Same thoughts. If the dev moved to a nice SEA country he could live a very comfortable life with that kind of money.

So in order to work for product you're passionate about and used by millions, instead of being paid well you should consider moving to a different part of the world just to live well? Your work should not be rewarded in proportion to the impact you are having?

This is ridiculous. Great engineers should be incentivized to work on open source projects. Would you rather the engineer and project get absorbed into a company like google? Because that's what will eventually happen if the developers don't feel like they are being rewarded for their work. They'd rather go somewhere where they feel more valued.

- Had they figured out how to monetize it, you and me would not have had to try to solve this problem - monetizing is part of long term project sustainability cause time is money and living is not free..

- I don't hold any opinion on how to solve this problem or if they should get paid or not... consider this, 11K is the Yearly / Half yearly salary of a mid-level developers in most parts of Asia, double it and you can hire a decent senior developer for that price..

I can understand the dilemma the person is in, but, making 11k a month, this person is part of the top 10% of the richest people worldwide.. little hard to care too much.

I don't see it. Either you run a company and earn money and deserve every penny or you get donations and be thankful for every penny.

OTOH, Babel is a piece of critical infrastructure, a core of every modern web product's path from development to production. It's not a junior / medior developer job to manage and develop a project like that.

$11k / month is pretty close to an entry-level Bay Area salary. Given that Babel is one of the most popular and widely-used tools in the history of web development, I am surprised that all the creators can afford to pay themselves is one near-entry-level Bay Area salary and a few intern-type salaries.

Perhaps the question is why the Bay Area is the golden standard here? Half the salary would make you top 10% earners in almost all other places in the world, but because the salary is paid at SF levels all the "poorer" users have to step up and match the SF expectation? I couldn't find where Henry lives, but this setup allows him to go live anywhere he wants.

I'm also unconvinced by the "most popular tool" argument. Sure a huge amount of people make use of babel, but it's only a (very) small part of the complete tech stack an average company would need. I.e. database, frameworks, other programming languages, nodejs, deployment and management tools, the underlying OS; there are dozens of dependencies that are critical nowadays, all which need to share the available donation pool.