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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

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.
- wildpeaks 5y ago
  I successfully removed it years ago because Typescript replaced everything I was using Babel for, things even build way faster and I even got Intellisense autocompletion and refactoring as bonus.
  - nsonha 5y ago
    I doubt typescript is faster than babel with all the static analysis it does. In fact it's typical for projects to use typescript as a check in CI and actually build with babel, for speed. Fast alternatives to babel are things like esbuild and swc
    - wildpeaks 5y ago
      Typechecks are optional, just use transpile-only mode for the build: it merely removes the type annotations, it's fast. You can have the best of both worlds: Intellisense based on types in the editor yet fast transpile in the build.
amelius 5y ago
The inventors of our economic system didn't conceive of people giving away valuable stuff for free.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  Our economic systems weren’t invented. They’re all hacks on top of hacks on top of hacks. Every economic theorist of note is well aware of that and they always have been. Everyone who has tried to build a new complex system from scratch has failed. Usually they’ve failed completely but occasionally they’ve gotten something functional at the end, but not what they designed. I’m reasonably confident every economist knows people give stuff away for free but it’s certainly been true since Adam Smith, whose Theory of the Moral Sentiments is chock full of psychological and philosophical insight.
  - amelius 5y ago
    > Everyone who has tried to build a new complex system from scratch has failed. Has anyone tried to design an economic system recently, based on tools from the information age?
    - the_lonely_road 5y ago
      China would probably be the best case study available, but they are of course notoriously difficult to get reliable data about. DeFi (Ethereum Decentralized Finance) would be the next best case study but finding someone capable of wading through all of the scams to find the actual projects is going to be almost as hard as getting reliable data out of China.
hnbad 5y ago
Your last sentence is worth emphasizing. Many people misunderstand the tragedy of the commons as an argument why a commons can't work, but the only possible conclusion is that the commons can't work under the current economic system (and specifically the dominant school of economic thought of the past half century). The usual example given is a pasture shared by shepherds who are each going to optimize their use of the pasture by getting more sheep even if it means exceeding the sustainable capacity of the pasture, eventually killing it for everyone. Yet the real world shows that communal pastures have existed for centuries in rural communities just fine. The difference is that these pastures aren't used "optimally" and the shepherds aren't economically "rational actors" within the current economic system, though they are increasingly being pressured into that by the dominant system surrounding them. The tragedy of the commons is not a warning about the unsustainability of a commons, it's a warning about the logical consequence of our dominant economic system.
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
  Capitalism represents a solution to the tragedy of the commons: Privatize it. You guys are interpreting this as a takedown of capitalism when it's the exact opposite. Capitalism represents a solution to this issue. You might not like that solution, but this circumstance just goes to show that naive attempts to reinvent capitalism are unlikely to work.
  - orwin 5y ago
    But you can't privatize the air? Also, do you think the indian company was a perfect example of why capitalism should not involve itself with common goods? Unless you think it isnt a capitalist company despite presenting all aspect of it (including regulatory capture and threats of violence against slaves/employees).
  - GlobalFrog 5y ago
    Contrarily to the common claim of capitalism, this wouldn’t be an optimal solution. Let’s say there are ten shepherds sharing the fields. You privatize it and in a short amount of time, there will be one shepherd left, ultra rich, and nine unemployed shepherds. So capitalism is a good system to optimize the value of the field, not its value for society.
qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
In this case the problem would actually be solved if the project was a bit more capitalist and charged money for usage, no? This isn't capitalism failing, it's Burning Man gift economy type stuff failing.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  I never understand the reluctance to charge for software amongst this community. Especially when you consider projects like Babel are mostly being used in commercial environments. Why do people expect that their employer should get this stuff for free or that the developer should have to beg for a few crumbs at the end of the month.
  - TheAceOfHearts 5y ago
    I really like the model where tools are free for educational, open-source, and other non-commercial uses. I've ended up paying for software libraries because I was first able to try them out for free in school and other personal projects. One issue with fixed pricing or licensing is that it can lock out people in developing countries from participating. A few hundred dollars is nothing for a San Francisco based company but it might be a huge amount for someone in Latin America. How many great ideas fail to take off due to insufficient access to funding? In recent years game engines have been doing an interesting job at exploring this space. You can use stuff like Unity or Unreal and the price depends on how much money you're making. I think something similar is done in the mobile app store ecosystems as well.
  - 5560675260 5y ago
    For many OSS is a breath of fresh air. A project where you're in charge, free to set your own goals and deadlines. Free to tinker and experiment. Free to say "do it yourself" when someone gets a wrong idea and goes against your creative vision. Money create exactly the kind of obligations you're running away from. Even if it's not demanded, you're still feel pressure to provide support, make your code fit for some purpose. And for what? Some chump change? > Why do people expect that their employer should get this stuff for free Because it's offered for free. > developer should have to beg for a few crumbs They shouldn't. Developers unhappy with their financial situation should pick up some contractual work or offer their product as SaaS.
greenpresident 5y ago
