Companies should probably pay $2k per person for open source (2017)

* Well, the links on the front page point somewhere random -- to a clipart site.

* There's nothing about who is doing this or why.

* There's no way to actually pay that I could find.

* There's no information about overhead, or if the GratiPay is pocketing the money.

It's just a half-baked half-finished web page. I think a good not-for-profit here might be helpful? But I'm not sure how to structure it so that it is. I don't see why a business would actually want to pay. Most managers believe they have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. This doesn't help.

And the money raised? I'm not sure a serious analysis has been done by anyone. As an open source author, I'm not inclined to even deposit a $0.32 royalty check.

If you look closely you'll see that the banner on the linked site says:

“Gratipay: A pioneer in open source stability née gittip 2012–2017 RIP”

Apparently, after five years of trying to make a business of it, he gave up.

The article, by the way is from 2017. Perhaps a mod should add that to the link title.

Overall this is a good idea but with too many options to turn ugly fast. You need to carefully examine the situation: For instance at an old job my contract contained the following sentence: "all intellectual property and code, developed during or outside working hours, regardless of it's nature or purpose belongs to {COMPANY_NAME}". Somehow if my employer pays me extra for working on personal(albeit open source) projects will make me incredibly suspicious.

I think this is good will for sure, and 2k is a rounding error to the cost of most enterprise software, but the real problem with (most) FOSS is the lack of clear structure or organization in terms of payment. Not only who gets paid, but also how much to pay, how to quantity roles and work, spending if necessary, etc. That’s the real problem/opportunity for someone like Gratipay.

What happened?