Babel 有数百万人在用，那我们为什么会快没钱了？

自2018年以来，Babel一直在做一个资金实验：全职做Babel能维持下去吗？我们已经了解到答案可能是否定的。

🌐 Since 2018, Babel has been doing a funding experiment: can full time work on Babel be sustained? We've learned the answer might be no.

2019 年 11 月，在成功向 Henry 支付了超过一年的薪水之后，我们 扩大了目标，还决定支持另外三位维护者：俊亮、Kai 和 Nicolò。

🌐 In November 2019, after successfully paying Henry a salary for over a year, we expanded our goal to also support three additional maintainers: Jùnliàng, Kai, and Nicolò.

Babel 团队的一部分成员（Nicolò、Jùnliàng 和 Henry）仍然领取工资来工作于 Babel，但鉴于我们目前收到的捐赠，我们现在需要做一些调整。这个更新是为了讨论这个问题，并向社区寻求更多支持。

🌐 Part of the Babel team (Nicolò, Jùnliàng and Henry) is still being paid a salary to work on Babel, but we now need to make some adjustments in light of the donations we are currently receiving. This update is to talk about that and ask for further support from the community.

回望

🌐 Looking Back

2018 年，Henry 辞掉了工作，想看看自己是否能靠做开源和 Babel 赚钱，同时向像 Evan You 这样的人取经和寻求建议。他已经开始通过我们在 2017 年设立的 Open Collective 获取更多资金，这个平台是为了支持这个项目，特别是为了支持我们之前的核心团队成员 Logan Smyth，但在兼职工作时一开始做到这一点很困难。

🌐 In 2018, Henry left his job to see if he could make a living working on open source and Babel, looking to people like Evan You as an example and for advice. He had already started work on getting more funding through the Open Collective that we had set up in 2017 to support the project and specifically our previous core team member Logan Smyth, but it was difficult to do so early on while working half-time.

几个月后，通过筹款活动我们能够每月支付亨利工资：我们确定了每月 11,000 美元作为全职从事开源工作的基础薪水。我们得到了来自 Handshake 的一笔大额资助（10 个月共 1 万美元），最初帮助增加了我们的资金，但即使资助结束了，得益于一些赞助商如 Airbnb、Trivago、Gatsby、AMP 和 Salesforce，我们依然能毫无问题地支付团队工资。

🌐 After a few months, the fundraising efforts allowed paying Henry every month: we settled on $11,000 per month as a baseline salary for working full-time on open source. We had a large grant ($10k for 10 months) from Handshake which initially helped boost our funds, but even when it ended we didn't have problems paying our team thanks to some amazing sponsors such as Airbnb, Trivago, Gatsby, AMP, and Salesforce.

我们不想就此止步。我们认为，通过展示我们有能力组建和支付一支强大的团队，更多的功能和改进（进而带来更多价值）会通过 Babel 实现，这将继续推动资金和赞助的势头。我们决定开始以“兼职”薪资支付 Jùnliàng、Nicolò 和 Kai：我们最初能负担每人每月 2,000 美元。我们希望通过 宣布这个计划 并继续筹款工作，能够增加预算，把他们的薪资提高到全职水平。

🌐 We didn't want to stop there. We thought that by demonstrating our ability to create and pay a strong team, more features and improvements (and in turn, value) would be delivered via Babel, which would continue the momentum of funding and sponsorship. We decided to start paying Jùnliàng, Nicolò and Kai a "part-time" rate: we could initially afford $2,000 USD per month. Our hope was by announcing this plan and continuing our fundraising efforts, we would be able to increase the budget and raise them to the full-time rate.

今天的Babel

🌐 Where Babel is Today

从那时起已经一年多了，我们俩都做了很多，也学到了很多。

🌐 It has been more than a year since then and we've both done and learned a lot.

我们已经实现了对许多新的 ECMAScript 提案的支持，跟上了每一个新的 TypeScript 和 Flow 版本，并设计了新功能以生成更小的编译输出。我们现在正接近下一个重大版本，Babel 8。

Babel 仍然被全球成千上万的公司使用。它被集成到 JavaScript 生态系统的各种框架中，无论是 React、Next.js、Vue、Ember、Angular 等。我们的下载量已经超过了每月1.17 亿次。它在各种场景下驱动自定义插件和优化，比如 CSS-in-JS、GraphQL 或者大规模代码库的本地化。

🌐 Babel continues to be used by thousands of companies all over the world. It's integrated into all kinds of frameworks in the JavaScript ecosystem, whether it's React, Next.js, Vue, Ember, Angular, etc. We are hitting over 117 million downloads/month. It powers custom plugins and optimizations in varied scenarios like CSS-in-JS, GraphQL, or localization across enormous code bases.

