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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

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.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    I... didn't say anything about the gold standard or austerity or whatever you think I implied. I also don't think the decade+ of ZIRP is a necessary consequence of fiat money or the fed or whatever; it's one of many possible fiscal paths which could have been taken even staying within the constraints of liberal capitalism. I'm not even really attacking ZIRP, I'm attacking reconfiguring our whole industry around what was obviously a temporary financialization stage. Even then, I'm not even really attacking it - I'm just saying, if you hitched yourself to such a transient software ecosystem for whatever reason, don't come crying when it transitions out.
petermcneeley 4y ago
"Creating value is not enough — you also need to capture some of the value you create" - Peter Thiel I think what your comment (and those similar) misses is that someone can provide a great deal of value but fail to capture any of it. Specifically this line "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."
black_puppydog 4y ago
I think given that babel is used by many many corporate entities, an e.g. $5/month payment would not stop them from using it, IF that payment was trivial to make. I'd guess what's holding that back is that a) that fee is not necessary for them to use it, and b) it's hard to fight for paying money that's not technically necessary, and c) getting a license for anything approved can be a pain. What I don't think prevents this is that companies (even startups) think it's too expensive.
- CountSessine 4y ago
  What it really means is that they like using it when it’s free and that the cost of switching away from Babel to an alternative is less than the cost of supporting Babel.
  - xmprt 4y ago
    The cost of supporting Babel (and other open source products in general) is more an administrative and political cost than a financial one in a lot of places.
    - foobiekr 4y ago
      It’s actually probably easier to get $20k approved annually than $5k. The bigger number implies skin in the game at all steps in the process and has an air of legitimacy.
- krisoft 4y ago
  > babel is used by many many corporate entities, an e.g. $5/month payment would not stop them from using it, IF that payment was trivial to make But for a corporation undertaking the obligation to pay any amount of money is not trivial to do. Someone inside has to justify the expense, probably write a document about it, depending on the corporation all kind of hoops need to be jumped, decision makers convinced, checks and gates passed. It is probably not meaningfully harder to do all of these for a $50k yearly licence than for $5 monthly licence.
guipsp 4y ago
> What are the free alternatives? At the time this post was written, pretty much none.
rqtwteye 4y ago
“you need to really provide a lot of value to get someone to open their wallet.” I think it’s more about asking for money.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  Yep. It's a less known trick among developers. For some reason, most people will do something and expect to be rewarded for it without setting up the reward mechanism. No, people almost never give you money without you asking for it. Other people assume that it's very hard to get money for something. Totally wrong, people love spending money. The exact same thing goes for just asking for help or whatever you want. It's even true for romantic relationships. Asking people for something is remarkably powerful.
sdiacom 4y ago
Yes, if you release something for free, you're not entitled to being paid for it. That's tautological. It's what something being free means, that people don't have to pay for it. The interesting question here is, what happens when the people who are working on something for free move on, or when their motivation is no longer enough to ensure the quality of the resulting product? What would the millions of people who rely on that thing do then? Maybe they'll just move on to an alternative, or just do without this particular product. That's fine, at least at an individual level. But collectively, the cost of millions of people moving to an alternative, or figuring out how to go on without it, is surely much higher than the cost of maintaining the original product. So there's a tragedy of the commons in the making here, right? Millions of people collectively benefit from the existence and maintenance of this project, and would be harmed to some extent by its absence, and yet, because it's "free", no one is willing to put in the time, effort or money needed to ensure its continued existence. You can plainly see that none of this is about whether it deserves to be paid. Regardless, "you deserve to be paid if people pay you" is as absurd a sentence as "you deserve to be alive if people don't kill you". That's not what "deserve" means, that's just stating what things are.
- strken 4y ago
  In the specific case of Babel the alternatives are an order of magnitude faster and much less complicated (SWC, esbuild, Sucrase); this comes at the cost of features and of dropping support for older browsers. Given the excellent alternatives, there may actually be a long-term benefit to switching off Babel, since the end result will be cleaner and faster transpilation tools that don't support increasingly antiquated browsers. This sucks for anyone who needs to support very old browsers, but if you really need Babel presumably you'll be willing to pay for it.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    If you really need to support old browsers you might as well just write old JS anyway. It's not like you're going to get anything acceptable running with a modern team writing idiomatic CRA-via-Babel on these browsers, and writing the actual code that will run will be easier overall and at most steps of development.
risyachka 4y ago
>> What am I getting for my money? >> you need to really provide a lot of value to get someone to open their wallet Tool like babel provides a ton of obvious value, but they need a good business model to capture it.
