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.
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.
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.
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.
Last year I was working with a client that still (yes, still) had to support IE11 (this was in healthcare) and was able to do so while writing Vue (v2) and bundling with Webpack all thanks to Babel and a handful of polyfills. We basically got to write the modern JS we’re used to and still support IE11 without having to think about it too much.
Hopefully this becomes less necessary (that client’s IE11 requirement will likely end this year when one of their partners finishes converting their ActiveX app to Electron), but right now it still is, and Babel actually does do what people say it does, and very well.
Not entirely true, I can get reasonable performance on 10 year old smart TVs using Svelte and TypeScript if I use Babel and a few extra polyfills. React would be a terrible idea though, you're right about that.
> 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.
The tragedy of the commons happens long before that.
Developers cannot an build and publish a software product like babel for-profit, because someone else would give out a V1 version for free. I suspect that there are many languages, compilers, IDEs, libraries, and build tools that no longer get written because the authors can't make a living from doing it.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Give dev's an ad hoc budget to buy whatever tools they need under a certain total per year, rather than have 5 meetings and 2 months of sales pitches for a tool.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
If those individuals didn't exist, other athletes would fill the roles just as well. Also, it's questionable how inspiring or positive they are. The behavior of many athletes is horrible.
> 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.
What about experts in other fields - such as teachers, nurses, coders, etc. Nothing special about athletes.
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.
> 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.
What does that have to do with capturing eyeballs?
Sports fans are the product. Advertisers are the consumers. The more product a game can attract, the more valuable that game is to the consumers (i.e. the advertisers).
It's no different to "free" online services (google, facebook, tumbler, youtube, whatever) - the visitors are the product, the advertisers are the consumers.
I'm more curious about why you find it illogical. Are you a sports supporter by any chance? You realise that it's possible to like something even as you realise that you are the product, right?
Being delusional about your place in the market is pointless.
> If this statement doesn’t make sense to you, perhaps you shouldn’t make business and investment decisions.
> And why do some 'capture eyeballs' more effectively than others?
Who cares? It doesn't matter.
There's a lot more dexterity, agility, speed and intelligence required to compete at the top levels of Starcraft than in football, but football pays more because football captures more eyeballs, not individual football players.
Okay, you know what - let's pretend that skill and talent does matter in terms of revenue.
We now need to explain why those sports that require just as much skill and talent (sometimes more) as the major money-making sports do, have less revenue.
You really want to go down the path of saying that a sport that relies more on brute-force strength (football) than other sports requires more "skill" and "talent" than (for example) sports that require insanely fast reflexes (ping pong) or sports that require a very high degree of precision (golf).
Right, so lets pretend that brute-force strength is a skill and talent - now how are we going to explain sports that require more brute-force strength being less popular than football.
Athletic skill and talent have almost nothing to do with the revenue of the money-making machine.
Like I said above, athletes are entertainers. They get paid for entertainment.
You're right, I am confused - do you think it does matter or it doesn't matter, because whichever one you think, the comment I posted addresses it in full.
I'm not even sure why you are asking the question - is it common to ask a question again when the answer is one that doesn't suit you?
> You're right, I am confused - do you think it does matter or it doesn't matter, because whichever one you think, the comment I posted addresses it in full.
No? Your comment doesn't seem to directly answer the question at all.
If you think it did, can you point to where it does?
It can be and is measured objectively, and certainly we can reason about it: Saving lives is more valuable than scoring goals.
> You have a fundamentally flawed
People can disagree with you without being wrong or flawed or whatever. Maybe you are missing something. The way to knowledge is curiosity about people who disagree with you - otherwise, you are stuck in a cage of your own making.
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.
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!
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.
Software has zero marginal costs and infinite supplies, and therefore the free market would only ever give it a price of zero. The reason that it does not is because of the government interfering.
Economics is very clear on this. You tax negative externalities and subsidize positive externalities. Discovering new open source software is a positive externality. Subsidize it.
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.
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.
This is an incredibly idealistic and naive view of capitalism that no doubt 99% of people on this website are across.
Fortunately we’ve got plenty of examples of the myriad shortcomings of strict free-market capitalism, namely the fact that it has never survived outside of very constrained, sterile, low-importance environments. After x generations, the systems start to fall apart, and inevitably someone has to augment it with some socialist policies.
