> but why does an OSS tool have to be supported by Silicon Valley salaries?
Because these high profile OSS tools generally have trouble finding core maintainers/contributors.
It's easy enough to find people who will contribute a couple of PRs, it's another to get people to handle the ownership and product/project management responsibilities. Even rarer on a reasonably complex project (not that many people find working on something like Babel "fun". It's not sexy like some of the other high profile OSS projects in the JS ecosystem).
Core-js' maintainer has begged for someone to help forever (dunno if he finally found someone). The JS minifier space was nearly abandoned until significant issues brought them back in the spot light. Webpack was struggling until someone stepped up to be their de facto marketer.
If someone wants to do the work for half the money, go ahead. It's just...rare.
Because these high profile OSS tools generally have trouble finding core maintainers/contributors.
It's easy enough to find people who will contribute a couple of PRs, it's another to get people to handle the ownership and product/project management responsibilities. Even rarer on a reasonably complex project (not that many people find working on something like Babel "fun". It's not sexy like some of the other high profile OSS projects in the JS ecosystem).
Core-js' maintainer has begged for someone to help forever (dunno if he finally found someone). The JS minifier space was nearly abandoned until significant issues brought them back in the spot light. Webpack was struggling until someone stepped up to be their de facto marketer.
If someone wants to do the work for half the money, go ahead. It's just...rare.