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Why big corps don't give donations to open-source maintainers?
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Re: Why big corps don't give donations to open-source maintainers?
#2"Hey, Boss, I want to spend money on something that we already have. The benefits that spending will return are conditional, probabilistic, and long term, if any."
Its not an easy sell.
Several people have done fine work in providing example sales pitches, articulating the benefits of supporting open source generally and maintainers specifically. Even with that kind of help, it's still a hard sell.
Many business are run for today with no regard for tomorrow, stiff suppliers and contractors and come back next quarter whining about "but if you won't extend more credit you'll be taking hundreds of jobs!" Actual legal obligations don't mean much to those people; they'll never care about a commonwealth.
The better type of business still has far more things to do with their money than care for an apparently healthy and vibrant common ecosystem. Usually, the best they can do some public relations spending on par with the rest of their charity work.
Re: Why big corps don't give donations to open-source maintainers?
#3Nobody is managing a big corporation because he cared about keeping his name on Santa's "nice" list. The donations that big corps do make are carefully calculated performative virtue - aka marketing - which they make only if, when, and where they feel confident of a positive ROI.
Or, very occasionally they are de facto buying software support with "donations".
Re: Why big corps don't give donations to open-source maintainers?
#4In general companies won't pay people to do things when they are willing to do it for free. There are exceptions. Linus Torvalds is paid by the Linux Foundation, which is funded by big corporations https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members .
Re: Why big corps don't give donations to open-source maintainers?
#5As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905557
Corporations are paying in equal measure.
Re: Why big corps don't give donations to open-source maintainers?
#6Why not have a separate license for commercial use?
Re: Why big corps don't give donations to open-source maintainers?
#7Why not have a separate license for commercial use?
Because there are hordes of neckbearded zealots who will loudly claim that's a Jeffrey Epstein level of immoral, and nobody benefits from that kind of distraction.
Re: Why big corps don't give donations to open-source maintainers?
#8They do, but indirectly. They pay Red Hat (RHEL) or SuSE or another commercial vendor for support. That vendor then hires programmers who contribute patches back to the Linux kernel and user space apps. For critical projects, they hire core team members.
Re: Why big corps don't give donations to open-source maintainers?
#9I’ve never had a budget for donations as an engineer. That money would go through some other part of the organization.
I have had discretionary budgets many many times. I could easily give part of that budget to open source maintainers but I’ve also never found one that made it easy to get an invoice.
Re: Why big corps don't give donations to open-source maintainers?
#10It's tedious to accomplish and not common, but it can be done: https://tech.target.com/blog/open-source-fund