Babel 也已经成为实践者和语言设计者汇聚的交汇点。我们相信，它已经成为测试新的 ECMAScript 提案过程中不可或缺的一部分（希望不会有太多不稳定的提案直接应用到生产环境！）。这让 JavaScript 开发者有机会尝试新功能，并向 TC39 委员会反馈意见，最终影响语言的发展。Babel 并不代表任何单个公司的利益，而是希望反映出 JavaScript 用户参与新想法的热情。即使你或你的公司不直接使用 Babel，也仍然可以从它帮助语言特性标准化的过程中直接受益。

🌐 Babel also has become the intersection where practioners and language designers meet. We believe that it's become a vital part of the process used to test new ECMAscript proposals (hopefully, not with too many unstable proposals in production!). This creates the ability for JavaScript developers to try new features and give feedback to the TC39 committee and ultimately influence how the language evolves. Babel doesn't represent any individual company's interest but hopefully the JavaScript users eagerness to participate in new ideas. Even if you or your company don't directly use Babel, you can still directly benefit from how it can help standardizing language features.

我们当前的融资情况

🌐 Our Current Funding Situation

每个项目都有独特的资金方案和问题。对于 Babel，人们通常不会直接与它互动：像大多数构建工具一样，你一开始设置好它们，然后就忘了它们（直到你发现了一个 bug，有时会这样！）。

🌐 Every project has unique funding propositions and problems. For Babel, people often don't directly interact with it: like most build tools, you set them up once at the beginning and then forget about them (until you find a bug, sometimes!).

你不会看到招聘“Babel 开发者”的职位，即使大多数主流的 JS 框架都采用了 Babel。此外，随着像 Next.js 这样预配置框架的兴起，它们帮用户管理底层构建工具的责任，让人甚至在不知情的情况下使用 Babel 已经很常见了。这也让我们的用户更难说服公司去支持我们。

🌐 You won't see job offers for a "Babel developer", even if most of the major JS frameworks are used with Babel. Additionally, with the growth of pre-configured frameworks such as Next.js that lift the responsibility of managing the underlying build tools from their users, it's not uncommon to use Babel without even knowing it. This makes it harder for our users to justify sponsoring us to their companies.

从一开始，我们就知道没有足够的钱支付任何人的全职工资，所以亨利花了很多时间尝试争取持续的资金，去会议上演讲并与公司交流。然而，尽管这段时间科技行业在增长，2020年还是对我们的资金产生了负面影响。我们失去了一些大赞助商，凯不得不辞职去另一份工作上做全职工作。

🌐 From the beginning, we knew we wouldn't have enough to pay anyone a full time salary, so Henry has been spending a lot of time attempting to get continued funding, giving talks at conferences and talking to companies. However, 2020 has negatively affected our funding, despite the tech industry's growth during this time. We lost some big sponsors, and Kai had to step down to get full-time work at another job.

我们原本希望捐款能继续增加，这样就可以增加俊良和尼科洛的收入，但这并没有发生。

🌐 We were hoping to see a continued increase in donations to be able to increase what Jùnliàng and Nicolò where taking, but it didn't happen.

未来

🌐 The Future

尽管资金困难，我们仍然希望继续支付核心团队的工资，以便继续改进 Babel。我们想专注于让 Babel 更易配置、性能更高，并生成更优化的输出。我们希望在继续实现新的提案的同时，也确保现有功能稳定可靠。我们希望能够花时间更好地撰写文档，不仅是 Babel 本身，还有 JavaScript 和语言设计，为开发者创造一个环境，让他们如果愿意，可以尝试自己设计语法。这方面的潜力很大，不仅仅是我们写的代码，还有将更多人带入语言设计字段的机会，那些也许从未考虑过的人。我们还发布了路线图，以便更好地传达我们的中期目标。

🌐 Despite these funding difficulties, we still want to keep paying our core team, in order to continue improving Babel. We want to focus on making Babel easier to configure, more performant, and produce more optimized output. We want to continue implementing new proposals while also ensuring that existing features are rock solid. We want to be able to spend time on better documentation of not just Babel itself but JavaScript and language design, creating an environment where any developer can tinker with making their own syntax if they choose. There's a large scope not in terms of the code we write but opportunities to bring more people into the language design space for people who might not have ever considered it. We have also published a roadmap to better communicate our medium-term goals.

