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>But the amount of funding they're getting is scraps from any of these organizations that, I'm sure, get way more than $24K/year value from Babel It's hard to

>But the amount of funding they're getting is scraps from any of these organizations that, I'm sure, get way more than $24K/year value from Babel It's hard to measure the value it provides, but generally thats a weird way to look at things that are open sourced. If they wanted their fair share of the profits, they could've chosen a different license, or sold the product.

geofft 5y ago
I'm not talking about fair share of the profits - the OSS project, I hope, has no profits. Babel, in particular, is a project that's primarily interesting to software development companies. It's not consumer-facing software like Signal or Firefox or GNOME or whatever. It's not the logic for a self-driving car or a pacemaker. It's a tool that's for software developers who want to write in one version of JavaScript and have code run in an environment that expects another version of JavaScript. I would agree with you for things like Signal or Firefox - that while there's theoretically a monetary value for me being able to use them, it's difficult and weird to pin down that number, and it's a social good to have them available for free. But there's a very non-theoretical monetary value for companies that use Babel. They can develop software x% faster, and they pay $y per unit time to develop software, so the value is x times y. It doesn't even matter if the company using Babel makes any profit: their costs are lower because they use it. And, corresponding, Babel isn't a social good like Signal or Firefox. It doesn't make the world a better place on its own. It makes the world a better place insofar as people using Babel are trying to make the world a better place and they can do so faster. (Or it makes the world a worse place if people using Babel are trying to make the world a worse place.) So it's up to the people using Babel, all of whom have significant engineering funding, to make sure it continues to exist and work. And they should be doing so on a scale commensurate with the cost savings they get from Babel. Which is to say, they will do so, provided that the danger of Babel not existing is real, and the possibility of avoiding that fate with funding is real - it's in their rational self-interest to do so. Or, in other words, the framing of "funding sufficient to keep a project alive" as "fair share of the profits," and the idea that closed-source software companies can reasonably expect "profits" and open-source projects used by those companies cannot, is itself the crisis. We have no way of talking about funding apart from profit. Either we need to come up with one, or we need to admit that the only way to solve the open-source funding crisis is giving up on open source. If we can't figure out how to employ more than one person on Babel when its users' rational self-interest would be to fund it to the tune of many millions of dollars a year if they had to, is it any surprise Signal is pivoting to cryptocurrencies and Firefox is pivoting to VPNs?

geofft 5y ago

I'm not talking about fair share of the profits - the OSS project, I hope, has no profits. Babel, in particular, is a project that's primarily interesting to software development companies. It's not consumer-facing software like Signal or Firefox or GNOME or whatever. It's not the logic for a self-driving car or a pacemaker. It's a tool that's for software developers who want to write in one version of JavaScript and have code run in an environment that expects another version of JavaScript. I would agree with you for things like Signal or Firefox - that while there's theoretically a monetary value for me being able to use them, it's difficult and weird to pin down that number, and it's a social good to have them available for free. But there's a very non-theoretical monetary value for companies that use Babel. They can develop software x% faster, and they pay $y per unit time to develop software, so the value is x times y. It doesn't even matter if the company using Babel makes any profit: their costs are lower because they use it. And, corresponding, Babel isn't a social good like Signal or Firefox. It doesn't make the world a better place on its own. It makes the world a better place insofar as people using Babel are trying to make the world a better place and they can do so faster. (Or it makes the world a worse place if people using Babel are trying to make the world a worse place.) So it's up to the people using Babel, all of whom have significant engineering funding, to make sure it continues to exist and work. And they should be doing so on a scale commensurate with the cost savings they get from Babel. Which is to say, they will do so, provided that the danger of Babel not existing is real, and the possibility of avoiding that fate with funding is real - it's in their rational self-interest to do so. Or, in other words, the framing of "funding sufficient to keep a project alive" as "fair share of the profits," and the idea that closed-source software companies can reasonably expect "profits" and open-source projects used by those companies cannot, is itself the crisis. We have no way of talking about funding apart from profit. Either we need to come up with one, or we need to admit that the only way to solve the open-source funding crisis is giving up on open source. If we can't figure out how to employ more than one person on Babel when its users' rational self-interest would be to fund it to the tune of many millions of dollars a year if they had to, is it any surprise Signal is pivoting to cryptocurrencies and Firefox is pivoting to VPNs?