I’d classify it as a public goods problem. The difference is rivalry in consumption. You compete over fishing grounds but you don’t compete over use of Babel. It makes a difference in user strategy too: with the tragedy of the commons, your personal marginal gain is higher than the individual share of the social cost. This leads to overconsumption. In a public goods problem, you fully benefit without contributing. As a result, you maximize utility by not contributing. There is also an incentive to understate the the utility you derive from the public good in order to avoid being forced to pay, making it hard to estimate the utility generated by the public good. It’s also called the freerider problem.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Thanks for your analysis but isn't the share of the social cost the fact that Babel will stop updating when these people can't support themselves? It's just delayed in this case, no?
  - jsmith99 5y ago
    When something is too obviously a good thing, there is a game of 'chicken' where no one feels the need to contribute because the item is so obviously advantageous they are sure someone else will. At the extreme, this is the opposite of a normal public good, which are characterised by a cost above any individual's marginal utility. Here, there are any number of organisations who probably have marginal utility from Babel above the cost of provision. See the snowdrift dilemma. Prisoner's dilemma or tragedy of commons has a dominant strategy (defect), but chicken does not - your best strategy is to do the opposite to the other.
culturestate 5y ago
> Unless I was flush with cash, I probably wouldn't donate from company funds if I were an entrepreneur. I specifically budget a small amount (~$100/mo) of company cash for this purpose. Some of it's donated to OSS, and some if it goes to pay for low-cost freemium products where we don't necessarily need the premium features but want to support the team[1]. I stole this idea from someone else so I know I'm not the only one, but more entrepreneurs really should do it. 1. https://mailsac.com/ https://mailsac.com/ is a good example where our usage would fit fine in the free tier but we subscribe anyway.
emilsedgh 5y ago
While I agree with your general point, I still think crowd sourcing open source projects is still doable. All we need is to centralize it. I work for a very small startup that uses hundreds of big or small open source projects. And we never pay a penny for any of them. And I don't think I can go to my boss and ask for a meaningful contributions to any of these. We are not profitable and there's no reward for that contribution. However, if there was a way for me to subscribe to micro payments for a few projects, given some easy trivial incentive, we definitely would've. I can easily subscribe to $5/m payments to like 5-10 projects that we use. Would've meant nothing for us. But economics of scale would've kicked in for them. Allow $1-10 monthly subscriptions, give the backers a badge or something they can use when hiring. Maybe show a badge next to their usernames on github or whatever. Maybe show a badge to the issues the backers create so they get a sense of priority. slowly you can build a small habit of people/companies subscribing small amounts to projects they use. If there was such small incentives I would've immediately subscribed $5/m to following project: * Nodejs * Postgres * Node-Pg * Rabbit MQ * Grapesjs * Esbuild * Webpack (Which I badly need to improve it's killing us everyday) * Dokku * Metabase * MJML It's in my company's benefit for each of these to survive/thrive and keep improving. I am afraid that once/if some of them stop that'll hurt us. $5/m and potentially getting some attention from maintainers (in smaller ones) if we had issues would be enough of an incentive for these all. The incentives I suggest: * Badges on Issue tracking on the issues created by backers * Badges next to usernames on Slack/Discord/Irc/Whatever * Badges on Github profiles for backers An example: Docker. They started rate limiting their free tier, asking for $5/m. I don't care about the $5/m at all. My biggest problem with that change was not the $5/m, but the time I had to spend on our different tools setting up auth environment variables.
- gioele 5y ago
  > If there was such small incentives I would've immediately subscribed $5/m to following project: Nodejs, Postgres, Node-Pg, [...] Who would receive that money? Only the core developers? Anybody with "commit access"? In which share? Will it detract voluntary contributions? How should other companies working on the same code-base be treated? Are they allowed to contribute at all? Do they get some shares of the funds? All these questions (and many others) that have been discussed in the Debian project for a long time and nobody has yet found an answer that is acceptable to everybody. Some sources: * "Debian + Dunc-Tank.org = dissent" (2006) https://lwn.net/Articles/201488/ https://lwn.net/Articles/201488/ * "Paying (some) Debian developers" (2019) https://lwn.net/Articles/790954/ https://lwn.net/Articles/790954/ * "DPL: Debian project has plenty of money but not enough developers" (2020) https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/10/debian_project_address/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/10/debian_project_addres...
guerrilla 5y ago
The first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics worked on studying systems where the tragedy of the commons does not hold and determining under which conditions[1] such arrangements do work. Adopting open source to that system seems like a very difficult task to me though. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Design_principles_for_Common_Pool_Resource_(CPR)_institution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Design_principle...
jwr 5y ago
> 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 this, the ecosystem would be healthy. I'm happy to see that at least the Clojure community is very mature and this approach is rather common. It is in my best interest and it does make sense: I rely on those libraries, I want them to be maintained. And if they get abandoned, I will bear the very significant cost of rewrites.
- bengale 5y ago
  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 allow a few to carry them. It makes the idea of running these projects on sponsorships seem unsustainable.
  - jwr 5y ago
    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.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      I agree in general with your comment, but even in your example, is donating to exactly the top 8 clearly the right thing? Why not 5, or 13, or numbers 6-15 (figuring that 1-5 are adequately funded by others)?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
I was just thinking how messed up it is that basically companies can take those expenses off their taxes and they still don't contribute, but then I was thinking - do they think that if there was a healthy ecosystem then they would create problems to employ people because the healthy open source community is then another competitor for top quality talent.

