20-30 hours per week to Babel. It's not always the same: sometimes it's less, sometimes it's more. It depends on what I'm working on for Babel, and on how much I have to do for university each week. - I don't know if it's the same all over the world, but (at least in the few countries in which I know how it works) if a company hires you for $6k/month gross, the actual cost for the company is more. Since from a legal perspective we are self-employed, $6k/month is the actual cost taken from our balance.
• 11235813213455 5y ago
  Ideally we would need Babel less and less, but kudos to Henry and others contributors, they are making cool stuff (like ecma proposals implementations)
• capableweb 5y ago
  > 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.
  • ChrisRR 5y ago
    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
    • varispeed 5y ago
      > $132,000 is almost double my salary is the UK. If that's true, then you should probably have a word with your employer. Typical dev pay is 80k (~$120k) or twice as that if contracted.
      • RReverser 5y ago
        That's nowhere typical, even in London you'll find that only in higher-end companies.
      • pmlnr 5y ago
• belatw 5y ago
  Hacker News: Raw raw, libertarian objectivist open market capitalist fetishm for the win!!!! Also crab-ass Hacker News commenters: how dare those commies make more than minimum wage writing open source software!?!?!?
  • ChrisRR 5y ago
    Minimum wage in the US would earn you about $21k for a full time job. That's objectively nowhere near $130k
    • belatw 5y ago
      You’re missing my point pretty hard. Most of the people getting outraged about $130k are the same people ready to defend Musk and Bezo’s billions. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
• chadlavi 5y ago
  If React had their own jsx transpiler Babel would be irrelevant.
• MangoCoffee 5y ago
  this is why i preferred Corporation backed open source project like Microsoft's VS code. MSFT fund it. no drama.
  • danuker 5y ago
    Instead you get Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
  • oneepic 5y ago
    Yes, instead MSFT has quite a few dead/"reprioritized" projects. That drama probably happened internally, you just didn't see it play out in a bunch of tweets. I'm not sure many strong/passionate people outside MSFT feel motivated to contribute to MSFT open source. Especially to do work that someone already gets paid for, and might get a huge bonus from their boss if the project is a success. I would argue non-corp-backed projects are the ones which get the passionate contributors and community.
    • drw85 5y ago
      Many OS projects get contributions from people using them at work. They use their work time paid for by their employer to report or fix bugs that they encountered while using them in development.
• incrudible 5y ago
  Babel may be used by millions, but it arguably shouldn't be. Abandon it, let it collapse. The project is aptly named for that fate.
  • zbentley 5y ago
    Why do you think that? I'm curious, not incredulous. I haven't worked on JS/used Babel in more than a year.
• FiberBundle 5y ago
  This 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 of their maintainers have, which pretty much dwarfs the skill sets of people in other well paid professions such as lawyers or doctors, it's frankly ridiculous that they are expected to work for significantly less money. Not to mention that the abstractions some of these people wrote basically allow a significant number of people to enter the industry in the first place.
  • ForHackernews 5y ago
    Just license your software under the GPL, then corporations can't take and use it without contributing back. It's hard for me to feel sympathetic for people who deliberately sign up for a model that encourages free-riding and then complain about it.
    • corty 5y ago
      So much this. Earning money with "do whatever"-style licenses like BSD or MIT is bound to fail. Use GPL and sell commercial licenses on the side.
    • thrower123 5y ago
      What exactly would the benefit of licencing a tool like Babel under GPL be? It would be completely moot. Using a GPL transpiler isn't going to confer GPL virally onto the code that you run through it.
      • ForHackernews 5y ago
        It would mean big greedy companies with skittish legal departments would be forbidden from using it without paying for a commercial license.
  • 5y ago
• sktrdie 5y ago
  Regarding open source not getting funding: It’s been the most powerful source of volunteering work precisely because there was no money tainting or inducing work on to people. It’s a true example that society can work without capitalism. Let’s please not change that.
• dboreham 5y ago
  Because there is no open source business model.
• Corrado 5y ago
  On the subject of paying OSS projects, it makes me think that the idea of a part-time OSS "employee" might be a good one. Almost all businesses benefit from OSS but almost none of them pay back to the community. What if a business budgeted for a part-time employee and just sent the money to the OSS community at large. I mean, that "employee" IS helping and develop software, from a certain point of view. Without that work their other employees would have to work much more to reach the same output. I wonder how virtual employees would work for taxes. Maybe the government could offer a discount for them. It would be cheaper for a company than a "real" employee. No health care, no social security, no office or equipment; just a salary.
