On May 10, the core Babel team posted a post on their official blog asking why millions of people use Babel and why we’re running out of money.

This article is particularly glaring in the stream of updates.

How did the Babel team grow as an indispensable piece of front-end infrastructure, and why did it get into financial trouble?

Let’s go back to 2018.

The vision of digital nomads

The great strength of open source is its welcoming attitude towards any contributor. This creates a challenge for code consistency and iteration in open source projects.

Babel, a team that generates electricity from love, suffers from this problem.

A turning point came soon after, inspired by Vue author Yu Yuxi,

Babel team began to receive sponsorship from opencollective in 2018, and used the funds to provide Henry Zhu, the core maintainer, with a full-time job at Babel.

In nineteen nineteen, Babel hopes to provide salaries for three other major maintainer Junliang, Kai and Nicolo in order to achieve more stable iterations of the project.

Among them, Henry’s full-time income is 11,000/ month, the other three get 11,000/ month, the other three get 11,000/ month, and the other three get 2,000/ month part-time income.

Most of these revenues come from corporate sponsorships (Including Handshake, Airbnb, Salesforce, etc.).

The funding enabled Babel to quickly track many new ECMAScript features, track every release of TypeScript and Flow, and optimize compilation volume (via Babel-Runtime).

Someone once said: third-rate programmers write business, second-rate programmers make framework, first-class programmers make standards.

Commercially, Babel is used directly or indirectly by thousands of companies around the world as part of their front-end infrastructure.

Framework Babel is used by all the major front-end frameworks in the world (React, Next-js, Vue, Ember, Angular…). .

In terms of standards, Babel serves as a testing ground for new language features and a bridge between developers and the TC39 committee.

His downloads hit an impressive 117 million a month.

The members of Babel’s core team should benefit from such success as the best digital nomads in the open source world, but……

The pain of 2020

As you can see, Babel’s donations have been declining since July of ’19.

The possible reasons for this are:

The utility project itself

As a link in the front-end compilation tool chain, though, Babel plays a vital role.

But in business development, the toolchain, once configured, rarely changes. Babel is rarely exposed to by newcomers in business development.

Less contact, less affection, not to mention donations.

This can be seen in the difference between Babel’s individual donations and Vue’s.

Integration of upper level tools

More and more out-of-the-box frameworks (create-React-app, Next-js) integrate Babel.

The role Babel plays in the development process is hard to visualize for framework users.

On this point, one elder brother should have the deepest comprehension: Denis Pushkarev, the author of Core-JS.

Core-js is the standard JS syntax library used at the bottom of Babel.

If you haven’t heard of core-js, you’ve probably seen this tip when installing dependencies in your project:

The author of Core-JS, a library of 2,900 downloads a week, was killed in a motorcycle accident and wanted a good job after he got out of prison.

Denis Pushkarev, however, had to print out his job application information during the core-JS installation process because core-JS was so low-level that most people had never heard of it.

Impact of the epidemic

As individuals and companies struggle with the pandemic, the cost of sponsoring open source projects can be avoided.

Babel, which relies heavily on corporate donations, is having a harder time.

By the end of this year, Babel is expected to run out of money.

So, there is an opening reference to the official blog post and a call for donations.

A gossip

The Babel team is not a monolit, however. Key developers have complained that Henry Zhu is paid more than $100,000 a year but produces little.

As a full-time core maintainer, how do you feel about this PR number?