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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that “used by millions” != “should receive money”.

If I write a book and release it for free, I may get a lot of readers willing to read it. The moment I say, “sorry readers - to read this you must pay me!” suddenly I am now competing with all forms of paid entertainment.

A lot of the draw to open source is that it’s free. A lot of the allure to open source devs is knowing that tons of people are using their software, the license means they can’t be sued, and they don’t have any of the headache of running a business.

Once you believe “I deserve to be paid for this” I have a lot of counterpoints.

What are the free alternatives? What am I getting for my money? What support do you offer?

In a world where people agonize over Netflix going from $9 to $14, you need to really provide a lot of value to get someone to open their wallet.

No one deserves to be paid just because they did something popular. You deserve to be paid if people are willing to pay you vs. all the other things they can spend money on.

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Yes, if you release something for free, you're not entitled to being paid for it. That's tautological. It's what something being free means, that people don't have to pay for it.

The interesting question here is, what happens when the people who are working on something for free move on, or when their motivation is no longer enough to ensure the quality of the resulting product? What would the millions of people who rely on that thing do then?

Maybe they'll just move on to an alternative, or just do without this particular product. That's fine, at least at an individual level. But collectively, the cost of millions of people moving to an alternative, or figuring out how to go on without it, is surely much higher than the cost of maintaining the original product.

So there's a tragedy of the commons in the making here, right? Millions of people collectively benefit from the existence and maintenance of this project, and would be harmed to some extent by its absence, and yet, because it's "free", no one is willing to put in the time, effort or money needed to ensure its continued existence.

You can plainly see that none of this is about whether it deserves to be paid. Regardless, "you deserve to be paid if people pay you" is as absurd a sentence as "you deserve to be alive if people don't kill you". That's not what "deserve" means, that's just stating what things are.

In the specific case of Babel the alternatives are an order of magnitude faster and much less complicated (SWC, esbuild, Sucrase); this comes at the cost of features and of dropping support for older browsers.

Given the excellent alternatives, there may actually be a long-term benefit to switching off Babel, since the end result will be cleaner and faster transpilation tools that don't support increasingly antiquated browsers. This sucks for anyone who needs to support very old browsers, but if you really need Babel presumably you'll be willing to pay for it.

If you really need to support old browsers you might as well just write old JS anyway. It's not like you're going to get anything acceptable running with a modern team writing idiomatic CRA-via-Babel on these browsers, and writing the actual code that will run will be easier overall and at most steps of development.

Not entirely true, I can get reasonable performance on 10 year old smart TVs using Svelte and TypeScript if I use Babel and a few extra polyfills. React would be a terrible idea though, you're right about that.

Dead false.

Last year I was working with a client that still (yes, still) had to support IE11 (this was in healthcare) and was able to do so while writing Vue (v2) and bundling with Webpack all thanks to Babel and a handful of polyfills. We basically got to write the modern JS we’re used to and still support IE11 without having to think about it too much.

Hopefully this becomes less necessary (that client’s IE11 requirement will likely end this year when one of their partners finishes converting their ActiveX app to Electron), but right now it still is, and Babel actually does do what people say it does, and very well.

> So there's a tragedy of the commons in the making here, right? Millions of people collectively benefit from the existence and maintenance of this project, and would be harmed to some extent by its absence, and yet, because it's "free", no one is willing to put in the time, effort or money needed to ensure its continued existence.

The tragedy of the commons happens long before that.

Developers cannot an build and publish a software product like babel for-profit, because someone else would give out a V1 version for free. I suspect that there are many languages, compilers, IDEs, libraries, and build tools that no longer get written because the authors can't make a living from doing it.

"Creating value is not enough — you also need to capture some of the value you create" - Peter Thiel

I think what your comment (and those similar) misses is that someone can provide a great deal of value but fail to capture any of it.

Specifically this line "No one deserves to be paid just because they did something popular. You deserve to be paid if people are willing to pay you vs. all the other things they can spend money on."

A dirty secret that's finally come to reckoning is that there is a ridiculous amount of "hyperscaled" "open source" projects just as there are startups. These exist primarily not to help software developers be more efficient or build better things; but to pad resumes, influence formal and informal standards bodies, carve out mindshare for companies and tech stacks, and generally do a bunch of stuff that only makes sense when the industry as a whole is also bloated on a decade of ZIR financial policy and its handmaiden of zero-consequence cost-insensitive development.

An equally dirty secret is that "we must hold everyone to account policy" got demonstrated in the gold standard. It was a failure that ended in deflation and depression.

