11 ms·

Companies should probably pay $2k per person for open source (2017)

117 points by mattbk1 5y ago

gibba999 5y ago
* Well, the links on the front page point somewhere random -- to a clipart site. * There's nothing about who is doing this or why. * There's no way to actually pay that I could find. * There's no information about overhead, or if the GratiPay is pocketing the money. It's just a half-baked half-finished web page. I think a good not-for-profit here might be helpful? But I'm not sure how to structure it so that it is. I don't see why a business would actually want to pay. Most managers believe they have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. This doesn't help. And the money raised? I'm not sure a serious analysis has been done by anyone. As an open source author, I'm not inclined to even deposit a $0.32 royalty check.
- dhosek 5y ago
  If you look closely you'll see that the banner on the linked site says: “Gratipay: A pioneer in open source stability née gittip 2012–2017 RIP” Apparently, after five years of trying to make a business of it, he gave up. The article, by the way is from 2017. Perhaps a mod should add that to the link title.
dirtyoldmick 5y ago
Companies like money too much and won't pay for something they already get for free. Ye of too much faith.
dpitkin 5y ago
Another attempt at this business model post-Gratipay is Tidelift https://tidelift.com/ https://tidelift.com/
whichdan 5y ago
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.
- foo92691 5y ago
  How do you provide these pay-only features on an open source project? And who is doing the support? It sounds like you are envisioning something like Red Hat.
  - whichdan 5y ago
    I was thinking more like Sidekiq - https://sidekiq.org/products/enterprise.html https://sidekiq.org/products/enterprise.html
- infogulch 5y ago
  The problem with this is that a single enterprise customer may not pay enough to support: 1. an individual dedicated to provide that priority support, and 2. the overhead of managing two independent releases with different feature sets.
- Fiahil 5y ago
  Just drop the features, priority support with SLA are really what they are looking for on critical pieces. 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".
- GordonS 5y ago
  Ah, I wish it were so simple! One of the reasons why devs at enterprise scale companies like OSS so much (except GPL, obviously) is because trying to purchase anything is a nightmare. If you've worked at such an org, you know exactly what I mean, otherwise you might even find it difficult to believe. Purchasing anything can take several months, with hundreds of manhours wasted on call, meetings, legal review, approvals from random people etc. And if you're the one that initiated it, you'll be the poor sod that has to keep pushing that boulder up the hill all the time, otherwise it just stalls forever. It's honestly should destroying.
  - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
xupybd 5y ago
Really the best way to go about this is a mixed license. If you want commercial users to pay then require them to pay.
908B64B197 5y ago
Some businesses are incredibly dependent on open source components that can stop being maintained at any time. Having in-house contributors spend company time on these dependencies alleviates the issue.
dystopiabreaker 5y ago
We should not be building our infrastructure to rely on the incidental beneficence of the oligarchy. We should build tools for decentralized permissionless economic coordination. Quadratic funding as used in Gitcoin and others is promising.
- interactivecode 5y ago
  I have no clue what half of these words mean. But why would any type of block chain coin be better than regular subscriptions or licensing? Note: Im purposely ignoring the pyramid scheme like effects from rising currency values.
sam0x17 5y ago
This is very true and based on well-researched, well-founded premises. At Arist (YC S20) we donate $1k/month to the main open source project we make use of (Ruby on Jets). This has been a major productivity boost for us as issues critical to our business are fixed quickly. Definitely recommend it!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
prepend 5y ago
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.
- decebalus1 5y ago
  I disagree with that. Maintaining OSS projects is not easy. And it does not get easier when you have a plethora of people trying to contribute for the sake of contributing. Money is better IMO. It would serve as an actual payout for people who are actually working on the OSS project.
  - prepend 5y ago
    The 200 hours could be by open sourcing a new project. There’s different motivators for different people. I would not want to pay open source developers and I would rather pay commercial companies. Of course, I would rather contribute back to the open source community through my own contributions as this leads to a stronger community. If there’s a transactional aspect to OSS then it could make the culture worse in the long run.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  > Cool, that’s easy. So each company should donate 200 hours of work to open source projects. 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.
- david_allison 5y ago
  This adds to maintainer burnout. During heavy periods this year I had ~20-30 code reviews per day. There's a balance between money and contributions. You can't just throw bodies at a problem and say it's better than any alternatives.
tyingq 5y ago
I can't tell what "Person" in the headline maps to. Like, for a non-tech company, is that every employee, every employee in the IT org, or every developer in the IT org?
- whit537 5y ago
  IC engineer. That's the brightest line for comparison across companies (dim though it may be), as well as the primary role whose productivity is materially multiplied due to open source (i.e., imagine if the engineer had to build everything they get from open source).
  - whit537 5y ago
    So yeah for a non-tech company it'd be something like "every developer in the IT org."
saulhoward 5y ago
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.
