Babel has four paid developers, an almost $200k/year budget and hundreds of contributors. I'm sure that's enough to maintain the polyfills, if someone else wasn't already doing it for free - not to throw shade on them, but that's reality (not one I particularly like).
I do agree with that second statement. It is unfortunate that he got into this situation, but there is absolutely no reason to continue if it's not working out. He has the choice to go make six figures too, and doesn't owe anyone maintaining this library either.
If you would have read the article, you would have seen the image from a Babel maintainer saying they won't fork because they don't have the resources to maintain it.
If the coreJS maintainer stops working on it and it bitrots for a year or two, maybe the babel people will magically find the manpower to maintain it then. As it stands, why should they spend their time maintaining a fork of a project that is still maintained and in good shape?
Yeah, maybe. Or maybe the current subject matter expert that’s been pouring thousands of hours into this project should be funded by the billion dollar companies that rely on him, same as what’s happened to the projects at the top of the ecosystem.
> Or maybe the current subject matter expert that’s been pouring thousands of hours into this project should be funded by the billion dollar companies that rely on him
Ideally yes, but as we've seen time after time, charity as a business model doesn't work with corporations. I think the coreJS maintainer would be fully justified to take another job, and then work on coreJS as a hobby as much or as little as he likes. Nobody needs to martyr themselves so that a bunch of billion dollar advertising companies can save a buck.
Maybe in the future we decide to finance core open source projects as public infrastructure through taxes, or those billion dollar corps set up some kind of foundation to fund them, but for now the whole situation is highly dysfunctional and one cannot blame maintainers who put the financial interests of themselves and their family ahead of producing open source.
Of course they won't volunteer to maintain a massive project that they depend on, when someone else is already doing the work.
But you can bet the minute core-js goes away, the community will pull together to maintain or create something new, purely out of necessity - that's the main motivator. Hopefully with a more distributed model that doesn't overload a single person.
I do agree with that second statement. It is unfortunate that he got into this situation, but there is absolutely no reason to continue if it's not working out. He has the choice to go make six figures too, and doesn't owe anyone maintaining this library either.