I can sympathize with the author's troubles, and wish he finds a well-paid position that still allows him to work on OSS.
That said, the idea that companies would pay for a JS library that is patching browser support is wild. Practically nobody pays for JS modules except for very specific niches (e.g. a charting library) or product/technical support. Especially when it's an indirect dependency of tools you use. Maybe Babel could pull off having a paid tier, but that's already a stretch, as there is still a lot more software up the chain. There are many commercial ideas in the JS ecosystem worth pursuing, but this doesn't look like one of them.
Projects like Babel, ESLint, Rollup etc get significant funding from corporations, but these are the very top of the food chain, and even then the amounts are still barely enough to pay for full-time dev salaries at market rate. It's just not a model that works.
There is also no particular reason these hundreds of polyfills have to be maintained by a single person, and kept in one central package. The maintenance overhead is massive. Any project using this as part of their core offering, like Babel, would certainly be able to keep up with a bunch of smaller modules, and deal with churn.
Finally, the reach and numbers are very impressive, but I'm afraid they are an artifact of building a monolithic package, more than a reflection of the value companies might attach to it. If core-js stopped being maintained today, it would hurt momentarily, but there are hundreds if not thousands of people who will step in to fill the void. There is no reason to sacrifice your personal well-being for a project that is not bringing you happiness.
The idea that they _don't_ pay for it is wild, honestly. There's no FOSS equivalent in so many other industries - they pay for every part of their supply chain and yet still somehow make a profit. You can't open a hotdog stand and use "FOSS hotdogs".
The whole point of the post is that the FOSS model doesn't work and that sucks. I don't know what the answer to that is, and neither does he, but the answer certainly isn't "oh well."
Also, I feel you should read or reread the article - he explicitly responds to your last two paragraphs in there. Babel specifically has said they're not interested in doing the work that core-js is doing, and there are clearly _not_ thousands of people willing to step in and fill the void of core-js. They've had many opportunities before, including when everyone hated him for asking for financial support and the web seemingly united against him, and when he was stuck in prison for months, not maintaining anything. And yet core-js is still there at the forefront, because of the passion and his willingness to put up with too much abuse.
But who said the FOSS model doesn't work? It's been working for decades. Having a well-paid, full-time job as an OSS maintainer is what doesn't work - it's the equivalent of becoming a celebrity, not achievable for 99% regardless of effort.
But seriously, depends on your definition of "works". It works for large companies, doesn't seem to work for anyone else. It seems the only opensource that "works" is when large companies are nice enough to open source and maintain something that is accidentally useful to someone else (IE, never the crown jewels obviously) otherwise you mostly hear stories of harassment and burn out.
> - The idea that companies would pay for a JS library that is patching browser support is wild.
Companies make more money by having their websites work in older browsers. If it wasn't for core-js, they would be paying developer time to write polyfills or compile and maintain them from various other single polyfill packages. Surely if they are willing to pay developers to do this in return for increased profits they would also be willing to pay someone else to do it, just as businesses outsource all kinds of tasks.
Yes, they would be paying for developers' time, and most likely never notice the difference.
The value added doesn't automatically translate into a viable model where that money ends up in the library author's hands. Companies sponsor projects for exposure, street cred, or pay for commercial features and support. They will not hand out the realized savings out of goodwill.
That's what I thought until I read the entire post and got to the part about duplicate polyfills due to the whole dependency mess. At that point I would give up on maintaining such a project.
That said, the idea that companies would pay for a JS library that is patching browser support is wild. Practically nobody pays for JS modules except for very specific niches (e.g. a charting library) or product/technical support. Especially when it's an indirect dependency of tools you use. Maybe Babel could pull off having a paid tier, but that's already a stretch, as there is still a lot more software up the chain. There are many commercial ideas in the JS ecosystem worth pursuing, but this doesn't look like one of them.
Projects like Babel, ESLint, Rollup etc get significant funding from corporations, but these are the very top of the food chain, and even then the amounts are still barely enough to pay for full-time dev salaries at market rate. It's just not a model that works.
There is also no particular reason these hundreds of polyfills have to be maintained by a single person, and kept in one central package. The maintenance overhead is massive. Any project using this as part of their core offering, like Babel, would certainly be able to keep up with a bunch of smaller modules, and deal with churn.
Finally, the reach and numbers are very impressive, but I'm afraid they are an artifact of building a monolithic package, more than a reflection of the value companies might attach to it. If core-js stopped being maintained today, it would hurt momentarily, but there are hundreds if not thousands of people who will step in to fill the void. There is no reason to sacrifice your personal well-being for a project that is not bringing you happiness.