Prettier begins paying maintainers
Prettier, an opinionated code formatter for JavaScript and many web languages, has been accepting donations at OpenCollective since 2019 and thanks to many generous donations we now have $50,000 in the bank! As a result, we are now able to pay the two active maintainers $1,500/month each. This funding will ensure that they will be able to continue consistent maintenance of Prettier into the future.
📣 Prettier is now accepting donations! 🎉 If you 'd like to support our work, head to our OpenCollective! 🙏https://t.co/etDqkYLm4H
— Prettier (@PrettierCode) May 24, 2019
Open Source and Money has always been a tricky topic. We've tried many things with Prettier. Right after the project was open sourced, Facebook contracted James Long for 2 weeks in order to polish it. Facebook also paid Christopher Chedeau (vjeux) for 9 months to work on it full time. Once there was $10,000 in contributions, we gave everyone that contributed significantly the opportunity to redeem $1,000 but due to the complexities in collecting the money, few people did.
We now have $50,000 which is a sizable sum but not enough for someone with the skills to work on it to do it full time. But at the same time we shouldn't let it sit unused. So after a lot of thinking, we decided to provide a recurring $1,500 to the two current maintainers of the project. They have been amazing stewards for the project for the past 2 years!
As you can imagine, maintaining a project that is used by 60% of all JavaScript developers is not a simple task. We are planning to release Prettier 3.0, including a migration to ECMAScript Modules, support for formatting new language features in, and fixing new edge cases as they are identified.
If Prettier has been useful for you or your company, there has never been a better time to donate to Prettier. We will now be much more able to use that money to make Prettier better!