Failing to get your nose out of your economics textbook to look at the myriad real-world examples of a free market still reflecting the desires of the elite, is a massive shortcoming.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
> Welcome to large companies (who may still get more people browsing from IE than populations of entire countries)
Would like more info on this and examples of the companies you're talking about. How are they turning a profit from the 0.25% of the population using IE.
> and government agencies (good government agencies cannot afford not to support a wide array of old, weird, and unsupported browsers)
How can they not afford to support it? I don't see how they're raking in massive amounts of extra tax income, political goodwill, or providing a huge amount of value by supporting old browsers. I've not been in a local library, in the UK at least, that didn't have Chrome installed. The only people left using IE are boomers and last time I checked they're the segment of the population most able to afford a new laptop but, predictably, least willing to buy a new one or learn more about computers. Or just generally do anything for the greater benefit of society but that's a whole other conversation.
As others have pointed out, IE is a poster child. There are many, many outdated browser versions and devices beside IE.
If you have 200 million users, 0.25% is 500 000 people. You may think it's not much, but most cities on Earth have fewer people than that. And it's 0.25% IE, and 0.25% QQ, and 0.25% that Samsung browser from 2014, and... And suddenly you have 5 million people using outdated browsers.
And when it comes to government agencies, "afford" does not mean "profit" because you can't measure everything in terms of profit. And no, not every "boomer" has the money to upgrade their 2012 Android phone bought for them by their kids. And not every millenial sports the latest iPhone. Etc.
--- start quote ---
In the middle, a young woman sits on a hard plastic chair. She is surrounded by canvas-bags containing her worldly possessions. She doesn't look like she is in a great emotional place right now. Clutched in her hands is a games console - a PlayStation Portable...
Walking behind her, I glance at her console and recognise the screen she's on. She's connected to the complementary WiFi and is browsing the GOV.UK pages on Housing Benefit.
There's a reason ADA exists: it's because people only view everything through the lenses of "how much profit do I get from these people even if I am government"
> If you have 200 million users, 0.25% is 500 000 people. You may think it's not much, but most cities on Earth have fewer people than that. And it's 0.25% IE, and 0.25% QQ, and 0.25% that Samsung browser from 2014, and... And suddenly you have 5 million people using outdated browsers.
Yes but I’m still not convinced it makes economic sense for companies to support those users. Those users are signalling a clear aversion to technology and technology purchases. So how many sales or subscriptions are they getting from those 5 million people? Because a 0.5% conversion rate on 5 million people is 25,000 sales. Is that worth it for a company of that size and does it cover the development and management costs?
And I see what you’re saying about access for governments sites but the government routinely hires contractors for £500 or more a day and the cost of a new iPad is £369. You would probably save more money loaning people on benefits a bottom of the range ipad and just supporting safari and chrome rather than throwing manpower and money supporting old browsers. Everyone involved gets a better experience (other than the contractors who aren’t needed any more).
"I'm young and rich, and I can't understand why the rest of the world caters to other people than me" is a position, for sure.
No matter how amazingly technologically savvy you are, if your smart TV is more than just three years old, it's already running a deprecated browser that in all likelihood never be updated. And nearly all apps on modern smart TVs run in the browser, so yes, companies will have to support that (if their apps run on those TVs. Think Netflix, Spotify, even probably Apple's integration with Samsung).
As for governments, you assume that it's only "people on benefits" that use outdated or deprecated technology. And you assume that governments will run through acquiring and updating millions of iPads once every few years. Because iPads and browsers on those iPads also get deprecated (a 7 year old iPad Pro while fully functional is no longer supported).
> I'm young and rich, and I can't understand why the rest of the world caters to other people than me" is a position, for sure.
I'm certainly not rich. I've yet to earn a salary in any given year that was above the median in my country. I've had to start from nothing and claw my way to where I am today. What I did however see, was that technology was going to dominate life in the future so I invested the money I did have in good quality Apple products, starting with second hand products until I could afford to buy brand new. But you know, feel free to carry on making assumptions about the internet strangers you chat with.
> No matter how amazingly technologically savvy you are, if your smart TV is more than just three years old, it's already running a deprecated browser that in all likelihood never be updated. And nearly all apps on modern smart TVs run in the browser, so yes, companies will have to support that (if their apps run on those TVs. Think Netflix, Spotify, even probably Apple's integration with Samsung).
