18 ms·

Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money? (2021)

89 points by dmitriid 4y ago

amir734jj 4y ago
This is from 2021. Has there been any update?
- ericlewis 4y ago
  The experiment was more or less continued when Rome, the creator of babels new company - spun out from fb and took on a pretty large amount of funding. There is questions on wether or not that is working though.
  - cjpearson 4y ago
    It's also worth noting that the founder of Rome left the Babel project a long time ago and was not involved in this 2021 fundraising post.
    - whstl 4y ago
      It is also worth noting that Babel diverged a lot from his original vision, which is much closer to what he's doing with Rome: https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1063574500493557760 https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1063574500493557760 He also had some criticism about this blog post, but ended up deleting his tweets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27115499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27115499
vmatsiiako 4y ago
I wonder if there is any other way for Babel to at least breakeven the salary costs. Perhaps adding certain features, which would only be useful for large enterprises and they are willing to pay for those? I think adding a commercial component to many open-source projects will only improve those and make them more sustainable
- ghaff 4y ago
  Open core has its own set of problems but it can potentially work if there is an obvious set of enterprise-specific features for a project that enterprises can genuinely need.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
enticingturtle 4y ago
A good take from the time https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/05/11/Sell-Babel-8 https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/05/11/Sell-Babel-8
- ghaff 4y ago
  Yep. Donations basically don't work is pretty near a universal opinion of anyone who has spent time looking at open source business models. As beer money for someone's side project hobby? Sure, why not? But to pay the full-time salary for someone even in a low cost country? Even $50,000 (per year) is actually a lot of money to collect through donations--in part, because as the author notes it's pretty hard for companies to just make a donation to someone.
IshKebab 4y ago
I wonder if it is partly because nobody really wants to have to use Babel, and maybe people are starting to stop using it. Most people don't need to support IE anymore.
- pictur 4y ago
  Browser support is not just about IE. I wish it was just IE.
- whstl 4y ago
  To me, that's the most plausible answer. People constantly complain about Javascript toolchains pulling too many dependencies here in HN, and Babel is by far the biggest offender. A vanilla project made with create-react-app pulls 133 Babel packages, all of them under control of the Babel organization. A lot of those packages have only a few lines of code, and a lot of the real logic is in the core packages. It could be a single package, or at least a more reasonable number. For this reason and others, almost everyone who knows deeply about the JS ecosystem is looking for different solutions. Everyone is dying to move to SWC and ESBuild. Or Rome. With the amount of damage that Babel does to the image of the Javascript ecosystem, it's surprising they're getting as much money. EDIT: With that said, if there was a plan to solve the current problems of Babel (package spam and slowness), I would be on board with supporting it. As of now, I'm supporting both Vite and SWC. ESBuild doesn't seem to have monetization but I would support it in a heartbeat.
- rcarr 4y ago
  Completely agree. Anyone who wants to support IE and Outlook astonish me. I'm going to be starting an email newsletter soon and I've not done one before outside of mail chimp but I am absolutely not fucking around using tables. Why are we indulging Microsoft on this and letting them think it's acceptable to use their shitty Word rendering engine for email? How much productivity is being wasted from people globally having to spend time working around their piss poor decisions? Newsletter makers should just refuse to indulge it and provide a plain text email alternative for Outlook users along with the reasoning at the top of the email: sorry this email isn't pretty for you but Microsoft need to sort this the fuck out. Please use a proper email client in order to view the nice version. Let things die that need to die. I can understand it more with Outlook because it still has just under 5% market share according to this[1] (guessing this is a US centric survey and not global) but are you really going to be getting paying customers or even just the eyeballs you want on your site from people who are using IE? Internet Explorer makes up less than 0.5% of browser use nowadays. You have got better things to be spending your time and money on than supporting it.
pictur 4y ago
Open source ecosystem is really interesting. There are those who are able to reach a much smaller user base and somehow make money. and there are those who cannot reach a huge scale and earn money like this project. I have no idea what to do as an alternative, but it's really sad.
morelisp 4y ago
Babel is not actually very useful and gets less useful every year. It's "used by millions" because the JS ecosystem is a shitshow. I would rather pay money to our dependencies that pull in Babel transitively to fully divorce themselves from it. Also discussed at the time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114718 - many (including me) think they were not spending the money they did have very effectively.
