[mavelikara]

> So there's a tragedy of the commons in the making here, right? Millions of people collectively benefit from the existence and maintenance of this project, and would be harmed to some extent by its absence, and yet, because it's "free", no one is willing to put in the time, effort or money needed to ensure its continued existence.

The tragedy of the commons happens long before that.

Developers cannot an build and publish a software product like babel for-profit, because someone else would give out a V1 version for free. I suspect that there are many languages, compilers, IDEs, libraries, and build tools that no longer get written because the authors can't make a living from doing it.