Not really. Said companies could just refuse to support them and only develop for Apple TV, Firestick and Chromecast. Which would make a lot more sense than spreading yourself thin and wasting resources on each crappy built-in browser made by every TV company. Every time Smart TVs come up on HN the general consensus is don't connect it to the internet, don't update the firmware and use a proper external device for Smart TV functionality. Because TV companies suck at software the same way car companies do.
> As for governments, you assume that it's only "people on benefits" that use outdated or deprecated technology.
No, but you implied that the reason why people couldn't access them was monetary. If people aren't on benefits, then presumably they have enough money to purchase a second hand iPhone or Android that can run chrome for less than £100.
> And you assume that governments will run through acquiring and updating millions of iPads once every few years. Because iPads and browsers on those iPads also get deprecated (a 7 year old iPad Pro while fully functional is no longer supported).
Yes, if it is economically cheaper to do. What do you think happens to the existing computers owned by the government? Are they just never updated or replaced? Are they all still running Windows XP?
The basic truth is that it is simply uneconomical to support everything.
> Not really. Said companies could just refuse to support them and only develop for Apple TV, Firestick and Chromecast.
See, your attitude screams "I'm rich, I'm young, I can afford to upgrade to latest technology whenever".
I mean why should companies support anything older than 3 years? Right? Right?
> No, but you implied that the reason why people couldn't access them was monetary. If people aren't on benefits, then presumably they have enough money to purchase a second hand iPhone or Android that can run chrome for less than £100.
You assume too much.
> Yes, if it is economically cheaper to do.
Again. Not everything is, or should be, driven by profit.
> Are they all still running Windows XP?
You'd do well to learn how long Windows XP was supported, and why (hint: released in 2001, supported until 2015, absolutely final end of support was in 2019).
> The basic truth is that it is simply uneconomical to support everything.
The basic truth is that:
- no one is talking about supporting everything
- depending on where you work and product you build, you may need to support obsolete and outdated devices for numerous reasons: from goodwill, to secondary and primary market needs, to the sheer fact that manufacturers abandon their devices just a few years after release while millions of people still use them.
Oh. And those "cheap Android phones" you're talking about? Pray that they don't run something like UC browser, the one of the most popular browsers in Southeast Asia, which is likely to be several years out of date and with weird support for anything.
And those TVs that companies souldn't support? 30% of TVs sold worldwide in 2017 were Samsung TVs. That's 30 million units.
> See, your attitude screams "I'm rich, I'm young, I can afford to upgrade to latest technology whenever".
Right. So I've specifically just told you I am in no way rich. In my country, I am statistically in the bottom half of all earners. In fact, my average income last year was equivalent to the average income of someone in Poland in 2020 according to this chart[1], despite living in a more expensive country with a higher cost of living. But according to you, my attitude is a rich person attitude.
> I mean why should companies support anything older than 3 years? Right? Right?
Did I say this anywhere? No. You've completely made it up and heard what you wanted to hear. I specifically invested in Apple products precisely because they have long term support. I'm currently running an iPhone 8 in it's seventh year of life. Last November I replaced my iPad Pro because it was 8 years old and I could no longer update to the latest iOS. The same with my MacBook Pro which was a 2013 model - 9 years old. I invested in these Apple products precisely because they had a good reputation for longevity and long term support and were recommended by developers. I then self taught myself how to code on them to escape being trapped in minimum wage hospitality and leisure jobs. It took me the majority of my 20s to do but I did it.
>> No, but you implied that the reason why people couldn't access them was monetary. If people aren't on benefits, then presumably they have enough money to purchase a second hand iPhone or Android that can run chrome for less than £100.
> You assume too much.
You literally quoted a story about a homeless woman being able to access government websites on a PSP as your justification for why we should support all browsers. What I said was in no way an assumption. Yet you assuming I was rich and continuing to assert I have rich person attitude is a fucking gigantic one.
> Again. Not everything is, or should be, driven by profit.
No, we should also consider maximising user experience and functionality. Something we can do better if we're not wasting massive amounts of developer time and funds so 2 people can access a website from their xbox.
> Are they all still running Windows XP?
Yes I'm well aware of how long it was running for. Doesn't change the fact that it has now been replaced does it.
> The basic truth is that:
- no one is talking about supporting everything
Well where are you drawing the line if not 0.25% of the population. How low does the percentage have to go before you consider it a waste of time?
