Donating to GulpJS? 2014 is calling, they want their streaming build tool back.
Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
61–68 of 68 posts
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#62Donating to GulpJS? 2014 is calling, they want their streaming build tool back.
Gulp is still a great tool for straightforward workflows. It's still being developed and maintained. It has more than 30,000 GitHub stars. There's no need to change you have a working process.
There are valid reasons to look at other build tools, but "because your current tool is 4 years old" isn't one.
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#63I wonder what percentage the FAANG like companies donate. On the one hand, it's probably quite low, on the other hand, they do run a lot of projects themselves & donate labours to others. Still that's hardly sustainable for the rest of OSS
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Or have two developers split time with the OSS project and your internal needs. That way you have resident experts in that OSS project and you're more flexible in meeting deadlines since you can shift time.
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#65Thank you for doing this. This is a great idea. If every company that used open source committed to supporting the projects they depend on with this kind of approach, it would solve a lot of the current sustainability problems. I look forward to several initiatives over the next few years to encourage this kind of behavior from all companies.
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you force anyone to pay for it, it's no longer FOSS. This isn't just a technicality, either, it will literally become something different with a whole different set of incentives involved for everyone in the ecosystem. I am making no comment on whether this would be a positive or negative thing. Rather saying that you have to be careful about messing with established, organic systems with top down planning and twe…
I'm pretty sure that one of Richard Stallman's ideas for free software funding in the 1980s was government grants, paid for with taxes—except I don't think he suggested that the taxes would be collected only from users of particular software, but rather from everybody. (This does happen on a small scale because some government grants do go to academic researchers who are developing FOSS, and because U.S. government a…
That's a different thing entirely though. If you force companies to donate to a project, they'll want to have some ownership of it. If you do it indirectly through taxes, you're forcing everyone to fund it so it becomes a democratic process.
I personally don't agree with either approach, but I think Stallman's idea would have a much better result than forcing companies to donate.
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#67You can donate to several projects via Software for the Public Interest, including PostgreSQL, Debian, ArchLinux, OpenEmbedded, LibreOffice, Jenkins, FFmpeg and OpenWrt. https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/ > SPI acts as a fiscal sponsor to many free and open source projects ... we encourage programmers to use the GNU General Public License or other licenses that allow free redistribution and use of software and hardwar…
I'll make a plug for https://sfconservancy.org who sponsor many open source projects including Clojars (which I'm a maintainer of), and Clojurists Together. They do great work and deserve your support.
Going to plus 1 on this one. The Software Freedom Conservancy is doing great work. They are the fiscal sponsor for the project I run infra for (LibreHealth).
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 reso…
But charity does not preclude freedom. Unless you're suggesting that if charity was absent we'd be seeing more participation?