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I am wary of the excitement as well, but there's a bit difference: corporations. Spending $20/month on a patreon is entirely different than spending the same o

I am wary of the excitement as well, but there's a bit difference: corporations. Spending $20/month on a patreon is entirely different than spending the same on a library I make heavy use of at my job. I can easily convince my boss to do that; that type of money isn't even "noise" for most companies!

osd 7y ago
$20 is less than a drop in the bucket, but $20 dollars for essentially a donation is another matter. For the companies that already contribute monetarily to open source, I don't think much changes. The unfortunate reality is that for companies who don't, not much changes.
reggieband 7y ago
In my experience at a reasonably large corp ... getting the bureaucracy to spend $20/month is somehow more of a pain than getting it to spend $50,000/month. For the kind of dollar values most github supporters are working in (probably in the range of less than $1000/year) - a single yearly lump sum would be easier to expense directly on a corporate card rather than getting accounting involved monthly.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > In my experience at a reasonably large corp ... getting the bureaucracy to spend $20/month is somehow more of a pain than getting it to spend $50,000/month. This has been my experience, too. I suspect it has to do with how budgets are allocated. A large expenditure request follows a different path and will probably get seriously examined and specially budgeted for. A small one only needs the approval of the department manager, and it will come directly out of the budget that's already been allocated. This means that it is an expense that manager will actually feel, and is more likely to simply be denied.
  - rurban 7y ago
    Fully agree with that. And that's why I love github that much. I got two sponsors from github-as-official-company already. It's apparently easy there to get that microbudget approved.

osd 7y ago

$20 is less than a drop in the bucket, but $20 dollars for essentially a donation is another matter. For the companies that already contribute monetarily to open source, I don't think much changes. The unfortunate reality is that for companies who don't, not much changes.

reggieband 7y ago

In my experience at a reasonably large corp ... getting the bureaucracy to spend $20/month is somehow more of a pain than getting it to spend $50,000/month. For the kind of dollar values most github supporters are working in (probably in the range of less than $1000/year) - a single yearly lump sum would be easier to expense directly on a corporate card rather than getting accounting involved monthly.

JohnFen 7y ago
> In my experience at a reasonably large corp ... getting the bureaucracy to spend $20/month is somehow more of a pain than getting it to spend $50,000/month. This has been my experience, too. I suspect it has to do with how budgets are allocated. A large expenditure request follows a different path and will probably get seriously examined and specially budgeted for. A small one only needs the approval of the department manager, and it will come directly out of the budget that's already been allocated. This means that it is an expense that manager will actually feel, and is more likely to simply be denied.
- rurban 7y ago
  Fully agree with that. And that's why I love github that much. I got two sponsors from github-as-official-company already. It's apparently easy there to get that microbudget approved.