- draw_down 4y ago
  I don’t like it either, but it’s not used because it’s well liked. It’s used because it is in fact useful
  - morelisp 4y ago
    Bluntly, I don't agree, at least as much as "useful" means "improves developer efficiency or software quality". I think you can argue it was useful at one time - which I'd still probably argue against, there's always been unbundled alternatives with lots of advantages, but it'd be a much stronger case - but by 2021, that ship was definitely sunk. Babel is here today because of CRA, and CRA is, has always been, a horrible idea possible only because nobody gave a shit about anything other than wall-clock-time-to-series-A for over a decade.
- kosievdmerwe 4y ago
  I don't know JS at all, I just found it funny that in my modern Chrome browser the example automated conversion just output exactly the same JS as was input.
butterfly771 4y ago
Combined with recent public requests for assistance from core-js authors, I think many parts of the open source infrastructure are on the verge of collapse
- nickstinemates 4y ago
  I think open source as a "business model" is fundamentally failing and has completely fallen from grace in the past decade.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  See also "Software Below Poverty Line" from 2019: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html
logicalmonster 4y ago
Aren't there a few platforms that allow people to post bounties for features on open-source projects? To me, that's the funding model that might make the most sense for open source. Asking for an eternal subscription might be a hard sell for a lot of people, but throwing a few bucks into a big pot so somebody finally is motivated to dig deep and solve X pain point in your software seems like a more realistic approach.
- johnny22 4y ago
  i haven't actually seen that approach work. If you got an examples, I'd love to see it.
NextHendrix 4y ago
>$11,000 a month Is this not quite a lot of money?
- ed25519FUUU 4y ago
  Initially I thought that also, but $130k a year isn’t very competitive for a skilled US-based software engineer if you consider the entire market. Now for working on an open-source project it does seem pretty good.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- LastTrain 4y ago
  For a full time developer’s salary? No. That is bout 1/3 to 2/3 the salary I’d expect for that job, depending on which U.S. market.
- matsemann 4y ago
  Compared to what they could make at a FAANG? Probably no. Compared to developer salaries in the EU: A huge amount of money. A discussion about the pay from last time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116460
- kevingadd 4y ago
  Remember that for freelancers in the US you've typically got like 40% overhead on your income, since you have to pay full tax on it and then you need to pay for your own health insurance and dental insurance. So after that they've got 6-7k a month. Rent in many areas is 2000-3000/mo, so if they ended up previously settling down in an area like that (perhaps because they worked for a tech company or startup), I can understand feeling slightly squeezed. You can certainly live comfortably on 6k/mo as a freelancer but if you're the primary earner for a family it's probably going to make you nervous. Freelancers also have to worry about gaps between payment, and funders/clients paying late. During my freelancing years I had some clients pay me $11k/mo and other clients just Not Pay me upwards of $5000, so even though I was "making" 11k/mo optimally, I ended up almost evicted after two clients opted not to pay me back to back. It makes a lot of sense to feel like your situation is precarious if you can only save up 1-2k a month, because your nest egg isn't growing super fast and your income may dry up without warning. It's not like having a salaried job as a high performer where the only real risk to worry about is layoffs.
monero-xmr 4y ago
The problem is that “used by millions” != “should receive money”. If I write a book and release it for free, I may get a lot of readers willing to read it. The moment I say, “sorry readers - to read this you must pay me!” suddenly I am now competing with all forms of paid entertainment. A lot of the draw to open source is that it’s free. A lot of the allure to open source devs is knowing that tons of people are using their software, the license means they can’t be sued, and they don’t have any of the headache of running a business. Once you believe “I deserve to be paid for this” I have a lot of counterpoints. What are the free alternatives? What am I getting for my money? What support do you offer? In a world where people agonize over Netflix going from $9 to $14, you need to really provide a lot of value to get someone to open their wallet. No one deserves to be paid just because they did something popular. You deserve to be paid if people are willing to pay you vs. all the other things they can spend money on.
- morelisp 4y ago
  A dirty secret that's finally come to reckoning is that there is a ridiculous amount of "hyperscaled" "open source" projects just as there are startups. These exist primarily not to help software developers be more efficient or build better things; but to pad resumes, influence formal and informal standards bodies, carve out mindshare for companies and tech stacks, and generally do a bunch of stuff that only makes sense when the industry as a whole is also bloated on a decade of ZIR financial policy and its handmaiden of zero-consequence cost-insensitive development.
