Open-source JavaScript project Babel 'running out of money' after employing paid maintainers, sponsors pull out
- Reference: 1620816598
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/05/12/babel_money_woes/
- Source link:
Babel compiles modern JavaScript (ECMAScript 2015+) into code that runs on older web browsers. It can also compile JSX (syntax used by the React framework) and TypeScript, a typed superset of JavaScript. Using Babel is a huge benefit to developers trying to support multiple browsers on multiple platforms. Its [1]GitHub repository has 39,000 stars and has been forked 4,800 times, showing its popularity.
The core team has [2]now said that the project is running out of money, despite sponsorship from Airbnb, Facebook, Salesforce, Gitpod, GatsbyJS, Discord, Elastic, Vercel, and other users.
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According to the post made this week, the project has been engaged in a "funding experiment" since March 2018, when contributor Henry Zhu left his job to work on securing funding and then to become a full-time paid maintainer. In November 2019, this expanded to support three additional part-time maintainers, Nicolò Ribaudo, Huáng Jùnliàng, and Kai Cataldo. Funding is managed through the [6]Open Collective , which means anyone can see the transactions. Zhu was initially paid $11,000 per month, and, after they joined, the other three received $2,000 per month.
Funds to run out at end of 2021
The team now says that funding declined in 2020 "despite the tech industry's growth during this time." Some big sponsors dropped out, and Cataldo had to step down. "We strongly believe that working in open source should be a viable and sustainable career path. We should be bringing everyone up to the same level, not down. However, we need to face the fact that this would mean draining our current balance in just a few months," the team said.
The project has decided, despite the decline in funding, to pay all three remaining maintainers "a temporary rate of $6,000 per month." This will be sustainable until the end of 2021, during which time further funding will be sought. "We need at least $333,000 per year, which is 2x what we're currently bringing in," the team said.
Funding issues in open source are a longstanding problem affecting many projects. Babel may suffer from being somewhat hidden when it is integrated into other frameworks, such as React, Next.js, Vue, Ember and Angular. According to the team, Babel is downloaded over 117 million times a month.
How do you measure productivity? Maintainer's work ethic backed after ill-tempered debate over salaries on Twitter
Babel creator Sebastian McKenzie then complicated matters by making some strong allegations on Twitter, which he appears to regret since they were subsequently deleted, claiming Babel's "funds were misallocated for years, and the project has been too slow to improve."
McKenzie is no longer part of the Babel core team, and has his own JavaScript tooling project called [7]Rome , which last week raised $4.5m in venture capital funding.
With respect to Babel, McKenzie alleged, referencing Zhu, "the reason there's no money is because someone took a $130K annual salary and didn't actually work on the project."
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He added: "In 2020, Henry created 12 issues, commented 25 times, and created 29 pull requests. This is across all Babel orgs. Sorry but that's DEFINITELY not $132k worth of work. Especially when there are other contributors who are working for free doing much more."
McKenzie's take is very much disputed by Ribaudo, who [9]said on Hacker News that "simply looking at GitHub and counting the number of commits for each contributor does *not* tell how much someone is working."
A large part of Zhu's work was in publicising and raising funds, Ribaudo explained. "Henry is the one who contacts companies trying to explain to them why they should support us, the one who gives most talks at their internal events: he's the one working on fundraising for the team."
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There was discussion, Ribaudo said, over the discrepancy in salaries before they were equalised. "Everyone in the team was receptive to my arguments and everyone agreed that we should have reassessed our salaries. The main reason that Henry was earning more was that initially he was the only paid contributor," he said.
Evan You, creator of the Vue.js framework which is often used with Babel, [11]said on Twitter : "Working on a project doesn't only mean pushing commits. It also means deciding what to do, syncing with committees, running a team structure, thinking about how and where to get funding, and handling the mental pressure of 'I'm responsible for this'."
He defended Zhu's record, asking: "Is 130k a lot for someone who keeps Babel, which is used by millions of devs, which effectively served as the testing ground for ES next proposals, afloat? Heck I'd say that's even too little."
He also [12]noted that Zhu was willing to take a pay cut "because given current funding situation, that's the only way to keep the project going."
Zhu himself said in a [13]podcast last year that "slowly over time I realized stuff that I liked doing even if I'm not good at it is trying to deal with more of the people stuff. The community-oriented stuff. And I think that's been good for the project."
He added: "I do see myself as more of a maintainer than a creator. I'm not sure if I would want to be a creator. I think I like being a maintainer of other people's code."
Babel is a highly valued project, but the situation is messy and about management and governance as much as funding itself, and another example of the [14]sustainability problem in open source .