我们坚信，在开源字段工作应该是一条可行且可持续的职业道路。我们应该把每个人都提升到同一水平，而不是拉低。然而，我们需要面对这样一个事实：这意味着几个月内就会耗尽我们当前的余额。

🌐 We strongly believe that working in open source should be a viable and sustainable career path. We should be bringing everyone up to the same level, not down. However, we need to face the fact that this would mean draining our current balance in just a few months.

每个人都拿越来越少的东西，最终会产生一种虚假的可持续感。这会降低我们对自己工作的价值评估，也会影响赞助商对可持续资金金额的看法。

🌐 Everyone taking smaller and smaller amounts ends up creating a false sense of sustainability. It lowers how we value our own work, and what sponsors perceive to be sustainable amount of funding.

现实情况是，如果没有更多的资金支持，我们可能无法维持 Babel 和其用户应得的高标准支持和开发。我们可能会失去更多团队成员，而他们理应根据自己的技能水平获得体面的收入。整个开源生态系统也可能因为对这一关键且广泛使用的技术支持不足而受影响。

🌐 The reality is that, without more funding, we risk not being able to maintain the high standard of support and development that Babel and its users deserve. We risk losing more team members, who deserve to make a decent living in line with their skill level. The open source ecosystem also risks under-supporting a critical and widely used piece of technology.

我们的请求

🌐 Our Ask

暂时，Nicolò、Henry 和 Jùnliàng 的月薪都会暂时定为 6000 美元。这并不能解决问题，但可以在提高最初 2000 美元的临时工资的同时给我们一些缓冲时间。开销依然会超过我们目前每月收到的捐款，但我们现在的余额可以让我们维持这个水平直到 2021 年底。

🌐 For now, Nicolò, Henry, and Jùnliàng will all be paid a temporary rate of $6,000 per month. This doesn't solve the problem, but it gives us time while increasing the initial temporary $2,000 USD salaries. The burn rate will still be more than the donations we currently receive each month, but our current balance allows us to sustain this amount until the end of 2021.

我们会尽力平衡所有优先事项，不过由于资金有限，我们能投入的人员时间减少，还需要花一些时间去寻找新的赞助，所以产能会降低。Babel 不是一家公司，也不是一个产品或服务。而且我们团队很小，所以同样的人既做工程又做融资。但考虑到 Babel 带来的巨大价值，我们觉得其实不应该做这样的妥协。

🌐 We'll do our best to balance all the priorities, while at reduced capacity due to being able to fund less of people's time and needing to spend some of that time finding new sponsors. Babel is not a company, a product, or service. And we have a small team, so we are the same people working on engineering and on funding. But it's a compromise we don't think we should have to make, considering the huge value that Babel delivers.

为了完全资助目前有工资的维护者（不过我们希望扩大支付范围，把整个核心团队都包括进来），我们每年至少需要 333,000 美元，这大约是我们目前收入的两倍。考虑到科技行业的钱有多少，这似乎很小——但对 Babel 来说，这会产生巨大的影响。我们的故事和类似的故事对整个开源生态系统的健康和可持续性有很大的影响。

🌐 To fully fund the currently paid maintainers (but we would like to expand who is being paid, to include the whole core team), we need at least $333,000 per year, which is 2x what we're currently bringing in. Considering the amounts of money in the tech sector, this seems tiny in comparison—but it would make a big difference to Babel. Our story and stories like it make a big difference to the health and sustainability of the open source ecosystem overall.

所以，我们的请求是帮助资助我们的工作，通过 Open Collective 和 GitHub Sponsors 来支持。虽然个人的捐助也很重要（我们非常感激），但我们实际上更希望有更多公司能站出来，成为我们的 企业赞助商，就像现在的赞助商 AMP、Airbnb、Salesforce、GitPod 等一样。如果你的公司有其他方式支持我们也更合适，我们也乐于听取任何想法。可以直接联系我们，或者发送邮件到 team@babeljs.io 。

我们非常希望能够实现我们的目标：越来越多的公司使用 Babel 来交付他们的产品，而我们所要求的只是我们所提供价值的一小部分。Babel 被网络的一大部分依赖，确保项目继续以现在的高质量水平维护，对每个人都是有利的。

🌐 We intensely hope that we'll reach our goals: more and more companies use Babel to deliver their products, and what we are asking for is a tiny fraction of the value we provide. Babel is relied upon by a big part of the web, and it's in the interests of everyone to ensure that the project continues being maintained at the same quality levels as it is now.