However, by that measure the original creator should also be compensated for their past work, given that they wrote about an order of magnitude more code than the second most prolific contributor, at least in the main babel repository.[0]
(I have no way to easily measure other equally important contributions, such as shepherding other contributors, dealing with issues and PRs, so I'm ignoring them.)
> I'm just going to be explicit. In 2020, Henry created 12
> issues, commented 25 times, and created 29 pull requests.
> This is across all Babel orgs.
>
> https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392053448892469250
It seems like a gravy train. Open-source contributors of other projects are currently carrying the torch of uncompensated work.
If they want to get paid, they need to think about how they currently fit into the ecosystem.
Activity graphs can be deceiving, it’s extremely easy to look busy. Actually drill down and you’ll notice a lot of the activity earlier in this year was just pull request approvals, without comment, mostly done after someone else had already approved.
According to the original tweets by @sebmck there were only 25 comments in PRs by said contributor in the last year, so even that didn't happen, apparently.