Recently, the core team of the Babel project posted a blog saying that it was in financial trouble. In order to continue to maintain and develop Babel and ensure the salary of the core development team, the Babel team requests support from the community and hopes to receive donations or sponsorships.
According to reports, the Babel project has conducted a funding experiment since 2018: Is it sustainable to be engaged in Babel development full-time? The current situation seems that this experiment has failed.
Introduction to the Babel project
Babel is a tool chain that is mainly used to convert code written in ECMAScript 2015+ syntax into backward-compatible JavaScript syntax so that it can run in current and old versions of browsers or other environments. Babel can achieve the following functions:
- Grammar conversion
- Add missing features in the target environment through Polyfill (implemented through third-party polyfill modules, such as core-js)
- Source code conversion (codemods)
Babel has millions of users, is used by thousands of companies around the world, and has more than 117 million downloads per month. At present, Babel has been integrated into various frameworks in the JavaScript ecosystem, including React, Next.js, Vue, Ember, Angular, etc. In addition, it supports custom plug-ins and optimizations in various scenarios, such as CSS-in-JS, GraphQL, or localization across huge code bases.
Currently, Babel has implemented support for many new ECMAScript proposals, kept pace with each new version of TypeScript and Flow, and designed some new features to allow the generation of smaller compilation output. The Babel team stated that the next major version of Babel 8 will be released soon and a roadmap has been released (see https://babeljs.io/docs/en/roadmap#babel-2021-roadmap ).
How hard is it to develop Babel full-time?
Despite the large number of users, the funding situation of the Babel project is not optimistic.
Every project faces unique funding issues. For Babel, users usually don't directly interact with it: like most build tools, users only set it up once at first and forget it afterwards (unless an error is sometimes found).
Even though most major JS frameworks integrate Babel, developers usually don't see job opportunities as "Babel developers". In addition, pre-configured frameworks such as Next.js eliminate the need for users to manage the underlying build tools. The development of such frameworks makes it very common to "use Babel without understanding it". This makes it more difficult to attract sponsorship.
In 2018, Henry Zhu, the current head of Babel and one of the core maintainers, resigned from his job and engaged in Babel project development full-time. After several months of fundraising, Henry invested in the Babel project with a monthly base salary of $11,000.
In November 2019, after successfully paying Henry a full-time salary, the Babel team decided to pay several other important contributors Huáng Jùnliàng, Nicolò Ribaudo and Kai Cataldo part-time. The initial salary was $2,000 per month. The Babel team hopes to raise more funds and provide them with a full-time salary.
However, the withdrawal of the main sponsor in 2020 put the funding situation of the Babel project into a difficult situation, and Kai had to resign and switch to another full-time job.
Currently, Babel is still providing Nicolò, Henry and Jùnliàng with a temporary salary of US$6,000 per month. Nevertheless, the monthly fund consumption still exceeds the donation amount, and the Babel team stated that the current fund balance can only be maintained until the end of 2021.
The team stated that to provide adequate salaries for maintainers, at least $333,000 per year is required, which is twice its current income.
Therefore, Babel hopes that the community can help by donating through Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors. In addition, Babel is also actively seeking corporate sponsorship.
Donation channel:
The Babel team stated in this blog: We firmly believe that working in open source should be a viable and sustainable career path. But the reality is that without more funds, we may not be able to maintain a high level of support and development for Babel. We also face the risk of losing more team members, who should rely on their skill level to lead a decent life.
What is the salary for full-time open source developers?
The Babel team's donation request has been questioned after the release. Sebastian McKenzie (@sebmck), the founder of the Babel project and later left, tweeted that the reason for Babel’s financial difficulties was that the current person in charge Henry Zhu received an annual salary of 130,000, but did not make much contribution to the project. He only submitted it in the past year. 7 times code.
For this view, Vue.js author You Yuxi refuted it. He believes that "Working on a project" not only refers to submitting code, but also includes making decisions, raising funds, and managing the team, and is facing tremendous psychological pressure. He pointed out that if Henry hadn't taken over when @sebmck left, the Babel project might have died, and for maintaining a project with millions of developers and users, the annual salary of 130,000 is not much.
At present, @sebmck has deleted the original tweet and apologized.
Reference link:
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