- 5faulker 5y ago
  Ultimately it boils down to the difference between traditional business model and the non-profit model.
  - _wldu 5y ago
    Non-profits take in money too (just like for profit companies). The only big difference is they do not profit (money over and above expenses). Employees at non-profits are still paid, receive benefits, etc.
- bcherry 5y ago
  I think this is a good proposal and have also been interested in an expanded version of this where the company donates $X to _any_ profit cause, but directed by the employees. This way you can pay Vim one month and the NAACP or the ACLU the next month. 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.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  I've always thought that governments should do this to fund the arts in general, and political campaigns. Some of your taxes directed to the recipients of your choice. In the case of the arts, it would of course be a floor, but in the case of political contributions, it could be a ceiling.
- 5y ago
ginko 5y ago
Sure, but WHO are you supposed to pay those $2k to?
- phkahler 5y ago
  I'm sure there will be several people and organizations willing to step in and be a clearinghouse / middleman to "make it easy".
  - blitzar 5y ago
    I will just need to take a modest 25% to cover costs and we are good to go ...
    - mattbk1 5y ago
      When Gratipay existed, they didn't take a cut (financial transaction fees were covered by donor or recipient). They survived on dogfooding[1]. Liberapay operates the same way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
- reginold 5y ago
  I can make something up, but would love to see a guide to how to donate broadly to open source. Apache, GNU, Ubuntu, libinput? I've been doing this myself with a combo of one-off donations (Ubuntu, Pop OS, libinput) plus experimenting with Github Sponsors on one project. Here's an example from TripleByte of their employee-directed donations: https://triplebyte.com/open-source-donations https://triplebyte.com/open-source-donations
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    https://my.fsf.org/donate https://my.fsf.org/donate
    - reginold 5y ago
      Would this just be one org to donate to? Or do they donate to lots of other orgs?
Gormisdomai 5y ago
> At Gratipay, we believe that companies want to pay for open source, and will pay for open source if it’s easy enough—bureaucratically, technically, and socially. I think this is the right insight, but clicking around the links on their website I don't think they were executing on that insight particularly well. This looks more like it was a platform for individuals to make recurring donations than for companies to support the tools they use.
- whit537 5y ago
  > I don't think they were executing on that insight particularly well. Probably why they don't exist anymore.
- mattbk1 5y ago
  There was a lot of pivoting going on near the end, unfortunately. The "companies pay" version of the site wasn't around for very long.
  - whit537 5y ago
    Thrashing, one might even call it. :)
    - mattbk1 5y ago
      Glad to see you're still around!
      - whit537 5y ago
        <3 Funny timing, btw. :) https://twitter.com/chadwhitacre_/status/1431368348886052865 https://twitter.com/chadwhitacre_/status/1431368348886052865
        kawsper 5y ago
        You were such an inspiration to me seeing how you were running Gratipay, I only did one PR, but it was so interesting following from the sidelines.
axegon_ 5y ago
Overall this is a good idea but with too many options to turn ugly fast. You need to carefully examine the situation: For instance at an old job my contract contained the following sentence: "all intellectual property and code, developed during or outside working hours, regardless of it's nature or purpose belongs to {COMPANY_NAME}". Somehow if my employer pays me extra for working on personal(albeit open source) projects will make me incredibly suspicious.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  That's just flat out unenforceable in California.
  - maccard 5y ago
    And yet it's still in a contract. Just because it's unenforcable doesn't mean you're not going to have a shit time dragging your employer to court over it.
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      Just strike it out and get it removed.
      - maccard 5y ago
        And what happens if your employer says "no sorry that's our standard contract"?
        axegon_ 5y ago
        That's what happened in my case. I signed it regardless because the law in my country makes this worth as much as the paper it's written on but you know... Your options are either to roll with it or move on to the next job.
        908B64B197 5y ago
        That's a red flag. Hope the option package is worth it.
kiba 5y ago
PSA: Gratispay is dead. RIP.
- axiosgunnar 5y ago
  What happened?
  - mtmail 5y ago
    https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981 https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981 "Gratipay is shutting down at the end of the year" "However, funding open source is almost entirely about marketing, and we spent most of the past year writing code instead." https://liberapay.com/ https://liberapay.com/ a different team/company took over the assets.
uncomputation 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- aordano 5y ago
  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 quid pro quo with the community.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    That would only work for the largest companies hiring for the largest FOSS projects, without some sort of independent administration.
    - jimmaswell 5y ago
      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.