wpietri 4y ago
I get that this is one frame for how one uses money: > What am I getting for my money? But it's not the only frame, and I think it's vastly overapplied. Between various online newspapers, magazines and Patreon-supported writers and whatnot, I spend probably $2k/year. What do I get out of it personally? Very little. But the world gets quite a lot out of good journalism, and I'd say the world needs a lot more of it. I get that fundamentalist capitalism wishes to squeeze everything into the mold of dollar-denominated quid-pro-quo exchanges. It's certainly a useful frame on many occasions, but it's ultimately a bit me-me-me for my tastes. I have no opinion on this particular project, but in general I think we should find a way to support things that are useful to lots of people, because otherwise those things tend to go away.
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  You are talking about charity, I am talking about commerce. Charity has its place and can be sustained if properly executed. There is only so much that can be donated however. When you provide the market test, the bar is a lot higher for sustainability.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Well now you at least admit there are two things in the world. What if there were more than two?
wolverine876 4y ago
At the same time, the market doesn't value things well. Professional athletes, who do nothing to change the world (the world is the same no matter who does it or what they do), are valued N times as much as teachers, doctors, police, scientists, etc. who do change the world. Also, popularity is a signal that there is real value in what you are doing.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  > Also, popularity is a signal that there is real value in what you are doing. Now apply that to your first paragraph?
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  Value is subjective. I value a bottle of water far more when I’m dying of thirst. Professional athletes make money because their talent is valued and it’s rare. You have a fundamentally flawed understanding of price, value, and economics in general. Some teachers are indeed paid more - some extremely well - if they have rare skills that are highly valued. Top tier teachers get jobs at universities, private schools, and as tutors. I have never met them but I was told top-tier acting instructors are paid very high rates by Hollywood actors. Highly talented teachers don’t work at public schools because those jobs are generally pretty terrible.
  - lelanthran 4y ago
    > Professional athletes make money because their talent is valued and it’s rare. Incorrect. Profession athletes are performers, no more, no less. Talent scarcity has little to do with it. They get paid in direct proportion to the number of eyeballs they can capture. No different to any other type of performer (musicians, actors, he'll, even clowns).
    - monero-xmr 4y ago
      This is absurdly illogical. If I can convince 10 people to pay me $1 million each, I will earn far more than someone being watched by 10 million people paid nothing by each. If this statement doesn’t make sense to you, perhaps you shouldn’t make business and investment decisions.
rektide 4y ago
Maybe this post just shows that the market system is inefficient, is full of painful friction. Maybe we should have an economy that does pay people purely to make popular & impactful works. Personally, given how awful everyone else has been at supprting the maintenance & development of our base digital infrastructure, I start to feel like we should/must resort to governments funding open source. The social benefit created is immense, powers so much enterprise & creation. We should look after & care for these interests. Perhaps we need a socialistic social system that can do what capitalism seemingly cant- and actually, it sure seems like we could potentially make a lot more money by expanding & growing the base library of really good things we fund/support. The tough love no-one-deserves-to-get paid view looks like it causes enormous self harm to industry & the world. Good things, good infrastructure to start from, to work atop, seems obviously to the public benefit. It shouldnt be such a hellish toil to try to keep these projects afloat, the very minimum possible bar. Society should be driven to expand the free things we people can do, expand the scope of human possibility. Expanding liberty seems like such an obvious goal, but it seems so bizarrely reviled, so bitterly naysayed, alas!
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  The free market enables the collective desires of humanity to determine how to allocate scarce resources. Prices act as signals that balance supply and demand and inform producers where to allocate capital and invest in innovation. Money is a store of value that enables smooth commerce. If you try and mess with this system - say, by having a government that tries to set prices manually, or flood the market with printed money, you will no longer have an economy that reflects the collective desires of humanity but one that reflects the desires of a small elite. Luckily history provides numerous examples of the flaws of such things, if you are willing to study and understand the consequences.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > The free market enables the collective desires of humanity to determine how to allocate scarce resources. No. No it doesn't. Free market gives rise to companies Nestle who monopolise access to clean water and sell it at profit, all future be damned. > Luckily history provides numerous examples of the flaws of such things, if you are willing to study and understand the consequences. Indeed. History has also shown that unrestrained free market is the worst system there is, and has shown it again, and again, and again.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> In a world where people agonize over Netflix going from $9 to $14 Why is this acceptable/normalized as it is?
- RickHull 4y ago
  It is totally acceptable and normal (to me) for people to make decisions (and even agonize) over how to spend their own money.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

