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Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
51–60 of 68 posts
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course there are FOSS paid developers, for instance Intel pay few devs to work on Linux in order to have the hw they sell work properly. That's good. That's not someone that live on FOSS, that's a company that participate to a FOSS project because it need or desire it. On contrary there are other companies that pretend to sell "open" product that are open like a bunker (to name a few try looking for business softw…
And there are other projects (such as Django Rest Framework or even Django itself) where many people and companies derive significant value but either don’t have the time, knowledge, or resources to contribute directly. These projects advance by having people dedicated to maintainence. Often the only way to provide dedicated resources is through donations. If these donations dried up then the projects would suffer. T…
Because it's not "founding" but alms. With some intermediary subjects that gain and reign as they want. Not much different than Ottoman's empire "islamic alms" that was in fact a form of imposition on citizen for the sake of few in the upper pyramid.
If project like Django need maintenance the answer is: universities. Universities train students and can easily maintain projects providing not only people but also resources.
FOSS is knowledge, so a thing that need to be entirely public and entirely relay on public. It is ok if a company need a certain software and so develop it, it is not ok to be "founded" like Patreon, LibrePay, PayPal donation etc. We need freedom and participation not charity.
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey Joe, I'm one of the founders of Open Collective (opencollective.com) Happy to help if you have any questions on how to implement or if we can help out somehow.
Hi Pia, we love Open Collective and are using it to donate to one of our sponsored projects. The platform is a great way to relieve a good deal of pain that OSS devs would have to endure in running a funded project. One of the hardest things we've found is helping small projects (1 or 2 people) that don't have/need the structure of Open Collective but still could use the funds. PayPal is surprising bad since you can'…
Maybe https://donorbox.org would be better for those small projects?
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#54Taking that 3% and allocating towards your own developers contributing to OSS gives everyone more bang for the buck right? It's a wonderful gesture, I don't want to take away from that. Just wondering how straight up donating compares to contributing.
> Taking that 3% and allocating towards your own developers contributing to OSS gives everyone more bang for the buck right?
Maybe, maybe not. Projects can be rate-bound on other issues than rando's work-time e.g. maintainer's financial incentives or troubles, infrastructure, … in which case more contributors isn't necessarily helpful. Keep in mind 3% dev time is about a week / week-and-a-half, how relevant it is depends heavily on the specific project and developer.
And the 3% developer time is not necessarily equivalent to 3% revenue (e.g. because they're contributing heavily to revenue growth). Plus tax incentives could be a factor, for the company there might be more for the buck giving 3% revenue than keeping revenue and giving employee time.
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#55I support FOSS - please add some adult supervision here.. some developer teams have gotten angry and upset when someone gets paid (yes you read that), and on the other side, non-profit tax status is sometimes abused in the US by professionals who make management/fundraising a lifetime occupation with little emphasis on programs served. (sources on conviction of fraud are not always available on the net due to restric…
> ...non-profit tax status is widely abused in the US by professionals who make management a lifetime occupation. In what way? Any sources?
A related example is Zuckeberg charity - they simply moved some of their wealth to a charity but retain full control on how it's spent, it's just tax free now.
http://fortune.com/2015/12/02/zuckerberg-charity/
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#56Taking that 3% and allocating towards your own developers contributing to OSS gives everyone more bang for the buck right? It's a wonderful gesture, I don't want to take away from that. Just wondering how straight up donating compares to contributing.
Specialization and competitive advantage are a thing. Also, allocating 3% of my developers time is not super useful. That's less than 1 day a month per developer. Far better to allocate 1 developer for X time. By giving cash, you facilitate that for someone else. You could of course choose one person in your company to be that person and pay them directly, but thats hard for political reasons.
Maybe if you're a team of 30-40 people, you could pay one full time developer to work on a project of your choice, but of course that would mean that developer works mainly for the project of choice and not directly for your company's needs, even if your own bugs would take priority.
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#57Taking that 3% and allocating towards your own developers contributing to OSS gives everyone more bang for the buck right? It's a wonderful gesture, I don't want to take away from that. Just wondering how straight up donating compares to contributing.
> Taking that 3% and allocating towards your own developers contributing to OSS gives everyone more bang for the buck right? I see what you mean. However, as a two person company we think the impact from supporting those projects is a better use of funds. It's all a bit of an experiment, but we wanted to put a stake in the ground somewhere because of how important open source has been to our existence as a company. J…
I can see why you’d not want to give up the time to train, but improving the open source projects you rely on could be a really nice job for a summer CS intern - if 12 weeks intern salary is < 3%.
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Taking that 3% and allocating towards your own developers contributing to OSS gives everyone more bang for the buck right? I see what you mean. However, as a two person company we think the impact from supporting those projects is a better use of funds. It's all a bit of an experiment, but we wanted to put a stake in the ground somewhere because of how important open source has been to our existence as a company. J…
I can see why you’d not want to give up the time to train, but improving the open source projects you rely on could be a really nice job for a summer CS intern - if 12 weeks intern salary is < 3%.
There is non-zero chance that the project owner will appreciate the direct money more.
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#59Taking that 3% and allocating towards your own developers contributing to OSS gives everyone more bang for the buck right? It's a wonderful gesture, I don't want to take away from that. Just wondering how straight up donating compares to contributing.
Development performance does not increase linearly with time. I could not do any meaningful work with 3% of my time. Maybe if you have 33+ developers and dedicate one to fulltime open source development, this might be the case.
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...non-profit tax status is widely abused in the US by professionals who make management a lifetime occupation. In what way? Any sources?
A related example is Zuckeberg charity - they simply moved some of their wealth to a charity but retain full control on how it's spent, it's just tax free now. http://fortune.com/2015/12/02/zuckerberg-charity/
It's not a charity, his donations to it aren't tax deductible or tax free. If the business makes tax deductible donations those will pass back to him.