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.
wildpeaks 5y ago
I successfully removed it years ago because Typescript replaced everything I was using Babel for, things even build way faster and I even got Intellisense autocompletion and refactoring as bonus.
- nsonha 5y ago
  I doubt typescript is faster than babel with all the static analysis it does. In fact it's typical for projects to use typescript as a check in CI and actually build with babel, for speed. Fast alternatives to babel are things like esbuild and swc
  - wildpeaks 5y ago
    Typechecks are optional, just use transpile-only mode for the build: it merely removes the type annotations, it's fast. You can have the best of both worlds: Intellisense based on types in the editor yet fast transpile in the build.

amelius 5y ago

The inventors of our economic system didn't conceive of people giving away valuable stuff for free.

barry-cotter 5y ago
Our economic systems weren’t invented. They’re all hacks on top of hacks on top of hacks. Every economic theorist of note is well aware of that and they always have been. Everyone who has tried to build a new complex system from scratch has failed. Usually they’ve failed completely but occasionally they’ve gotten something functional at the end, but not what they designed. I’m reasonably confident every economist knows people give stuff away for free but it’s certainly been true since Adam Smith, whose Theory of the Moral Sentiments is chock full of psychological and philosophical insight.
- amelius 5y ago
  > Everyone who has tried to build a new complex system from scratch has failed. Has anyone tried to design an economic system recently, based on tools from the information age?
  - the_lonely_road 5y ago
    China would probably be the best case study available, but they are of course notoriously difficult to get reliable data about. DeFi (Ethereum Decentralized Finance) would be the next best case study but finding someone capable of wading through all of the scams to find the actual projects is going to be almost as hard as getting reliable data out of China.

hnbad 5y ago

Your last sentence is worth emphasizing. Many people misunderstand the tragedy of the commons as an argument why a commons can't work, but the only possible conclusion is that the commons can't work under the current economic system (and specifically the dominant school of economic thought of the past half century). The usual example given is a pasture shared by shepherds who are each going to optimize their use of the pasture by getting more sheep even if it means exceeding the sustainable capacity of the pasture, eventually killing it for everyone. Yet the real world shows that communal pastures have existed for centuries in rural communities just fine. The difference is that these pastures aren't used "optimally" and the shepherds aren't economically "rational actors" within the current economic system, though they are increasingly being pressured into that by the dominant system surrounding them. The tragedy of the commons is not a warning about the unsustainability of a commons, it's a warning about the logical consequence of our dominant economic system.

qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
Capitalism represents a solution to the tragedy of the commons: Privatize it. You guys are interpreting this as a takedown of capitalism when it's the exact opposite. Capitalism represents a solution to this issue. You might not like that solution, but this circumstance just goes to show that naive attempts to reinvent capitalism are unlikely to work.
- orwin 5y ago
  But you can't privatize the air? Also, do you think the indian company was a perfect example of why capitalism should not involve itself with common goods? Unless you think it isnt a capitalist company despite presenting all aspect of it (including regulatory capture and threats of violence against slaves/employees).
- GlobalFrog 5y ago
  Contrarily to the common claim of capitalism, this wouldn’t be an optimal solution. Let’s say there are ten shepherds sharing the fields. You privatize it and in a short amount of time, there will be one shepherd left, ultra rich, and nine unemployed shepherds. So capitalism is a good system to optimize the value of the field, not its value for society.

qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago

In this case the problem would actually be solved if the project was a bit more capitalist and charged money for usage, no? This isn't capitalism failing, it's Burning Man gift economy type stuff failing.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
I never understand the reluctance to charge for software amongst this community. Especially when you consider projects like Babel are mostly being used in commercial environments. Why do people expect that their employer should get this stuff for free or that the developer should have to beg for a few crumbs at the end of the month.
- TheAceOfHearts 5y ago
  I really like the model where tools are free for educational, open-source, and other non-commercial uses. I've ended up paying for software libraries because I was first able to try them out for free in school and other personal projects. One issue with fixed pricing or licensing is that it can lock out people in developing countries from participating. A few hundred dollars is nothing for a San Francisco based company but it might be a huge amount for someone in Latin America. How many great ideas fail to take off due to insufficient access to funding? In recent years game engines have been doing an interesting job at exploring this space. You can use stuff like Unity or Unreal and the price depends on how much money you're making. I think something similar is done in the mobile app store ecosystems as well.
- 5560675260 5y ago
  For many OSS is a breath of fresh air. A project where you're in charge, free to set your own goals and deadlines. Free to tinker and experiment. Free to say "do it yourself" when someone gets a wrong idea and goes against your creative vision. Money create exactly the kind of obligations you're running away from. Even if it's not demanded, you're still feel pressure to provide support, make your code fit for some purpose. And for what? Some chump change? > Why do people expect that their employer should get this stuff for free Because it's offered for free. > developer should have to beg for a few crumbs They shouldn't. Developers unhappy with their financial situation should pick up some contractual work or offer their product as SaaS.

greenpresident 5y ago

I’d classify it as a public goods problem. The difference is rivalry in consumption. You compete over fishing grounds but you don’t compete over use of Babel. It makes a difference in user strategy too: with the tragedy of the commons, your personal marginal gain is higher than the individual share of the social cost. This leads to overconsumption. In a public goods problem, you fully benefit without contributing. As a result, you maximize utility by not contributing. There is also an incentive to understate the the utility you derive from the public good in order to avoid being forced to pay, making it hard to estimate the utility generated by the public good. It’s also called the freerider problem.

guerrilla 5y ago
Thanks for your analysis but isn't the share of the social cost the fact that Babel will stop updating when these people can't support themselves? It's just delayed in this case, no?
- jsmith99 5y ago
  When something is too obviously a good thing, there is a game of 'chicken' where no one feels the need to contribute because the item is so obviously advantageous they are sure someone else will. At the extreme, this is the opposite of a normal public good, which are characterised by a cost above any individual's marginal utility. Here, there are any number of organisations who probably have marginal utility from Babel above the cost of provision. See the snowdrift dilemma. Prisoner's dilemma or tragedy of commons has a dominant strategy (defect), but chicken does not - your best strategy is to do the opposite to the other.

