There's never been a greater time to create an open source project.
As I wrote about recently in Hackernoon, platforms like OpenCollective are giving open source projects the opportunity for sustainability like never before thanks to crowdfunding.
But it's not just the hundreds of thousands of dollars in new funding that's changing the future of open source.
In that post, I reference "The Larkin Effect" (Sean Larkin of Webpack), this idea that OpenCollective on its own won't be enough to create true sustainability -- OSS projects need extraordinary community ambassadors to truly survive.
Babel is another project that has an incredible community ambassador -- Henry Zhu.
His work promoting Babel, supporting its community and constantly helping others is yet another shining example of what OSS projects need to be sustainable.
On top of that, Babel has been massively important for the JS community, providing the ability to compile ES6 code to ES5, plus now a ton of awesome plugins built by the community.
Not to mention how Dan Abramov feels about it:
Babel is the new jQuery.
— Dan Abramov (@dan_abramov) May 16, 2017
Babel's inspiring community makes it an obvious choice for X-Team to happily sponsor to ensure it remains a guiding light for other projects.
In the State of Babel, you can read about their roadmap and plans ahead, from babel-init to performance improvements, as well as how to start contributing to the project.
We do these sponsorships to help sustain projects that help developers make an impact in the world. Keep it up, Babel team, as you're doing just that.
If you're interested in joining us in sponsoring Babel, head on over to OpenCollective and support them with as little as $2/mo.