What "everything must make sense" policy effectively depends on is the idea that government finances and private sector finances (that can mean a person's/family's budget or a company budget) must look the same. That "the system as a whole" must sum to zero. This can easily be shown to be false. On might make the simple observation that if government DIDN'T have an institution like the FED that loaned ridiculous amounts of money while not making a great deal of profit on that lending, money wouldn't work.

We also know what government policy worked pretty well the last 50 or so years. The process, when looked at from 100.000 feet is to take all money in the US, and divide 3%-5% of it out to everyone that wants to try something. Given as a loan, so that "try something" is strongly incentivized to mean "grow the economy". The FED does not effectively want that money back (again, if the FED took what it was owed money would cease to exist in the US). This is on top of all other taxes.

That is what the FED effectively does, ignoring the details, pretending the many problems with it's functioning don't exist.

We are pretty fucking damn happy with the result of this policy.

I... didn't say anything about the gold standard or austerity or whatever you think I implied. I also don't think the decade+ of ZIRP is a necessary consequence of fiat money or the fed or whatever; it's one of many possible fiscal paths which could have been taken even staying within the constraints of liberal capitalism.

I'm not even really attacking ZIRP, I'm attacking reconfiguring our whole industry around what was obviously a temporary financialization stage. Even then, I'm not even really attacking it - I'm just saying, if you hitched yourself to such a transient software ecosystem for whatever reason, don't come crying when it transitions out.

I think given that babel is used by many many corporate entities, an e.g. $5/month payment would not stop them from using it, IF that payment was trivial to make.

I'd guess what's holding that back is that a) that fee is not necessary for them to use it, and b) it's hard to fight for paying money that's not technically necessary, and c) getting a license for anything approved can be a pain.

What I don't think prevents this is that companies (even startups) think it's too expensive.

What it really means is that they like using it when it’s free and that the cost of switching away from Babel to an alternative is less than the cost of supporting Babel.

The cost of supporting Babel (and other open source products in general) is more an administrative and political cost than a financial one in a lot of places.

It’s actually probably easier to get $20k approved annually than $5k. The bigger number implies skin in the game at all steps in the process and has an air of legitimacy.

> babel is used by many many corporate entities, an e.g. $5/month payment would not stop them from using it, IF that payment was trivial to make

But for a corporation undertaking the obligation to pay any amount of money is not trivial to do. Someone inside has to justify the expense, probably write a document about it, depending on the corporation all kind of hoops need to be jumped, decision makers convinced, checks and gates passed.

It is probably not meaningfully harder to do all of these for a $50k yearly licence than for $5 monthly licence.

With proliferation of cheap monthly subscriptions I believe the processes in the businesses would adapt - but yes, it would take some time.

Still, the other point (why pay if there is no obligation) is a bigger obstacle. One obvious solution is to provide paid extensions on top of free core product, but that might lead to forks if enough people are interested in the functionality and not willing to pay (/ use proprietary software).

I believe the future is in "fair use" licenses - those that grant users freedom to use for their (non-competing) business and to repair as needed, but that allow original developers to charge money for extra features and for services without worrying that competition will undercut them on market (without supporting the product).

I'm following the "cloud protection" licenses and hope that one of them gains enough traction to become a serious contender to FOSS.

In our current system, it would be far easier to get 1 corporation to give you $1000 a year than to get 200 of them to give you $5 a year.

How would changing our current system make it easier for 200 to give $5 a year? To me it seems like there's a coordination cost of having 200 to do an organized thing vs 1 to do the same thing as the organized 200.

Give dev's an ad hoc budget to buy whatever tools they need under a certain total per year, rather than have 5 meetings and 2 months of sales pitches for a tool.

At the same time, the market doesn't value things well. Professional athletes, who do nothing to change the world (the world is the same no matter who does it or what they do), are valued N times as much as teachers, doctors, police, scientists, etc. who do change the world.

Also, popularity is a signal that there is real value in what you are doing.

> Also, popularity is a signal that there is real value in what you are doing.

Now apply that to your first paragraph?

Value is subjective. I value a bottle of water far more when I’m dying of thirst.

Professional athletes make money because their talent is valued and it’s rare.

You have a fundamentally flawed understanding of price, value, and economics in general. Some teachers are indeed paid more - some extremely well - if they have rare skills that are highly valued. Top tier teachers get jobs at universities, private schools, and as tutors. I have never met them but I was told top-tier acting instructors are paid very high rates by Hollywood actors. Highly talented teachers don’t work at public schools because those jobs are generally pretty terrible.

> Professional athletes make money because their talent is valued and it’s rare.

Incorrect. Profession athletes are performers, no more, no less.

Talent scarcity has little to do with it. They get paid in direct proportion to the number of eyeballs they can capture.

No different to any other type of performer (musicians, actors, he'll, even clowns).

This is absurdly illogical.

