41–50 of 113 posts
I've often thought companies should provide say $500/month for each of their developers to pay out to the open source projects of their choice. One month an employee might give it to Vim, another to Curl. I think a discretionary scheme like that would buy a lot of good will from the employees, potential hires and the development community.
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.
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.
The article proposes that per person not per company.
> Encouraging more volunteer time is better than trying to collect and allocate cash. And better improved OSS. I think.
Depends on the size of the company and the number of projects you want to support. A bunch of low level commits across a bunch of projects by 100 companies would leave things off a lot worse (due to the maintenance burden vs improvement amount provided) than a bunch of donations from 100 companies to get a dedicated resource dedicated to each project year round.
I've often thought companies should provide say $500/month for each of their developers to pay out to the open source projects of their choice. One month an employee might give it to Vim, another to Curl. I think a discretionary scheme like that would buy a lot of good will from the employees, potential hires and the development community.
Ultimately it boils down to the difference between traditional business model and the non-profit model.
I've often thought companies should provide say $500/month for each of their developers to pay out to the open source projects of their choice. One month an employee might give it to Vim, another to Curl. I think a discretionary scheme like that would buy a lot of good will from the employees, potential hires and the development community.
An easier way to scale this might be to just have a set amount (say $10k/month for a large company) and a recurring ranked-choice poll open to all employees. The funds would be allocated according to the poll, with the winner getting say $5k and the two runner ups getting $3k and $2k or something like that.
This way employees don't have to do the work of submitting donations and filing expenses, as there's just one person at the company who administrates it a few days a month.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would only work for the largest companies hiring for the largest FOSS projects, without some sort of independent administration.
Hiring a full time dev just for FOSS submissions probably isn't justifiable to most employers, but diverting just a little employee time seems reasonable, especially if it's directed at bugs/feature improvements impacting the devs' use of the thing.
I wish more open source projects had an "enterprise" plan with a few inconsequential features and maybe priority support - just enough to justify a line item on a tech org's budget.
Note that you can have a one week (or more) lead time for support requests: the timing doesn't matter, you only need a maximum window so they can share visibility and socialize issues like this: "ticket opened with vendor, next update in one week".
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.
I think a possible solution may be paying not in terms of money. For a free and open source project, the ultimate goal IMO is growth and usability, to fulfill the reason why the software itself exists, and that can be done by donating that money in the shape of a hiring dedicated to work on the software. Some companies already do this, and i don't see why the practice couldn't be more established as a way to ensure a…
A couple of years back, someone asked if they could donate $250 to me - that was the first (and until now, only) time anyone did such a thing. I was really happy about it - not so much about the money, but more the fact they liked the project so much they were willing to hand over money.
Anyway, I asked if they could donate it to a charity instead, and I suggested a few that have personal meaning. They were quite happy with that, and actually donated $500 instead :)
The only way this will ever get resolved is if companies collectively join together and decide to pay. Like say, we could have a tax, that they pay the country they operate in, and that tax could then subsidize these free open source projects that produce positive externalities.