[HN Gopher] Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out...
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Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
(2021)
Author : dmitriid
Score : 68 points
Date : 2023-02-18 19:54 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (babeljs.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (babeljs.io)
| vmatsiiako wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| revskill wrote:
| 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.
| DoctorNick wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| enticingturtle wrote:
| A good take from the time
|
| https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/05/11/Sell-Babel-8
| ghaff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| whstl wrote:
| 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.
| pictur wrote:
| Browser support is not just about IE. I wish it was just IE.
| rcarr wrote:
| 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Anyone who wants to support IE and Outlook astonish me.
|
| Welcome to large companies (who may still get more people
| browsing from IE than populations of entire countries) and
| government agencies (good government agencies cannot afford
| not to support a wide array of old, weird, and unsupported
| browsers)
| ranting-moth wrote:
| 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.
| whstl wrote:
| "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.
| whatshisface wrote:
| "Free as in beer" is funny because it's basically open core.
| You pay for the sandwiches.
| guipsp wrote:
| The people commenting here are really underestimating the value
| that Babel provides to the whole Web ecosystem.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| pictur wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pictur wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 - many (including
| me) think they were not spending the money they did have very
| effectively.
| draw_down wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| dmitriid wrote:
| See also "Software Below Poverty Line" from 2019:
| https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html
| nickstinemates wrote:
| I think open source as a "business model" is fundamentally
| failing and has completely fallen from grace in the past
| decade.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| i haven't actually seen that approach work. If you got an
| examples, I'd love to see it.
| NextHendrix wrote:
| >$11,000 a month
|
| Is this not quite a lot of money?
| LastTrain wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| kevingadd wrote:
| 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.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| 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]
| monero-xmr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| With proliferation of cheap monthly subscriptions I believe
| the processes in the businesses would adapt - but yes, it
| would take some time.
|
| Still, the other point (why pay if there is no obligation)
| is a bigger obstacle. One obvious solution is to provide
| paid extensions on top of free core product, but that might
| lead to forks if enough people are interested in the
| functionality and not willing to pay (/ use proprietary
| software).
|
| I believe the future is in "fair use" licenses - those that
| grant users freedom to use for their (non-competing)
| business and to repair as needed, but that allow original
| developers to charge money for extra features and for
| services without worrying that competition will undercut
| them on market (without supporting the product).
|
| I'm following the "cloud protection" licenses and hope that
| one of them gains enough traction to become a serious
| contender to FOSS.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| In our current system, it would be far easier to get 1
| corporation to give you $1000 a year than to get 200 of them
| to give you $5 a year.
| briantakita wrote:
| How would changing our current system make it easier for
| 200 to give $5 a year? To me it seems like there's a
| coordination cost of having 200 to do an organized thing vs
| 1 to do the same thing as the organized 200.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 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.
| neilyio wrote:
| I encourage you to be more open-minded when evaluating the
| impact of others on the world.
|
| The millions of children, teenagers, and adults who find
| inspiration in likes of Kobe Bryant, Serena Williams, Michael
| Phelps, Lionel Messi etc. might disagree with you. Many of us
| learn to be better from their ambition, discipline,
| leadership, etc.
|
| These qualities become imprinted on young people who look up
| to these figures. In nearly every country, there are young
| people who see professional athletes as their greatest role
| models. Can you seriously say that creates no value for the
| world?
|
| As an aside, elite athletes have refined the art of practice
| and study for their entire lives. I've learned more about the
| process of learning from interactions with them than anywhere
| else. If you don't think there's something to learn from this
| entire category of intelligence, you're missing out.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| > Also, popularity is a signal that there is real value in
| what you are doing.
|
| Now apply that to your first paragraph?
| monero-xmr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Epic Healthcare person that posts on here, how has all the
| government $$$ for mandated EMRs worked out in actual
| implementation? That would be an interesting example of how
| well this model works.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > 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.
| dools wrote:
| There is no such thing as a free market really. All markets
| are created by governments, and all currency is created by
| governments through the imposition of taxes.
|
| Within this framework some prices are allowed to fluctuate
| but the price level is set generally when the government
| spends and all other prices derive from that.
|
| Governments also influence pricing through financial and
| corporate regulation. It's obviously a terrible idea for a
| government to attempt to decide how all of society's
| resources should be allocated and to designate prices for
| each and every item or service that might be produced, but
| it's just as bad of an idea to think that the "free market"
| can govern itself.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > In a world where people agonize over Netflix going from $9 to
| $14
|
| Why is this acceptable/normalized as it is?
| RickHull wrote:
| It is totally acceptable and normal (to me) for people to
| make decisions (and even agonize) over how to spend their own
| money.
| [deleted]
| guipsp wrote:
| > What are the free alternatives?
|
| At the time this post was written, pretty much none.
| sdiacom wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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.
| risyachka wrote:
| >> 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway284534 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway284534 wrote:
| I do appreciate your transparency, though I disagree with the
| sentiment that I'm arguing from a position of bad faith.
|
| It's a self-evident fact that the Babel team has not shown a
| moment of interest in lowering their role in the JavaScript
| ecosystem to anything short of kingmakers. Have a gander at
| their GitHub README and what do we see?[1]
|
| - "Babel is a compiler for writing next generation
| JavaScript." Indefinitely.
|
| - Over a dozen sponsor logos. An embarrassment of riches.
|
| - A literal audio recording of a song in praise of the
| project.
|
| The Babel team has a well documented history of their
| priorities[2], emphasizing the need for a modular approach
| that has no exit strategy[3]. At best, we have a case of
| accidental entrenchment and long term dependence on the Babel
| brewing as early as 2017![4]
|
| Compare this infinite circus to the humble but popular
| Normalize.css, which has the express purpose to _stop
| existing_.[5]
|
| If the Babel team wants to raise some money, they can start
| by putting a plan together that would codify an exit
| strategy. It's certainly more noble than their current plan
| of barnacling on to every NPM package...
|
| - [1] https://github.com/babel/babel
|
| - [2] https://github.com/babel/notes
|
| - [3] https://github.com/babel/notes/blob/master/2016/2016-07
| /july...
|
| - [4] https://github.com/babel/notes/blob/master/2017/2017-04
| /apri...
|
| - [5] https://nicolasgallagher.com/about-normalize-css/
| daveidol wrote:
| How would Babel stop existing though if JavaScript keeps
| evolving?
|
| Is the goal that we all are using evergreen browsers and
| versions of Node and thus have no need to support older
| runtimes?
| briantakita wrote:
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >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?
| amir734jj wrote:
| This is from 2021. Has there been any update?
| ericlewis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tyre wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How would a not for profit work without funding?
| m1sta_ wrote:
| it would leverage wealth.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Look at stuff like TeamTrees. People buy a service which
| they think is positive to the world.
| xmprt wrote:
| How do you think TeamTrees raises funds?
| charcircuit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They hire people who specialize in fundraising and people who
| specialize in reaching whatever community they support. It's
| not the same people and the fundraising teams are fairly slim
| ghaff wrote:
| It depends I guess. Yes, a lot or organizations will have a
| position like head of development (or a development office
| at scale) i.e. fundraising, but a lot of people who are
| ostensibly about the organization's mission--the artistic
| director of a theater company, the president of a
| university, the executive director of an organization with
| conservation properties, etc.--absolutely have fundraising
| as a key metric of their success.
| rcarr wrote:
| There is no other model. For profits are exactly the same
| they just call it sales and marketing rather than
| fundraising.
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