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Usually, paying somebody to do something that materially benefits you isn't called donating. As the article suggests, organizations should think of voluntary op
by parenthephobia 10y ago
Usually, paying somebody to do something that materially benefits you isn't called donating. As the article suggests, organizations should think of voluntary open source funding as insurance.
Of course, some companies do just donate money for open source, many more donate in kind - e.g. with hosting services - and still others develop internally and donate source code.
Naturally they do this because continued maintenance of the software supports their business objectives, and not out of an egalitarian sense of charity.
- hueving 10y agoEven though it's nice to think of it as insurance, it's not the same thing because it doesn't come with any actual insurance. You can donate money to a project to hope for help when you encounter some critical bug in the future. However, you don't actually get any guarantees that the community will help with said bug or return your money if they don't. That's a really hard sell if you're trying to pitch it as insurance.
- legostormtroopr 10y agoBut it is donating - because Open-source developers will just keep on keeping on. The developers of a project won't stop building it if no one is paying - until they have to. But for right now, if a bug is found MegaCorp reports it, and the open-source developer fixes it for free. And that's the problem.