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.
- morelisp 4y ago
  I... didn't say anything about the gold standard or austerity or whatever you think I implied. I also don't think the decade+ of ZIRP is a necessary consequence of fiat money or the fed or whatever; it's one of many possible fiscal paths which could have been taken even staying within the constraints of liberal capitalism. I'm not even really attacking ZIRP, I'm attacking reconfiguring our whole industry around what was obviously a temporary financialization stage. Even then, I'm not even really attacking it - I'm just saying, if you hitched yourself to such a transient software ecosystem for whatever reason, don't come crying when it transitions out.

petermcneeley 4y ago

"Creating value is not enough — you also need to capture some of the value you create" - Peter Thiel I think what your comment (and those similar) misses is that someone can provide a great deal of value but fail to capture any of it. Specifically this line "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."

black_puppydog 4y ago

I think given that babel is used by many many corporate entities, an e.g. $5/month payment would not stop them from using it, IF that payment was trivial to make. I'd guess what's holding that back is that a) that fee is not necessary for them to use it, and b) it's hard to fight for paying money that's not technically necessary, and c) getting a license for anything approved can be a pain. What I don't think prevents this is that companies (even startups) think it's too expensive.

CountSessine 4y ago
What it really means is that they like using it when it’s free and that the cost of switching away from Babel to an alternative is less than the cost of supporting Babel.
- xmprt 4y ago
  The cost of supporting Babel (and other open source products in general) is more an administrative and political cost than a financial one in a lot of places.
  - foobiekr 4y ago
    It’s actually probably easier to get $20k approved annually than $5k. The bigger number implies skin in the game at all steps in the process and has an air of legitimacy.
krisoft 4y ago
> babel is used by many many corporate entities, an e.g. $5/month payment would not stop them from using it, IF that payment was trivial to make But for a corporation undertaking the obligation to pay any amount of money is not trivial to do. Someone inside has to justify the expense, probably write a document about it, depending on the corporation all kind of hoops need to be jumped, decision makers convinced, checks and gates passed. It is probably not meaningfully harder to do all of these for a $50k yearly licence than for $5 monthly licence.

guipsp 4y ago

> What are the free alternatives? At the time this post was written, pretty much none.

rqtwteye 4y ago

“you need to really provide a lot of value to get someone to open their wallet.” I think it’s more about asking for money.

mrtksn 4y ago
Yep. It's a less known trick among developers. For some reason, most people will do something and expect to be rewarded for it without setting up the reward mechanism. No, people almost never give you money without you asking for it. Other people assume that it's very hard to get money for something. Totally wrong, people love spending money. The exact same thing goes for just asking for help or whatever you want. It's even true for romantic relationships. Asking people for something is remarkably powerful.

sdiacom 4y ago

Yes, if you release something for free, you're not entitled to being paid for it. That's tautological. It's what something being free means, that people don't have to pay for it. The interesting question here is, what happens when the people who are working on something for free move on, or when their motivation is no longer enough to ensure the quality of the resulting product? What would the millions of people who rely on that thing do then? Maybe they'll just move on to an alternative, or just do without this particular product. That's fine, at least at an individual level. But collectively, the cost of millions of people moving to an alternative, or figuring out how to go on without it, is surely much higher than the cost of maintaining the original product. So there's a tragedy of the commons in the making here, right? Millions of people collectively benefit from the existence and maintenance of this project, and would be harmed to some extent by its absence, and yet, because it's "free", no one is willing to put in the time, effort or money needed to ensure its continued existence. You can plainly see that none of this is about whether it deserves to be paid. Regardless, "you deserve to be paid if people pay you" is as absurd a sentence as "you deserve to be alive if people don't kill you". That's not what "deserve" means, that's just stating what things are.

strken 4y ago
In the specific case of Babel the alternatives are an order of magnitude faster and much less complicated (SWC, esbuild, Sucrase); this comes at the cost of features and of dropping support for older browsers. Given the excellent alternatives, there may actually be a long-term benefit to switching off Babel, since the end result will be cleaner and faster transpilation tools that don't support increasingly antiquated browsers. This sucks for anyone who needs to support very old browsers, but if you really need Babel presumably you'll be willing to pay for it.
- morelisp 4y ago
  If you really need to support old browsers you might as well just write old JS anyway. It's not like you're going to get anything acceptable running with a modern team writing idiomatic CRA-via-Babel on these browsers, and writing the actual code that will run will be easier overall and at most steps of development.

risyachka 4y ago

>> What am I getting for my money? >> you need to really provide a lot of value to get someone to open their wallet Tool like babel provides a ton of obvious value, but they need a good business model to capture it.