  - candiodari 4y ago
    An equally dirty secret is that "we must hold everyone to account policy" got demonstrated in the gold standard. It was a failure that ended in deflation and depression. What "everything must make sense" policy effectively depends on is the idea that government finances and private sector finances (that can mean a person's/family's budget or a company budget) must look the same. That "the system as a whole" must sum to zero. This can easily be shown to be false. On might make the simple observation that if government DIDN'T have an institution like the FED that loaned ridiculous amounts of money while not making a great deal of profit on that lending, money wouldn't work. We also know what government policy worked pretty well the last 50 or so years. The process, when looked at from 100.000 feet is to take all money in the US, and divide 3%-5% of it out to everyone that wants to try something. Given as a loan, so that "try something" is strongly incentivized to mean "grow the economy". The FED does not effectively want that money back (again, if the FED took what it was owed money would cease to exist in the US). This is on top of all other taxes. That is what the FED effectively does, ignoring the details, pretending the many problems with it's functioning don't exist. We are pretty fucking damn happy with the result of this policy.
charcircuit 4y ago
>why are we running out of money Because there was no real business model. You sell your software for $0. You maintain it and provide support for $0. You don't have any upsells or additional services. What value is being gives in exchange for the money? The hopes that the project doesn't shut down because they have yet to find product market fit for their business model which doesn't exist?
tyre 4y ago
I know it’s not fun but if a team/project/company wants money then they have to work for it. If you look at non-profits, a huge amount of time, effort, and resources goes into fundraising. Building something or doing good, then hoping people will pay you, isn’t a thing.
- vmatsiiako 4y ago
  Non-profits are literally in the constant fundraising state. I think it's not the optimal model, because it keeps you distracted from the main work that you should be doing.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    How would a not for profit work without funding?
    - m1sta_ 4y ago
      it would leverage wealth.
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      Look at stuff like TeamTrees. People buy a service which they think is positive to the world.
      - xmprt 4y ago
        How do you think TeamTrees raises funds?
        charcircuit 4y ago
        They didn't have to raise funds. The creation of the project was subsidized by existing businesses and it offers a service that lets people have trees get planted.
  - code_runner 4y ago
revskill 4y ago
This show is like shit. Instead of monopoly in the hands of small "senior" ones, why not inviting more junior devs for more balancing financial management ? This way of fundraising never works at all. If Babel could successfully manage the team of 100 or so, then it's viable strategy. Team of 5 ? No way.
guipsp 4y ago
The people commenting here are really underestimating the value that Babel provides to the whole Web ecosystem.
- pictur 4y ago
  People here usually don't like useful things. They are very interested in things like "look at the hello world application that I made without using javascript". It's hard to understand.
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  I loved Babel when I couldn't run ES6 natively, but once Ingot modules I dropped it. That was years ago. Are people mostly using it for long tail browser support now? I thought we were kinda mission accomplished on ES6?
  - whstl 4y ago
    A lot of people still use it to support JSX syntax in React. Also to remove Typescript types without type-checking (the type-checking is often done in parallel, for speed).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
throwaway284534 4y ago
6to5…err, I mean Babel, Already accomplished it’s mission to bridge the feature gap between older browser implementations. And like all bureaucratic melanomas, the maintainers made a strange decision to not only expand their domain to ES7, but to ALL FUTURE VERSIONS OF JAVASCRIPT FOREVER. Babel became Webpackified and splintered into poorly understood preset bundles of the latest revelations of the TC39. A fractal of API documentation could then be written and rewritten again for the next mission: Newer is better. Modularize everything. Maintenance is a virtue. I’m guessing that the brain trust at Babel HQ saw how the left-pad situation panned out and something clicked — we could turn our discrete task into an indefinitely lucrative operation as a rent seeking dependency for everyone. Every week could be infrastructure week so long as JavaScript kept adding features. But what their hubris didn’t factor in was a petard hoisting much higher on the food chain — the Chromification of the web. Now that everyone who’s anyone is building a browser on the same engine, there’s no need for a second cabal of feature creatures to get a cut of the action. It’s the same reason Firefox’s Wikipedia page has to be disambiguated with the term “cuckhold”; the same reason core-js can’t ask for a dime without macro fiscal policy being invoked by armchair techno economists. Why are you running out of money? Simple — We already paid for it! These projects have transmuted one kind of technical debt into another, and the sooner they’re gone, the better we’ll all be in their absence. I would pray for a cosmic force to come and topple Babel back to earth, but the irony would be lost on them.