If I can convince 10 people to pay me $1 million each, I will earn far more than someone being watched by 10 million people paid nothing by each.

If this statement doesn’t make sense to you, perhaps you shouldn’t make business and investment decisions.

> If I can convince 10 people to pay me $1 million each, I will earn far more than someone being watched by 10 million people paid nothing by each.

What does that have to do with capturing eyeballs?

Sports fans are the product. Advertisers are the consumers. The more product a game can attract, the more valuable that game is to the consumers (i.e. the advertisers).

It's no different to "free" online services (google, facebook, tumbler, youtube, whatever) - the visitors are the product, the advertisers are the consumers.

I'm more curious about why you find it illogical. Are you a sports supporter by any chance? You realise that it's possible to like something even as you realise that you are the product, right?

Being delusional about your place in the market is pointless.

> If this statement doesn’t make sense to you, perhaps you shouldn’t make business and investment decisions.

Right.

And why do some 'capture eyeballs' more effectively than others?

> And why do some 'capture eyeballs' more effectively than others?

Who cares? It doesn't matter.

There's a lot more dexterity, agility, speed and intelligence required to compete at the top levels of Starcraft than in football, but football pays more because football captures more eyeballs, not individual football players.

> It doesn't matter.

According to who?

Okay, you know what - let's pretend that skill and talent does matter in terms of revenue.

We now need to explain why those sports that require just as much skill and talent (sometimes more) as the major money-making sports do, have less revenue.

You really want to go down the path of saying that a sport that relies more on brute-force strength (football) than other sports requires more "skill" and "talent" than (for example) sports that require insanely fast reflexes (ping pong) or sports that require a very high degree of precision (golf).

Right, so lets pretend that brute-force strength is a skill and talent - now how are we going to explain sports that require more brute-force strength being less popular than football.

Athletic skill and talent have almost nothing to do with the revenue of the money-making machine.

Like I said above, athletes are entertainers. They get paid for entertainment.

If you are unsure about which comment your addressing, my previous one was:

> > It doesn't matter.

> According to who?

You're right, I am confused - do you think it does matter or it doesn't matter, because whichever one you think, the comment I posted addresses it in full.

I'm not even sure why you are asking the question - is it common to ask a question again when the answer is one that doesn't suit you?

> You're right, I am confused - do you think it does matter or it doesn't matter, because whichever one you think, the comment I posted addresses it in full.

No? Your comment doesn't seem to directly answer the question at all.

If you think it did, can you point to where it does?

> Value is subjective.

It can be and is measured objectively, and certainly we can reason about it: Saving lives is more valuable than scoring goals.

> You have a fundamentally flawed

People can disagree with you without being wrong or flawed or whatever. Maybe you are missing something. The way to knowledge is curiosity about people who disagree with you - otherwise, you are stuck in a cage of your own making.

I encourage you to be more open-minded when evaluating the impact of others on the world.

The millions of children, teenagers, and adults who find inspiration in likes of Kobe Bryant, Serena Williams, Michael Phelps, Lionel Messi etc. might disagree with you. Many of us learn to be better from their ambition, discipline, leadership, etc.

These qualities become imprinted on young people who look up to these figures. In nearly every country, there are young people who see professional athletes as their greatest role models. Can you seriously say that creates no value for the world?

As an aside, elite athletes have refined the art of practice and study for their entire lives. I've learned more about the process of learning from interactions with them than anywhere else. If you don't think there's something to learn from this entire category of intelligence, you're missing out.

> The millions of children, teenagers, and adults who find inspiration in likes of Kobe Bryant, Serena Williams, Michael Phelps, Lionel Messi etc. might disagree with you. Many of us learn to be better from their ambition, discipline, leadership, etc.

If those individuals didn't exist, other athletes would fill the roles just as well. Also, it's questionable how inspiring or positive they are. The behavior of many athletes is horrible.

> elite athletes have refined the art of practice and study for their entire lives. I've learned more about the process of learning from interactions with them than anywhere else.

What about experts in other fields - such as teachers, nurses, coders, etc. Nothing special about athletes.

“you need to really provide a lot of value to get someone to open their wallet.”

I think it’s more about asking for money.

Yep. It's a less known trick among developers. For some reason, most people will do something and expect to be rewarded for it without setting up the reward mechanism. No, people almost never give you money without you asking for it.

Other people assume that it's very hard to get money for something. Totally wrong, people love spending money.

The exact same thing goes for just asking for help or whatever you want. It's even true for romantic relationships. Asking people for something is remarkably powerful.

Maybe this post just shows that the market system is inefficient, is full of painful friction.

Maybe we should have an economy that does pay people purely to make popular & impactful works.

