5 ms·

makes you wonder, babel say they can't live with 300k a year in funding but the 1000s of projects used by 1000s of devs to build 1000s of things barely get 10

makes you wonder, babel say they can't live with 300k a year in funding but the 1000s of projects used by 1000s of devs to build 1000s of things barely get 10$ a month or even a year OSS donations should be more fairly distributed, not power law, rock star levels, where 1 project can get more funding than 99% of projects.

jdrc 5y ago
But this will never happen
oaiey 5y ago
Babel is a massive project which at a point was key for any web project. And 300k is good for how many full time people. In the US maybe 3? Not that I have any insights, but we should never forget, that we stand on the shoulders of Giants. And the giant is overall massively underpaid.
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  Probably closer to 1.5 people in the US. Unless they have some means of getting health insurance for free and not paying taxes on their income.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    and that’s borderline, a seasoned dev can find better offers at that rate… and with more benefits senior devs easily cost a company $200k between taxes, insurance, and benefits
    - kayodelycaon 5y ago
      Yup. I was assuming $200k total cost for a senior developer in the Midwest. If you want someone on the West coast, you’re easily looking at $300k for just the salary due to the cost of living being more than double.
- PaywallBuster 5y ago
  Sure 300k barely supports US market rates, but should it? There's plenty of people working the same job for many years with low-ish salary? Sure they could find new one and get the latest high market but they haven't I mean the project was already being developed before even having full time staff, and some contributors are not in the US and could live less for sure many OSS projects can go a long way the same way and that's the point, why should babel take "a big chunk" of OSS donations, while many others take nothing and looking at another comment below, seems it's becoming irrelevant, so it would make sense to reduce funding further and let staff to move away to other projects or take full time employment at a profit making organization and take market rates.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Babel should get however much of the donations as people want to donate to it. If other projects want more donations, they should be looking to users of their project, not to users of babel. If babel users become unhappy, the pace of donations will decrease naturally. That’s a good thing, IMO.
Tade0 5y ago
Babel is particularly shady, because before asking for this money they dropped making their own polyfills in favour of core-js, which turned out to be a bad move considering the main contributor of that library found himself doing time in a Russian penal colony.
- esperent 5y ago
  Unfortunate about the maintainer of core-js. But how does that make Babel shady? Especially if they made the change before asking for money. Sounds more like they were struggling with workload and made what, at the time, seemed like a reasonable decision to offload some of the work to another library.
  - phpnode 5y ago
    Also the core-js maintainer single handedly carried that project, with no financial support from Babel (or hardly anyone else for that matter). It became a vital part of the ecosystem, and then the community hung him out to dry when he asked for more support. The whole thing was shameful, especially those who mocked him for his unfortunate personal situation.
- PaywallBuster 5y ago
  agreed Quite shady that one of best funded OSS projects come public asking for more money, but when the community start questioning the expenses/the specific contribution from a certain member there's only silence (I haven't seen any response regarding their post in May last year asking for money) The project is big enough that it should be a _lot_ more transparent :)
- int_19h 5y ago
  Gotta say, the comments on this core-js issue are very illustrative of the article. https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/548 https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/548
draw_down 5y ago
cryptica 5y ago
Babel is now a less-than-useless project. It's a hack; which, like most hacks, was kind of useful when it first came out but was supposed to have a short shelf life. It only became popular because its creator was hired by Facebook and was promoted heavily to developers. IMO, it had no use outside of Facebook or any large corporation... Updating code to make use of the latest language feature at a later time is not difficult at all unless you have millions of lines of code; and even then, it can be automated to some extent. People should simply stick to the slightly older JS syntax while waiting for new versions of JS to reach mass adoption... Essentially all of the new features add very little value nowadays (mostly cosmetic value)... Surely you can wait 5 years or so... There hasn't been any significant 'must have' feature since async/await anyway. It's not worth adding 100+ Babel tooling dependencies and sub-dependencies to your project and adding a transpilation step just to reduce your project's code size by 2% (that's what cosmetic changes to ECMAScript are about really)... Just use the older feature; this is the most compatible approach.

jdrc 5y ago

But this will never happen

oaiey 5y ago

Babel is a massive project which at a point was key for any web project. And 300k is good for how many full time people. In the US maybe 3? Not that I have any insights, but we should never forget, that we stand on the shoulders of Giants. And the giant is overall massively underpaid.

kayodelycaon 5y ago
Probably closer to 1.5 people in the US. Unless they have some means of getting health insurance for free and not paying taxes on their income.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  and that’s borderline, a seasoned dev can find better offers at that rate… and with more benefits senior devs easily cost a company $200k between taxes, insurance, and benefits
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    Yup. I was assuming $200k total cost for a senior developer in the Midwest. If you want someone on the West coast, you’re easily looking at $300k for just the salary due to the cost of living being more than double.
PaywallBuster 5y ago
Sure 300k barely supports US market rates, but should it? There's plenty of people working the same job for many years with low-ish salary? Sure they could find new one and get the latest high market but they haven't I mean the project was already being developed before even having full time staff, and some contributors are not in the US and could live less for sure many OSS projects can go a long way the same way and that's the point, why should babel take "a big chunk" of OSS donations, while many others take nothing and looking at another comment below, seems it's becoming irrelevant, so it would make sense to reduce funding further and let staff to move away to other projects or take full time employment at a profit making organization and take market rates.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Babel should get however much of the donations as people want to donate to it. If other projects want more donations, they should be looking to users of their project, not to users of babel. If babel users become unhappy, the pace of donations will decrease naturally. That’s a good thing, IMO.

Tade0 5y ago

Babel is particularly shady, because before asking for this money they dropped making their own polyfills in favour of core-js, which turned out to be a bad move considering the main contributor of that library found himself doing time in a Russian penal colony.

esperent 5y ago
Unfortunate about the maintainer of core-js. But how does that make Babel shady? Especially if they made the change before asking for money. Sounds more like they were struggling with workload and made what, at the time, seemed like a reasonable decision to offload some of the work to another library.
- phpnode 5y ago
  Also the core-js maintainer single handedly carried that project, with no financial support from Babel (or hardly anyone else for that matter). It became a vital part of the ecosystem, and then the community hung him out to dry when he asked for more support. The whole thing was shameful, especially those who mocked him for his unfortunate personal situation.
PaywallBuster 5y ago
agreed Quite shady that one of best funded OSS projects come public asking for more money, but when the community start questioning the expenses/the specific contribution from a certain member there's only silence (I haven't seen any response regarding their post in May last year asking for money) The project is big enough that it should be a _lot_ more transparent :)
int_19h 5y ago
Gotta say, the comments on this core-js issue are very illustrative of the article. https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/548 https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/548

draw_down 5y ago

cryptica 5y ago

Babel is now a less-than-useless project. It's a hack; which, like most hacks, was kind of useful when it first came out but was supposed to have a short shelf life. It only became popular because its creator was hired by Facebook and was promoted heavily to developers. IMO, it had no use outside of Facebook or any large corporation... Updating code to make use of the latest language feature at a later time is not difficult at all unless you have millions of lines of code; and even then, it can be automated to some extent. People should simply stick to the slightly older JS syntax while waiting for new versions of JS to reach mass adoption... Essentially all of the new features add very little value nowadays (mostly cosmetic value)... Surely you can wait 5 years or so... There hasn't been any significant 'must have' feature since async/await anyway. It's not worth adding 100+ Babel tooling dependencies and sub-dependencies to your project and adding a transpilation step just to reduce your project's code size by 2% (that's what cosmetic changes to ECMAScript are about really)... Just use the older feature; this is the most compatible approach.