- driverdan 4y ago
  I downvoted you because you made multiple bad faith accusations about people involved in these projects. Regardless of Babel's and Firefox's utility your negative snark isn't helping anyone.
  - briantakita 4y ago
    The gist of the comment is that scope creep is expensive & mutates the original mission of the organization. Organizations tend to self-perpetuate via scope creep.
  - throwaway284534 4y ago
DoctorNick 4y ago
The Node.js ecosystem is full of people from Nebraska thanklessly maintaining critical pieces of infrastructure without much, if any, pay. I think it would be justified if some of them decided to hold the node community for ransom.
- ezekg 4y ago
  > I think it would be justified if some of them decided to hold the node community for ransom. Ah yes, let’s all just give these folks money when we don’t have to. Or how about... if they want money, they sell their software? It’s really that simple. There’s nothing about maintaining an open source project that entitles you to hold anybody for ransom.
- morelisp 4y ago
  The node.js ecosystem is full of grindset Californians maintaining fashion pieces because if their GitHub star count drops below the last candidate the hiring manager saw they won't get the rest-and-vest job. It's not NTP, it's not really infrastructure, you can literally do without it. It's not OpenSSL, if it just stops today there's no additional significant risk your prod systems all get popped next week. There's nothing worth salvaging, technically or culturally. Let it fall.
  - sergiomattei 4y ago
    Love your attitude towards OSS maintainers.
    - morelisp 4y ago
      There's no loathing like self-loathing.
ranting-moth 4y ago
The open source ecosystem, especially JS, is a royal shitshow. People pull inn hundreds of dependencies from all over the place and expect other people to maintain them for free. Those people argue the "free" means free as in free beer. Because, who wouldn't like free beer? (hint: it's the guy who has to buy the beer for everyone to drink for free). Free software is just software with freedom, just you are (hopefully) a free individual. Of course there might be individuals or organizations that have interests in keeping that software maintained and that's a different thing.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  "Free as in beer" is funny because it's basically open core. You pay for the sandwiches.
- whstl 4y ago
  "People pull hundreds of dependencies" only because Babel decided to split their package which used to be only one into hundreds of dependencies. A vanilla installation of create-react-app pulls 133 babel-owned packages, last I counted. If you pull all the available packages from @babel, it's 153. They all live in the same Github repo, since who would want to manage that many packages. The second biggest offender in the ecosystem has a whole order of magnitude less packages than that. Babel is the #1 cause for the JS ecosystem being the "royal shitshow" you and other people claim it to be.
  - SillyUsername 4y ago
    ^ This. I'm a BE dev, but occasionally do FE maintenance. I wrote a few pages of Typescript with a young FE developer and it pulled in a ton of Babel dependencies on build which was literally 90% of the packed archive. I still have no idea what they were needed for, neither it seems did the FE dev.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
okraigher 4y ago
Why not use an open source license that requires payment for commercial use? Then technically companies have to pay for their use and should have no problem justifying the expense if it is small. In this model there is probably a use case for an aggregated subscription service where a company pays one fee every year to an entity which redistributes it to open source projects proportionally by some usage metric. This is similarly to how artists are given royalty for how many times their song was used in a movie or played on the radio. The license used would need to support the aggregate service mentioned above.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  > open source license that requires payment for commercial use That's a contradiction. If you mean source-available, say so. Realistically, a non- open-source build system is doomed to obscurity.
bartimus 4y ago
The problem is that it's too complicated to get the finance department of a commercial company (where some developer is working for) to donate money to some open source library. It could perhaps be better facilitated (through npm?) showhow. Commercial companies could register an ID at npm. Then developers at the company could use packages like: npm install --save-dev $eW91ZGVjb2RlZHRoaXM@babel/core Npm could provide information on which packages got donations by the company. Developers could share a link to the finance department. The finance department could see which packages are used throughout the company and choose to make some donations. The PR department could make some nice PR how well the company supports open source libraries. Package maintainers could provide informtaion if their package received donations from company $eW91ZGVjb2RlZHRoaXM.