> depending on where you work and product you build, you may need to support obsolete and outdated devices for numerous reasons: from goodwill, to secondary and primary market needs, to the sheer fact that manufacturers abandon their devices just a few years after release while millions of people still use them.
Oh. And those "cheap Android phones" you're talking about? Pray that they don't run something like UC browser, the one of the most popular browsers in Southeast Asia, which is likely to be several years out of date and with weird support for anything.
I very specifically said `or Android that can run chrome for less than £100`. Which are very easy to find. If manufacturers want to abandon their handsets after 3 years, let them. Customers will soon tire of it and will learn to buy products from manufacturers that don't. All you are doing by supporting these devices is enabling the manufacturers to get away with shitty support. They're offloading their work on to you because you're willing to put up with it. Stop doing it and watch them either collapse or start taking longevity seriously.
> And those TVs that companies shouldn't support? 30% of TVs sold worldwide in 2017 were Samsung TVs. That's 30 million units.
Yeah but how many people are running the Samsung Smart TV functionality and how many are running ChromeCast/Apple TV/Firestick through them. If you are being honest with yourself, do you really think that the SmartTV UX is better than the standalone sticks? Put a shit version of the app on the tv if you really want to but really we're better off encouraging uptake of the other platforms. And you can pick second hand fire sticks up off eBay for less than £10 so people are hardly priced out of it. If someone can afford a brand new smart tv they can certainly afford a fire stick to go with it.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
^ 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.
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.
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.
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.
I do appreciate your transparency, though I disagree with the sentiment that I’m arguing from a position of bad faith.
The Babel team has not shown a moment of interest in lowering their role in the JavaScript ecosystem to anything short of kingmakers. I think the facts are self-evident, but I can easily back up my claims by citing pretty much any document the team has ever produced. Have a gander at their GitHub README and what do we see?[1]
- “Babel is a compiler for writing next generation JavaScript.” I suppose they left out “indefinitely” to avoid the obvious. Don’t forget, you’re here forever.
- Over a dozen sponsor logos. An embarrassment of riches.
- A literal audio recording of a song in praise of the project. The call is coming from inside the house, people!
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 Babel brewing as early as 2017![4] At worst, we have a group of aspiring Carmack-wannabes looking for their big break into the incestuous and lucrative class of technorati standards committees.
Don’t believe me? It doesn’t take an inner-join on the TC39 roster and the Babel maintainers to see our own version of regulatory capture forming right before our eyes.
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 onto every NPM package…
That is a wonderful question and is exactly the sort of thing that should be on the Babel website. You’ll find no such explanation or even a summary of trade offs that come with adding Babel to your app.
It’s assumed that if you want to support older browsers, the next logical step is to add Babel…forever. An incredible trick happens here, where the developer thinks they added the magic package which only bears a “tax” on the poor sap who’s stuck on Internet Explorer, presumably running eye watering amounts of polyfills on 32 bit limits of RAM.
In my opinion, the Babel team should start looking for a strategy that aligns with a world of evergreen browsers, and untangle the web of feature polyfills from syntax transformations.
It’s also not too wild to think that Babel is a symptom of a larger problem. JavaScript lacks a versioning mechanism when new features are added. A more self-aware Babel could use their connections with the TC39 team do what all successful JavaScript libraries do: become part of the standard library a la jQuery and CoffeeScript.
Alternatively, reconsider the velocity that Babel introduces to the JavaScript ecosystem. These tools might actually be self perpetuating their existence by making new features so readily accessible.
With evergreen browsers it's not only about features, but also about security. If you can't update your browser to have arrow functions, you might have security issues. So it is in everyone's best interest that old browsers have yet another reason to be updated.
Also it can be argued that Babel gave IE11 a huge afterlife. IE11 support should have been dropped by the javascript community much sooner, and IE11 should have been used only for legacy apps, as Microsoft tried to. But tools like Babel made it possible for managers to say "c'mon just use Babel".
Also, while it is convenient to have Javascript features before they're available in Browsers, in practice the wait time is not as long as it was. And having a tool removes pressure (including internal pressure) for browsers companies to be fast.
And also: normally, projects using Babel have to pull hundreds of babel-related packages. The biggest complaints you see here on Hacker News about the Javascript ecosystem center around the massive number of packages. Well, guess what: Babel by default on create-react-app needs 133 packages.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.