Companies should probably pay $2k per person for open source (2017) • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by prepend » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 10:03 PM UTC

decebalus1 wrote: post #42

prepend wrote: post #36

Cool, that’s easy. So each company should donate 200 hours of work to open source projects. Encouraging more volunteer time is better than trying to collect and allocate cash. And better improved OSS. I think.

I disagree with that. Maintaining OSS projects is not easy. And it does not get easier when you have a plethora of people trying to contribute for the sake of contributing. Money is better IMO. It would serve as an actual payout for people who are actually working on the OSS project.

The 200 hours could be by open sourcing a new project.

There’s different motivators for different people. I would not want to pay open source developers and I would rather pay commercial companies.

Of course, I would rather contribute back to the open source community through my own contributions as this leads to a stronger community.

If there’s a transactional aspect to OSS then it could make the culture worse in the long run.

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

#112

Post by mattbk1 » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 3:03 PM UTC

blitzar wrote: post #93

phkahler wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there will be several people and organizations willing to step in and be a clearinghouse / middleman to "make it easy".

I will just need to take a modest 25% to cover costs and we are good to go ...

When Gratipay existed, they didn't take a cut (financial transaction fees were covered by donor or recipient). They survived on dogfooding[1]. Liberapay operates the same way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food

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

#113

Post by phendrenad2 » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

The whole "corporations owe open-source developers remuneration" movement feels like the setup for a big grift. Maybe we'll get some laws passed that enforce this. Maybe we'll get something like the RIAA which tried to claim royalties for all streaming audio, regardless of if the copyright holder was a RIAA member (https://m.slashdot.org/story/84061).