89 points by dmitriid 4y ago

amir734jj 4y ago

This is from 2021. Has there been any update?

ericlewis 4y ago
The experiment was more or less continued when Rome, the creator of babels new company - spun out from fb and took on a pretty large amount of funding. There is questions on wether or not that is working though.
- cjpearson 4y ago
  It's also worth noting that the founder of Rome left the Babel project a long time ago and was not involved in this 2021 fundraising post.
  - whstl 4y ago
    It is also worth noting that Babel diverged a lot from his original vision, which is much closer to what he's doing with Rome: https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1063574500493557760 https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1063574500493557760 He also had some criticism about this blog post, but ended up deleting his tweets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27115499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27115499

vmatsiiako 4y ago

I wonder if there is any other way for Babel to at least breakeven the salary costs. Perhaps adding certain features, which would only be useful for large enterprises and they are willing to pay for those? I think adding a commercial component to many open-source projects will only improve those and make them more sustainable

ghaff 4y ago
Open core has its own set of problems but it can potentially work if there is an obvious set of enterprise-specific features for a project that enterprises can genuinely need.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

enticingturtle 4y ago

A good take from the time https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/05/11/Sell-Babel-8 https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/05/11/Sell-Babel-8

ghaff 4y ago
Yep. Donations basically don't work is pretty near a universal opinion of anyone who has spent time looking at open source business models. As beer money for someone's side project hobby? Sure, why not? But to pay the full-time salary for someone even in a low cost country? Even $50,000 (per year) is actually a lot of money to collect through donations--in part, because as the author notes it's pretty hard for companies to just make a donation to someone.

IshKebab 4y ago

I wonder if it is partly because nobody really wants to have to use Babel, and maybe people are starting to stop using it. Most people don't need to support IE anymore.

pictur 4y ago
Browser support is not just about IE. I wish it was just IE.
whstl 4y ago
To me, that's the most plausible answer. People constantly complain about Javascript toolchains pulling too many dependencies here in HN, and Babel is by far the biggest offender. A vanilla project made with create-react-app pulls 133 Babel packages, all of them under control of the Babel organization. A lot of those packages have only a few lines of code, and a lot of the real logic is in the core packages. It could be a single package, or at least a more reasonable number. For this reason and others, almost everyone who knows deeply about the JS ecosystem is looking for different solutions. Everyone is dying to move to SWC and ESBuild. Or Rome. With the amount of damage that Babel does to the image of the Javascript ecosystem, it's surprising they're getting as much money. EDIT: With that said, if there was a plan to solve the current problems of Babel (package spam and slowness), I would be on board with supporting it. As of now, I'm supporting both Vite and SWC. ESBuild doesn't seem to have monetization but I would support it in a heartbeat.
rcarr 4y ago
Completely agree. Anyone who wants to support IE and Outlook astonish me. I'm going to be starting an email newsletter soon and I've not done one before outside of mail chimp but I am absolutely not fucking around using tables. Why are we indulging Microsoft on this and letting them think it's acceptable to use their shitty Word rendering engine for email? How much productivity is being wasted from people globally having to spend time working around their piss poor decisions? Newsletter makers should just refuse to indulge it and provide a plain text email alternative for Outlook users along with the reasoning at the top of the email: sorry this email isn't pretty for you but Microsoft need to sort this the fuck out. Please use a proper email client in order to view the nice version. Let things die that need to die. I can understand it more with Outlook because it still has just under 5% market share according to this[1] (guessing this is a US centric survey and not global) but are you really going to be getting paying customers or even just the eyeballs you want on your site from people who are using IE? Internet Explorer makes up less than 0.5% of browser use nowadays. You have got better things to be spending your time and money on than supporting it.

pictur 4y ago

Open source ecosystem is really interesting. There are those who are able to reach a much smaller user base and somehow make money. and there are those who cannot reach a huge scale and earn money like this project. I have no idea what to do as an alternative, but it's really sad.

morelisp 4y ago

Babel is not actually very useful and gets less useful every year. It's "used by millions" because the JS ecosystem is a shitshow. I would rather pay money to our dependencies that pull in Babel transitively to fully divorce themselves from it. Also discussed at the time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114718 - many (including me) think they were not spending the money they did have very effectively.