culturestate 5y ago

> Unless I was flush with cash, I probably wouldn't donate from company funds if I were an entrepreneur. I specifically budget a small amount (~$100/mo) of company cash for this purpose. Some of it's donated to OSS, and some if it goes to pay for low-cost freemium products where we don't necessarily need the premium features but want to support the team[1]. I stole this idea from someone else so I know I'm not the only one, but more entrepreneurs really should do it. 1. https://mailsac.com/ https://mailsac.com/ is a good example where our usage would fit fine in the free tier but we subscribe anyway.

emilsedgh 5y ago

While I agree with your general point, I still think crowd sourcing open source projects is still doable. All we need is to centralize it. I work for a very small startup that uses hundreds of big or small open source projects. And we never pay a penny for any of them. And I don't think I can go to my boss and ask for a meaningful contributions to any of these. We are not profitable and there's no reward for that contribution. However, if there was a way for me to subscribe to micro payments for a few projects, given some easy trivial incentive, we definitely would've. I can easily subscribe to $5/m payments to like 5-10 projects that we use. Would've meant nothing for us. But economics of scale would've kicked in for them. Allow $1-10 monthly subscriptions, give the backers a badge or something they can use when hiring. Maybe show a badge next to their usernames on github or whatever. Maybe show a badge to the issues the backers create so they get a sense of priority. slowly you can build a small habit of people/companies subscribing small amounts to projects they use. If there was such small incentives I would've immediately subscribed $5/m to following project: * Nodejs * Postgres * Node-Pg * Rabbit MQ * Grapesjs * Esbuild * Webpack (Which I badly need to improve it's killing us everyday) * Dokku * Metabase * MJML It's in my company's benefit for each of these to survive/thrive and keep improving. I am afraid that once/if some of them stop that'll hurt us. $5/m and potentially getting some attention from maintainers (in smaller ones) if we had issues would be enough of an incentive for these all. The incentives I suggest: * Badges on Issue tracking on the issues created by backers * Badges next to usernames on Slack/Discord/Irc/Whatever * Badges on Github profiles for backers An example: Docker. They started rate limiting their free tier, asking for $5/m. I don't care about the $5/m at all. My biggest problem with that change was not the $5/m, but the time I had to spend on our different tools setting up auth environment variables.

gioele 5y ago
> If there was such small incentives I would've immediately subscribed $5/m to following project: Nodejs, Postgres, Node-Pg, [...] Who would receive that money? Only the core developers? Anybody with "commit access"? In which share? Will it detract voluntary contributions? How should other companies working on the same code-base be treated? Are they allowed to contribute at all? Do they get some shares of the funds? All these questions (and many others) that have been discussed in the Debian project for a long time and nobody has yet found an answer that is acceptable to everybody. Some sources: * "Debian + Dunc-Tank.org = dissent" (2006) https://lwn.net/Articles/201488/ https://lwn.net/Articles/201488/ * "Paying (some) Debian developers" (2019) https://lwn.net/Articles/790954/ https://lwn.net/Articles/790954/ * "DPL: Debian project has plenty of money but not enough developers" (2020) https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/10/debian_project_address/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/10/debian_project_addres...

guerrilla 5y ago

The first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics worked on studying systems where the tragedy of the commons does not hold and determining under which conditions[1] such arrangements do work. Adopting open source to that system seems like a very difficult task to me though. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Design_principles_for_Common_Pool_Resource_(CPR)_institution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Design_principle...

jwr 5y ago

> 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 this, the ecosystem would be healthy. I'm happy to see that at least the Clojure community is very mature and this approach is rather common. It is in my best interest and it does make sense: I rely on those libraries, I want them to be maintained. And if they get abandoned, I will bear the very significant cost of rewrites.

bengale 5y ago
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 allow a few to carry them. It makes the idea of running these projects on sponsorships seem unsustainable.
- jwr 5y ago
  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.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I agree in general with your comment, but even in your example, is donating to exactly the top 8 clearly the right thing? Why not 5, or 13, or numbers 6-15 (figuring that 1-5 are adequately funded by others)?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

I was just thinking how messed up it is that basically companies can take those expenses off their taxes and they still don't contribute, but then I was thinking - do they think that if there was a healthy ecosystem then they would create problems to employ people because the healthy open source community is then another competitor for top quality talent.