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Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

Babel is particularly shady, because before asking for this money they dropped making their own polyfills in favour of core-js, which turned out to be a bad move considering the main contributor of that library found himself doing time in a Russian penal colony.

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Unfortunate about the maintainer of core-js. But how does that make Babel shady? Especially if they made the change before asking for money.

Sounds more like they were struggling with workload and made what, at the time, seemed like a reasonable decision to offload some of the work to another library.

Also the core-js maintainer single handedly carried that project, with no financial support from Babel (or hardly anyone else for that matter). It became a vital part of the ecosystem, and then the community hung him out to dry when he asked for more support. The whole thing was shameful, especially those who mocked him for his unfortunate personal situation.

agreed

Quite shady that one of best funded OSS projects come public asking for more money, but when the community start questioning the expenses/the specific contribution from a certain member there's only silence

(I haven't seen any response regarding their post in May last year asking for money)

The project is big enough that it should be a _lot_ more transparent :)

Gotta say, the comments on this core-js issue are very illustrative of the article.

https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/548

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