draw_down 4y ago
I don’t like it either, but it’s not used because it’s well liked. It’s used because it is in fact useful
- morelisp 4y ago
  Bluntly, I don't agree, at least as much as "useful" means "improves developer efficiency or software quality". I think you can argue it was useful at one time - which I'd still probably argue against, there's always been unbundled alternatives with lots of advantages, but it'd be a much stronger case - but by 2021, that ship was definitely sunk. Babel is here today because of CRA, and CRA is, has always been, a horrible idea possible only because nobody gave a shit about anything other than wall-clock-time-to-series-A for over a decade.
kosievdmerwe 4y ago
I don't know JS at all, I just found it funny that in my modern Chrome browser the example automated conversion just output exactly the same JS as was input.

butterfly771 4y ago

Combined with recent public requests for assistance from core-js authors, I think many parts of the open source infrastructure are on the verge of collapse

nickstinemates 4y ago
I think open source as a "business model" is fundamentally failing and has completely fallen from grace in the past decade.
dmitriid 4y ago
See also "Software Below Poverty Line" from 2019: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html

logicalmonster 4y ago

Aren't there a few platforms that allow people to post bounties for features on open-source projects? To me, that's the funding model that might make the most sense for open source. Asking for an eternal subscription might be a hard sell for a lot of people, but throwing a few bucks into a big pot so somebody finally is motivated to dig deep and solve X pain point in your software seems like a more realistic approach.

johnny22 4y ago
i haven't actually seen that approach work. If you got an examples, I'd love to see it.

NextHendrix 4y ago

>$11,000 a month Is this not quite a lot of money?

ed25519FUUU 4y ago
Initially I thought that also, but $130k a year isn’t very competitive for a skilled US-based software engineer if you consider the entire market. Now for working on an open-source project it does seem pretty good.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
LastTrain 4y ago
For a full time developer’s salary? No. That is bout 1/3 to 2/3 the salary I’d expect for that job, depending on which U.S. market.
matsemann 4y ago
Compared to what they could make at a FAANG? Probably no. Compared to developer salaries in the EU: A huge amount of money. A discussion about the pay from last time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116460
kevingadd 4y ago
Remember that for freelancers in the US you've typically got like 40% overhead on your income, since you have to pay full tax on it and then you need to pay for your own health insurance and dental insurance. So after that they've got 6-7k a month. Rent in many areas is 2000-3000/mo, so if they ended up previously settling down in an area like that (perhaps because they worked for a tech company or startup), I can understand feeling slightly squeezed. You can certainly live comfortably on 6k/mo as a freelancer but if you're the primary earner for a family it's probably going to make you nervous. Freelancers also have to worry about gaps between payment, and funders/clients paying late. During my freelancing years I had some clients pay me $11k/mo and other clients just Not Pay me upwards of $5000, so even though I was "making" 11k/mo optimally, I ended up almost evicted after two clients opted not to pay me back to back. It makes a lot of sense to feel like your situation is precarious if you can only save up 1-2k a month, because your nest egg isn't growing super fast and your income may dry up without warning. It's not like having a salaried job as a high performer where the only real risk to worry about is layoffs.

monero-xmr 4y ago

The problem is that “used by millions” != “should receive money”. If I write a book and release it for free, I may get a lot of readers willing to read it. The moment I say, “sorry readers - to read this you must pay me!” suddenly I am now competing with all forms of paid entertainment. A lot of the draw to open source is that it’s free. A lot of the allure to open source devs is knowing that tons of people are using their software, the license means they can’t be sued, and they don’t have any of the headache of running a business. Once you believe “I deserve to be paid for this” I have a lot of counterpoints. What are the free alternatives? What am I getting for my money? What support do you offer? In a world where people agonize over Netflix going from $9 to $14, you need to really provide a lot of value to get someone to open their wallet. No one deserves to be paid just because they did something popular. You deserve to be paid if people are willing to pay you vs. all the other things they can spend money on.