• serverholic 5y ago
  I honestly didn't even know Babel ran off donations. Perhaps they can make that more obvious on their website.
• nwsm 5y ago
  Here's [0] a blunt take on the situation by Sebastian McKenzie, who left Babel to start Rome Tools. He blames the full time salary of Henry, who he doesn't think contributed enough. [0] https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522
  • andrew_ 5y ago
    And a rebuttal by Evan You, absolutely torching Seb for being a massive hypocrite https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1392096427313147908 https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1392096427313147908
    • adamrezich 5y ago
      can you explain what makes this statement an "absolute torching?" I must be missing something
    • nwsm 5y ago
      Interestingly, the article mentions that Evan was an inspiration/mentor for Henry.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• simlevesque 5y ago
  Babel is already obselete. I'll avoid it for the rest of my life. Can't believe the time I wasted before using esbuild.
• codegobrrr 5y ago
  Haha code go brr
• moralestapia 5y ago
  Feels very dishonest from Sebastian to try to wash his hands from this while, in his own words, "funds were misallocated for years" [1]. You can't have that kind of thing happening for years and just "don't notice" nor "do anything about it". IMO, it's quite obvious that not only did he knew, but he was also complicit in the whole thing. The only reason they're venting this now is because they ran out of money, if some wealthy sponsor had come and gave them a few million, their sudden spark of morality wouldn't have realized. Reminds me of Ruth Madoff stating that she "had no idea" [2] that her husband was running a multibillion dollar scam business for decades. Like, come on, who is going to believe that. 1: https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 2: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/madoff-s-wife-had-no-idea-scam-6255447.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/madoff-s-w...
• marsdepinski 5y ago
  Because it's not a business.
• djrconcepts 5y ago
  Savage of Sebastian to call out Henry like that on twitter. Are you on drugs or something? https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 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 terribly difficult one for most all of us to get through this pandemic. Not a good look for you Sebastian. Feels like you are looking for a place to point blame and unfortunately decided to direct that blame in Henry's direction. Henry Zhu is a great developer and contributor. Really deserves better than this.
  • capableweb 5y ago
    I might agree with your overall point but there is no reason for the name calling, this is not Twitter.
  • R0b0t1 5y ago
    He is levying accusations that money is, effectively, being stolen. That is not polite but if he genuinely believes it to be true, you are suggesting he remain quiet instead?
    • aniforprez 5y ago
      He is welcome to open a channel with Babel privately and, if unaddressed, make a proper statement about it. Blasting someone by using GitHub contributions as KPI on Twitter is highly unprofessional and awful behaviour
      • R0b0t1 5y ago
        It seems it has gone past that. If it is an accusation of theft (or what he perceives to be theft) he is surely allowed to say it publicly. You can still give them both the benefit of the doubt. You must have never talked to someone who can't be reasoned with. It is best to do some of these things in public. The conception of libel that, say, the UK has is quaint and open to abuse. No such issue in the US. I agree there's problems with looking at the proposed KPI but that does not mean it is pointless to speak up. For the vast majority of people you could ask about this, pulling that kind of money from a nonprofit is ridiculous.
• marsven_422 5y ago
  $11k is an unachievable salary in Sweden, as a engineer you will NEVER get paid that mutch.
• wildermuthn 5y ago
  Babel has always struck me as the lowest-quality highest-profile tool that exists in the JS ecosystem. Their website and documentation are unorganized and unhelpful beyond the most basic usage — transpiring JSX. I had some thought of implementing threading operators (like Clojure), and was happy to see existing proposals. But then I went searching for the implementation of those proposals and subsequent PRs and such. As my ultimately fruitless search dragged on, I kept saying to myself, “Who is in charge of this shit-show?” Well, I finally have my answer. No one is in charge. It seems to me that Babel’s survival hinges upon one decision at Facebook to either create their own JSX transpiler or to switch from Babel to something else.
• KingOfCoders 5y ago
  I always feel like Babel is forced on me because of tutorials, setups, examples and frameworks. I don't want it.