wpietri 4y ago

I get that this is one frame for how one uses money: > What am I getting for my money? But it's not the only frame, and I think it's vastly overapplied. Between various online newspapers, magazines and Patreon-supported writers and whatnot, I spend probably $2k/year. What do I get out of it personally? Very little. But the world gets quite a lot out of good journalism, and I'd say the world needs a lot more of it. I get that fundamentalist capitalism wishes to squeeze everything into the mold of dollar-denominated quid-pro-quo exchanges. It's certainly a useful frame on many occasions, but it's ultimately a bit me-me-me for my tastes. I have no opinion on this particular project, but in general I think we should find a way to support things that are useful to lots of people, because otherwise those things tend to go away.

monero-xmr 4y ago
You are talking about charity, I am talking about commerce. Charity has its place and can be sustained if properly executed. There is only so much that can be donated however. When you provide the market test, the bar is a lot higher for sustainability.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Well now you at least admit there are two things in the world. What if there were more than two?

wolverine876 4y ago

At the same time, the market doesn't value things well. Professional athletes, who do nothing to change the world (the world is the same no matter who does it or what they do), are valued N times as much as teachers, doctors, police, scientists, etc. who do change the world. Also, popularity is a signal that there is real value in what you are doing.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
> Also, popularity is a signal that there is real value in what you are doing. Now apply that to your first paragraph?
monero-xmr 4y ago
Value is subjective. I value a bottle of water far more when I’m dying of thirst. Professional athletes make money because their talent is valued and it’s rare. You have a fundamentally flawed understanding of price, value, and economics in general. Some teachers are indeed paid more - some extremely well - if they have rare skills that are highly valued. Top tier teachers get jobs at universities, private schools, and as tutors. I have never met them but I was told top-tier acting instructors are paid very high rates by Hollywood actors. Highly talented teachers don’t work at public schools because those jobs are generally pretty terrible.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  > Professional athletes make money because their talent is valued and it’s rare. Incorrect. Profession athletes are performers, no more, no less. Talent scarcity has little to do with it. They get paid in direct proportion to the number of eyeballs they can capture. No different to any other type of performer (musicians, actors, he'll, even clowns).
  - monero-xmr 4y ago
    This is absurdly illogical. If I can convince 10 people to pay me $1 million each, I will earn far more than someone being watched by 10 million people paid nothing by each. If this statement doesn’t make sense to you, perhaps you shouldn’t make business and investment decisions.

rektide 4y ago

Maybe this post just shows that the market system is inefficient, is full of painful friction. Maybe we should have an economy that does pay people purely to make popular & impactful works. Personally, given how awful everyone else has been at supprting the maintenance & development of our base digital infrastructure, I start to feel like we should/must resort to governments funding open source. The social benefit created is immense, powers so much enterprise & creation. We should look after & care for these interests. Perhaps we need a socialistic social system that can do what capitalism seemingly cant- and actually, it sure seems like we could potentially make a lot more money by expanding & growing the base library of really good things we fund/support. The tough love no-one-deserves-to-get paid view looks like it causes enormous self harm to industry & the world. Good things, good infrastructure to start from, to work atop, seems obviously to the public benefit. It shouldnt be such a hellish toil to try to keep these projects afloat, the very minimum possible bar. Society should be driven to expand the free things we people can do, expand the scope of human possibility. Expanding liberty seems like such an obvious goal, but it seems so bizarrely reviled, so bitterly naysayed, alas!

monero-xmr 4y ago
The free market enables the collective desires of humanity to determine how to allocate scarce resources. Prices act as signals that balance supply and demand and inform producers where to allocate capital and invest in innovation. Money is a store of value that enables smooth commerce. If you try and mess with this system - say, by having a government that tries to set prices manually, or flood the market with printed money, you will no longer have an economy that reflects the collective desires of humanity but one that reflects the desires of a small elite. Luckily history provides numerous examples of the flaws of such things, if you are willing to study and understand the consequences.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > The free market enables the collective desires of humanity to determine how to allocate scarce resources. No. No it doesn't. Free market gives rise to companies Nestle who monopolise access to clean water and sell it at profit, all future be damned. > Luckily history provides numerous examples of the flaws of such things, if you are willing to study and understand the consequences. Indeed. History has also shown that unrestrained free market is the worst system there is, and has shown it again, and again, and again.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

> In a world where people agonize over Netflix going from $9 to $14 Why is this acceptable/normalized as it is?

RickHull 4y ago
It is totally acceptable and normal (to me) for people to make decisions (and even agonize) over how to spend their own money.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]