morelisp 4y ago
A dirty secret that's finally come to reckoning is that there is a ridiculous amount of "hyperscaled" "open source" projects just as there are startups. These exist primarily not to help software developers be more efficient or build better things; but to pad resumes, influence formal and informal standards bodies, carve out mindshare for companies and tech stacks, and generally do a bunch of stuff that only makes sense when the industry as a whole is also bloated on a decade of ZIR financial policy and its handmaiden of zero-consequence cost-insensitive development.
- candiodari 4y ago
  An equally dirty secret is that "we must hold everyone to account policy" got demonstrated in the gold standard. It was a failure that ended in deflation and depression. What "everything must make sense" policy effectively depends on is the idea that government finances and private sector finances (that can mean a person's/family's budget or a company budget) must look the same. That "the system as a whole" must sum to zero. This can easily be shown to be false. On might make the simple observation that if government DIDN'T have an institution like the FED that loaned ridiculous amounts of money while not making a great deal of profit on that lending, money wouldn't work. We also know what government policy worked pretty well the last 50 or so years. The process, when looked at from 100.000 feet is to take all money in the US, and divide 3%-5% of it out to everyone that wants to try something. Given as a loan, so that "try something" is strongly incentivized to mean "grow the economy". The FED does not effectively want that money back (again, if the FED took what it was owed money would cease to exist in the US). This is on top of all other taxes. That is what the FED effectively does, ignoring the details, pretending the many problems with it's functioning don't exist. We are pretty fucking damn happy with the result of this policy.

charcircuit 4y ago

>why are we running out of money Because there was no real business model. You sell your software for $0. You maintain it and provide support for $0. You don't have any upsells or additional services. What value is being gives in exchange for the money? The hopes that the project doesn't shut down because they have yet to find product market fit for their business model which doesn't exist?

tyre 4y ago

I know it’s not fun but if a team/project/company wants money then they have to work for it. If you look at non-profits, a huge amount of time, effort, and resources goes into fundraising. Building something or doing good, then hoping people will pay you, isn’t a thing.

vmatsiiako 4y ago
Non-profits are literally in the constant fundraising state. I think it's not the optimal model, because it keeps you distracted from the main work that you should be doing.
- themitigating 4y ago
  How would a not for profit work without funding?
  - m1sta_ 4y ago
    it would leverage wealth.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    Look at stuff like TeamTrees. People buy a service which they think is positive to the world.
    - xmprt 4y ago
      How do you think TeamTrees raises funds?
      - charcircuit 4y ago
        They didn't have to raise funds. The creation of the project was subsidized by existing businesses and it offers a service that lets people have trees get planted.
- code_runner 4y ago

revskill 4y ago

This show is like shit. Instead of monopoly in the hands of small "senior" ones, why not inviting more junior devs for more balancing financial management ? This way of fundraising never works at all. If Babel could successfully manage the team of 100 or so, then it's viable strategy. Team of 5 ? No way.

guipsp 4y ago

The people commenting here are really underestimating the value that Babel provides to the whole Web ecosystem.

pictur 4y ago
People here usually don't like useful things. They are very interested in things like "look at the hello world application that I made without using javascript". It's hard to understand.
EamonnMR 4y ago
I loved Babel when I couldn't run ES6 natively, but once Ingot modules I dropped it. That was years ago. Are people mostly using it for long tail browser support now? I thought we were kinda mission accomplished on ES6?
- whstl 4y ago
  A lot of people still use it to support JSX syntax in React. Also to remove Typescript types without type-checking (the type-checking is often done in parallel, for speed).

deleted 4y ago

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throwaway284534 4y ago

6to5…err, I mean Babel, Already accomplished it’s mission to bridge the feature gap between older browser implementations. And like all bureaucratic melanomas, the maintainers made a strange decision to not only expand their domain to ES7, but to ALL FUTURE VERSIONS OF JAVASCRIPT FOREVER. Babel became Webpackified and splintered into poorly understood preset bundles of the latest revelations of the TC39. A fractal of API documentation could then be written and rewritten again for the next mission: Newer is better. Modularize everything. Maintenance is a virtue. I’m guessing that the brain trust at Babel HQ saw how the left-pad situation panned out and something clicked — we could turn our discrete task into an indefinitely lucrative operation as a rent seeking dependency for everyone. Every week could be infrastructure week so long as JavaScript kept adding features. But what their hubris didn’t factor in was a petard hoisting much higher on the food chain — the Chromification of the web. Now that everyone who’s anyone is building a browser on the same engine, there’s no need for a second cabal of feature creatures to get a cut of the action. It’s the same reason Firefox’s Wikipedia page has to be disambiguated with the term “cuckhold”; the same reason core-js can’t ask for a dime without macro fiscal policy being invoked by armchair techno economists. Why are you running out of money? Simple — We already paid for it! These projects have transmuted one kind of technical debt into another, and the sooner they’re gone, the better we’ll all be in their absence. I would pray for a cosmic force to come and topple Babel back to earth, but the irony would be lost on them.