• deleted 5y ago
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  • cjaybo 5y ago
    I'm of the opinion that these issues are no one's business but the folks involved with Babel. Taking this situation to Twitter is childish, and speaks volumes about the author and their interpersonal skills (or their desire to try and tilt the scales for their new startup or whatever). Given that, your comment seems incredibly unnecessary, and pretty disrespectful to someone you call your friend. It adds very little to the discussion while revealing personal details about the person and their life situation that no one here needs to be privy to. I'm struggling to see the motivation for sharing this publicly. Surely if your intention was to communicate those last few sentences to Henry, you could have have done so directly?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • warty 5y ago
    For the sake of Henry's privacy this should not have been posted.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• abxytg 5y ago
  Jesus this is ugly. did any confirm, for instance, that both of Henry's parent's are still alive etc. We just had a fucking global pandemic. Maybe github contribs isn't an awesome metric right now.
• barefeg 5y ago
  How come European developers can do full time development with 5k per month or less? Is it less taxes, cheaper cities? Who knows,...
• 13daug 5y ago
  So this Bible thing is got the short cut of getting
• jlhwung 5y ago
  I am Jùnliàng, a Babel contributor since 2019. I would like to share my perspective here. GH is a platform where people collaborate on developing softwares, so the contribution graph is engineering-biased. But operating an OSS, especially like Babel which is serving millions, is just like running a company. In a company we have different roles, none of roles is more important than the others. In Babel team, Henry spends most time on reaching out to contacts in companies, giving talks, syncing with different projects in the ecosystem, offering mentorship to junior contributors like me. None of these is visible on GH but they are vital to sustain the project, to attract both new company sponsors and contributors. 2020 is a hard time for any reasons. Before we talk about funding with team, Henry has already voluntarily pooled less money ($11k to $8k) and another long-time core contributor Brian (https://github.com/existentialism https://github.com/existentialism) stopped taking money. While this helped bumped up our balance, everyone taking less is a dangerous signal to an OSS: maintainers constantly fighting with financial insecurity may burn out or stop maintaining in order to recover from the mental pressure about "I am responsible for this". I maintained small side projects like (https://github.com/JLHwung/postcss-font-family-system-ui https://github.com/JLHwung/postcss-font-family-system-ui), where the feature set is frozen and most maintenance works can be automated by bots. This is quite unlike Babel: The feature is open-ended because the language is evolving. Various edge cases should be take cared. Tradeoffs between spec compliance and output code size should be made. It is not a side project that I can dedicate part time efforts like 10hrs/week to work on. Speaking for myself, I spend around 40hrs/week to meet my own productivity requirements. I don't think I deserve more than other paid team members because everyone has different time constraints and we don't track work time meticulously. To avoid burn-out and not let Babel consume all my energy, I spare some time on encoding Chinese characters in Unicode, which, just like Babel, has profound impacts on ecosystem but long overlooked and underfunded. I helped submitted hundreds on characters in IRGN2487 (https://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/irg56/IRGN2487UKData002.pdf https://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/irg56/IRGN2487UKData...).
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• morelisp 5y ago
  Because it fucking sucks.
• mkl95 5y ago
  Surely $130k a year cannot be that much for a tool used by millions of people? Is someone in charge of developing a business model and talking to investors at Babel?
• gitowiec 5y ago
  What for is Babel? I know it's a transpiler, but who uses it now? Since I work with fronted, backend and JS (3 years now) I use only Typescript. Babel is like ancient technology for me. Should be deprecated soon, no need to clog the bandwidth.
• feross 5y ago
  > There’s a clear answer to Babel’s funding woes: sell the new version of Babel, Babel 8. At least until Babel 9 comes out. Then sell Babel 9. https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/05/11/Sell-Babel-8.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/05/11/Sell-Babel-8.html
• bagol 5y ago
  > For now, Nicolò, Henry, and Jùnliàng will all be paid a temporary rate of $6,000 per month. Am I reading correctly? 6K USD per month for a single developer? With that amount of salary, you could build a house within 3 months in my place.
  • bubakk 5y ago
    Are you implying that the maintainers of Babel should be paid less than 6K USD a month? Should developers anywhere in the world be paid more than what can build a house in 3 months "at your place"?
• vietvu 5y ago
  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?
• giardini 5y ago
  Is there any commercial alternative to Babel?