Personally, given how awful everyone else has been at supprting the maintenance & development of our base digital infrastructure, I start to feel like we should/must resort to governments funding open source. The social benefit created is immense, powers so much enterprise & creation. We should look after & care for these interests. Perhaps we need a socialistic social system that can do what capitalism seemingly cant- and actually, it sure seems like we could potentially make a lot more money by expanding & growing the base library of really good things we fund/support.

The tough love no-one-deserves-to-get paid view looks like it causes enormous self harm to industry & the world. Good things, good infrastructure to start from, to work atop, seems obviously to the public benefit. It shouldnt be such a hellish toil to try to keep these projects afloat, the very minimum possible bar. Society should be driven to expand the free things we people can do, expand the scope of human possibility. Expanding liberty seems like such an obvious goal, but it seems so bizarrely reviled, so bitterly naysayed, alas!

The free market enables the collective desires of humanity to determine how to allocate scarce resources. Prices act as signals that balance supply and demand and inform producers where to allocate capital and invest in innovation. Money is a store of value that enables smooth commerce.

If you try and mess with this system - say, by having a government that tries to set prices manually, or flood the market with printed money, you will no longer have an economy that reflects the collective desires of humanity but one that reflects the desires of a small elite.

Luckily history provides numerous examples of the flaws of such things, if you are willing to study and understand the consequences.

> The free market enables the collective desires of humanity to determine how to allocate scarce resources.

No. No it doesn't. Free market gives rise to companies Nestle who monopolise access to clean water and sell it at profit, all future be damned.

> Luckily history provides numerous examples of the flaws of such things, if you are willing to study and understand the consequences.

Indeed. History has also shown that unrestrained free market is the worst system there is, and has shown it again, and again, and again.

There is no such thing as a free market really. All markets are created by governments, and all currency is created by governments through the imposition of taxes.

Within this framework some prices are allowed to fluctuate but the price level is set generally when the government spends and all other prices derive from that.

Governments also influence pricing through financial and corporate regulation. It’s obviously a terrible idea for a government to attempt to decide how all of society’s resources should be allocated and to designate prices for each and every item or service that might be produced, but it’s just as bad of an idea to think that the “free market” can govern itself.

Epic Healthcare person that posts on here, how has all the government $$$ for mandated EMRs worked out in actual implementation? That would be an interesting example of how well this model works.

This is an incredibly idealistic and naive view of capitalism that no doubt 99% of people on this website are across.

Fortunately we’ve got plenty of examples of the myriad shortcomings of strict free-market capitalism, namely the fact that it has never survived outside of very constrained, sterile, low-importance environments. After x generations, the systems start to fall apart, and inevitably someone has to augment it with some socialist policies.

Failing to get your nose out of your economics textbook to look at the myriad real-world examples of a free market still reflecting the desires of the elite, is a massive shortcoming.

Software has zero marginal costs and infinite supplies, and therefore the free market would only ever give it a price of zero. The reason that it does not is because of the government interfering.

Economics is very clear on this. You tax negative externalities and subsidize positive externalities. Discovering new open source software is a positive externality. Subsidize it.

No, every copy of software always has a marginal cost above 0, it may be fractions of a cent, but it's not zero.

>Maybe we should have an economy that does pay people purely to make popular & impactful works.

We do and it's the whole point of copyright law. It gives creators the ability to monetize their works.

>> What am I getting for my money? >> you need to really provide a lot of value to get someone to open their wallet

Tool like babel provides a ton of obvious value, but they need a good business model to capture it.

> In a world where people agonize over Netflix going from $9 to $14

Why is this acceptable/normalized as it is?

It is totally acceptable and normal (to me) for people to make decisions (and even agonize) over how to spend their own money.

> What are the free alternatives?

At the time this post was written, pretty much none.

I get that this is one frame for how one uses money:

> What am I getting for my money?

But it's not the only frame, and I think it's vastly overapplied.

Between various online newspapers, magazines and Patreon-supported writers and whatnot, I spend probably $2k/year. What do I get out of it personally? Very little. But the world gets quite a lot out of good journalism, and I'd say the world needs a lot more of it.

I get that fundamentalist capitalism wishes to squeeze everything into the mold of dollar-denominated quid-pro-quo exchanges. It's certainly a useful frame on many occasions, but it's ultimately a bit me-me-me for my tastes. I have no opinion on this particular project, but in general I think we should find a way to support things that are useful to lots of people, because otherwise those things tend to go away.

You are talking about charity, I am talking about commerce. Charity has its place and can be sustained if properly executed. There is only so much that can be donated however.

When you provide the market test, the bar is a lot higher for sustainability.

Well now you at least admit there are two things in the world. What if there were more than two?

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