driverdan 4y ago
I downvoted you because you made multiple bad faith accusations about people involved in these projects. Regardless of Babel's and Firefox's utility your negative snark isn't helping anyone.
- briantakita 4y ago
  The gist of the comment is that scope creep is expensive & mutates the original mission of the organization. Organizations tend to self-perpetuate via scope creep.
- throwaway284534 4y ago

DoctorNick 4y ago

The Node.js ecosystem is full of people from Nebraska thanklessly maintaining critical pieces of infrastructure without much, if any, pay. I think it would be justified if some of them decided to hold the node community for ransom.

ezekg 4y ago
> I think it would be justified if some of them decided to hold the node community for ransom. Ah yes, let’s all just give these folks money when we don’t have to. Or how about... if they want money, they sell their software? It’s really that simple. There’s nothing about maintaining an open source project that entitles you to hold anybody for ransom.
morelisp 4y ago
The node.js ecosystem is full of grindset Californians maintaining fashion pieces because if their GitHub star count drops below the last candidate the hiring manager saw they won't get the rest-and-vest job. It's not NTP, it's not really infrastructure, you can literally do without it. It's not OpenSSL, if it just stops today there's no additional significant risk your prod systems all get popped next week. There's nothing worth salvaging, technically or culturally. Let it fall.
- sergiomattei 4y ago
  Love your attitude towards OSS maintainers.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    There's no loathing like self-loathing.

ranting-moth 4y ago

The open source ecosystem, especially JS, is a royal shitshow. People pull inn hundreds of dependencies from all over the place and expect other people to maintain them for free. Those people argue the "free" means free as in free beer. Because, who wouldn't like free beer? (hint: it's the guy who has to buy the beer for everyone to drink for free). Free software is just software with freedom, just you are (hopefully) a free individual. Of course there might be individuals or organizations that have interests in keeping that software maintained and that's a different thing.

whatshisface 4y ago
"Free as in beer" is funny because it's basically open core. You pay for the sandwiches.
whstl 4y ago
"People pull hundreds of dependencies" only because Babel decided to split their package which used to be only one into hundreds of dependencies. A vanilla installation of create-react-app pulls 133 babel-owned packages, last I counted. If you pull all the available packages from @babel, it's 153. They all live in the same Github repo, since who would want to manage that many packages. The second biggest offender in the ecosystem has a whole order of magnitude less packages than that. Babel is the #1 cause for the JS ecosystem being the "royal shitshow" you and other people claim it to be.
- SillyUsername 4y ago
  ^ This. I'm a BE dev, but occasionally do FE maintenance. I wrote a few pages of Typescript with a young FE developer and it pulled in a ton of Babel dependencies on build which was literally 90% of the packed archive. I still have no idea what they were needed for, neither it seems did the FE dev.

deleted 4y ago

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okraigher 4y ago

Why not use an open source license that requires payment for commercial use? Then technically companies have to pay for their use and should have no problem justifying the expense if it is small. In this model there is probably a use case for an aggregated subscription service where a company pays one fee every year to an entity which redistributes it to open source projects proportionally by some usage metric. This is similarly to how artists are given royalty for how many times their song was used in a movie or played on the radio. The license used would need to support the aggregate service mentioned above.

yencabulator 4y ago
> open source license that requires payment for commercial use That's a contradiction. If you mean source-available, say so. Realistically, a non- open-source build system is doomed to obscurity.

bartimus 4y ago

The problem is that it's too complicated to get the finance department of a commercial company (where some developer is working for) to donate money to some open source library. It could perhaps be better facilitated (through npm?) showhow. Commercial companies could register an ID at npm. Then developers at the company could use packages like: npm install --save-dev $eW91ZGVjb2RlZHRoaXM@babel/core Npm could provide information on which packages got donations by the company. Developers could share a link to the finance department. The finance department could see which packages are used throughout the company and choose to make some donations. The PR department could make some nice PR how well the company supports open source libraries. Package maintainers could provide informtaion if their package received donations from company $eW91ZGVjb2RlZHRoaXM.