The Register yesterday morning asked Zhu to comment. ®
Get our [15]Tech Resources
[1] https://github.com/babel/babel
[2] https://babeljs.io/blog/2021/05/10/funding-update.html
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YJv7muhZr8N663o9ekMN2AAAANI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YJv7muhZr8N663o9ekMN2AAAANI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YJv7muhZr8N663o9ekMN2AAAANI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://opencollective.com/babel
[7] https://rome.tools/blog/announcing-rome-tools-inc/
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YJv7muhZr8N663o9ekMN2AAAANI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116357
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YJv7muhZr8N663o9ekMN2AAAANI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522
[12] https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1392093115171885057
[13] https://podcast.babeljs.io/rome/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/untangling_open_sources_sustainability_problem/
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Open source stuff should be free ...
It is free. Nobody is paying to use Babel JavaScript.
But if you want the project to survive, you need to have people willing to give their time to that, and it is simpler and easier to attract developers if they get a financial incentive out of it - especially if you want the good ones to work full-time.
That being said, I'm sorry but $11k a month is not the kind of incentive I think is justified for an open-source project. Up to $4k could be justified, following the amount of work the developer contributes, but I think that is pretty much the high bar.
It's Open Source. A living wage, yes, but if you're in it for the money, go back to being a company drone. Either that or create a startup and go hit venture capital.
Re: Open source stuff should be free ...
$4k a month is $48k/year. Less taxes. Depending on where you live, that may be a very low salary for a developer or project manager role. There are cheap places in the world, but then there are places where you might struggle to pay your living expenses (rent, bills, health insurance) with that little cash.
If he's in California and working as an experienced full time project manager, and adding significant value, then $131k/year isn't too unreasonable. Similarly for a full-time developer.
Lady Godiva OSS
Open Source software is like riding naked to try and benefit a part of the world - everybody loves it, talks about it, and mentions you in the press. But the end is never going to be much benefit to you ... eventually the software retires and after a while nobody knows where it's buried. This doesn't mean that it's not good (and fun sometimes too) - it is normally a very good thing to do but it's always going to benefit the rest of the world far more than anyone originally doing the work.
Which is not a problem for many people who work in Open Source.
It is not much of a problem either for projects that can be realized by one person.
It's when you need a team, and need to coordinate, and use procedures for submitting code etc, that's where Open Source falters if there isn't good management and some form of financial backing.
'A large part of Zhu's work was in publicising and raising funds, Ribaudo explained. "Henry is the one who contacts companies trying to explain to them why they should support us, the one who gives most talks at their internal events: he's the one working on fundraising for the team."'
And what a stellar job he's been doing!
'Funds to run out at end of 2021'
Oh... Nevermind.
Commits... what an asinine metric!
Not all commits are created equal! Reminds me of paying people based on lines of code
/*
*
* Or
* Boilerplate
* Comments nobody
* Reads
*
*/
As a chief hardware engineer, I can measure the commits I've done in the last decade on one hand, but I feel my strongly nonzero salary is nonetheless justified...
Re: Commits... what an asinine metric!
Hi, it's your boss here. Less than 5 commits in a decade, and still time to post on The Reg? Clear your desk!
Open Source vs Open Exploitation
An important issue that situations like these highlight is the important distinction between source code being open and freely available, and the value of the work being put into said source code. For some reason it appears that people seem to mix the two up, even when closed source projects can just as well be unpaid hobby projects, and open source projects practically driven by commercial interests.
An interesting project is for example the Linux kernel, which by Linus' own admission could not have grown to where it's today if it wasn't for countless paid employees at companies around the world investing time and effort into developing the kernel and associated infrastructure.
When the expectation is that an open source project must by definition be developed by unpaid volunteers, then we end up at what is basically exploitation-ware. If a person is not duly compensated for their time and effort in some fashion, then this amounts to exploitation at best, and slavery at worst.
As someone who runs a couple of OSS projects which are moderately successful, I am well aware of the pressure that a project's success creates, but also the dangers that come with it. People may like the project, and gladly use it. Yet one should never lose sight of what is most important there: one's own happiness and health.
If you're not being paid for work, it's a hobby. Hobbies by definition have to be fun and bring some sense of reward. Nobody can force you to 'do' a hobby, because at that point it is work, and the person who pushes you to do such work should compensate you for it.
Which then raises the interesting question of how much a project is truly worth, and how much of the modern technology stack is based on such cynical exploitation of what are or were essentially hobby projects?
Charidee shop
PhuxAche
Open source stuff should be free ...
to everyone, especially the large corporates who depend on it. Guys should work for free so that these corporates can make even more money, why should they contribute a penny when they can get it for free, free, free .... ?
And if they did pay for features to be added then their competitors might use these features and that would be a bad, bad thing!
If the FLOSS software does not quite do what they want: then they will pay many times more than a contribution to the FLOSS developers ... because, well, closed source vendors need to be paid, you cannot use their stuff without making large, repeated, payments ... that is how it works y'know.
Well, that seems to be the attitude. I suspect that if they did a real cost benefit analysis then helping FLOSS would come out on top - often (not always); but the managers & bean counters cannot see that. If it is open source it should be free, free, free!