      - xboxnolifes 5y ago
        An issue with that is that even if you use a FOSS solution, your devs might not have the domain experience to contribute. Of if they could, it may be pretty inefficient to or take a while to get up to speed to get any meaningful contributions in.
ortusdux 5y ago
Github has a sponsorship program for open source developers. https://github.com/sponsors https://github.com/sponsors
- mattbk1 5y ago
  It also includes the ability to sponsor through Liberapay, the remaining Gratipay fork.
bob229 5y ago
Lol good luck with that companies are greed freeloaders
ItsMonkk 5y ago
This is a positive externality problem. A public goods problem. There is no incentive for each company to pay into a pile if another company doing so for them would get the same results. 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.
whit537 5y ago
I guess that would be $2,232.11/yr/eng in today's dollars. :D
bronlund 5y ago
Yeah, reminds me of this letter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobbyists_ocr.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobb... We all know how that went :D
kderbyma 5y ago
I may be alone, but I believe that open source should be wholly free except for the contribution of returning and modifications to the public domain. The reality is, if these tools are so worth it, the company will support them in house as needed, but the idea that community needs to pay for software suddenly because some people want to work on it full time is a bit odd.
Proven 5y ago
LOL. That's bullshit.
ChrisLomont 5y ago
$2k/year per technical employee is likely more than is paid to commercial licenses per technical employee. At these prices open source would cease to be of value. I work with a few companies with ~50 tech employees each. Both use significant commercial tooling. Both pay far less than $100k a year for it. If their use of open source (some scattered linux, but everyone has also a Windows PC and/or a Mac, etc.) cost them $100k a year, they'd both drop all of it and move to cheaper commercial solutions. Pick a field. Pick commercial tools that a technical person in the field uses. Check prices spread over the lifetime of the tool. Not even close. Art people - $2k/yr buys a lot of solid software that open source doesn't come close to. Software - $2k a year buys a significant amount of commercial tooling. CAD - Open source doesn't even have an answer here. Finance - Open source sucks here too. Scientific computing - Matlab/Mathematica/etc - open source not close, $2k a year buys all your tooling over the lifetime of the tools. And so on.... The reason I use some open source solutions is because they're adequate for the needs, and the cost reflects it. Had I needed to pay $2k a year for them, I'd have dropped them and bought decent commercial alternatives.
- whit537 5y ago
  Per-user closed-source software cost for other technical fields is an interesting comparison. Thanks for surfacing it. :^) Of your five examples, the first two reinforce $2k/yr as a reasonable spend, the second two are no-ops since you don't give a number, and the fifth case is unclear to me (a quick check of Matlab shows a $2k perpetual license with some fine print about support contracts, or an $860/yr annual license). To your secondary point: the fact that in some fields there are no good open source alternatives suggests that there's room for open source alternatives to exist, if our companies can become self-enlightened enough to fund them. Yes, there will always be companies that mooch. I, for one, prefer to work for companies that don't. :)
  - ChrisLomont 5y ago
    >Of your five examples, the first two reinforce $2k/yr as a reasonable spend How so? Annually? Nowhere I know spends that per employee in (software) tooling. Here's the first 2 you mention as reinforcing $2k as reasonable spend: Art people - Photoshop creative 600/yr, and there is nothing close to it in opensource at any price. Many creatives don't need all of ps, only a piece or two, much cheaper. OS is order of $100, lasts 5 years easily. Or maybe they're doing high end video editing in DaVinci Resolve, again with nothing even close in open source, for $295, again good for many years. Some artists will use a few tools, but then again many places also have floating licenses. Software dev: OS again $100, lasts 5 years easily. VS Pro 2019 $499, again many places keep a version about 5 years. So far we're at $120/yr for a significant amount of dev tooling. Again, some people use multiple paid for tools (say Resharper, etc.) but many don't. And again, lots of commercial tools have floating licenses to lower costs. Care to detail an annual software spend approaching $2k for either of these fields you claim provides reinforcement for that amount being a reasonable spend? I'd be curious how you spend $2k/yr for the average developer using commercial tooling. >the fact that in some fields there are no good open source alternatives suggests that there's room for open source alternatives to exist Actually, it points to open source being unable to meet market demand. That there is no CAD system comparable to a professional CAD tool, despite there being CAD tools for over 60 years, and despite it being a huge market, shows that open source simply cannot compete for many markets. This is true is nearly all products except a tiny few: Linux is a good OS, a few good web stacks, thunderbird, etc. But it sucks for the vast majority of product categories used by professionals. For CAD, basic SolidWorks is $4K, is insanely powerful, and a version easily lasts many, many years. And it has floating licenses. >Yes, there will always be companies that mooch. I, for one, prefer to work for companies that don't. I prefer to work for companies that apply the best tools for the job. If the tools are open source, so be it. If they're closed source, so be it. It's fine to raise money to fund open-source, it's fine to make closed source and sell it. Offering something for free, then calling it mooching when someone uses it for free, is simply childish emotional blackmail.
phendrenad2 5y ago
The whole "corporations owe open-source developers remuneration" movement feels like the setup for a big grift. Maybe we'll get some laws passed that enforce this. Maybe we'll get something like the RIAA which tried to claim royalties for all streaming audio, regardless of if the copyright holder was a RIAA member (https://m.slashdot.org/story/84061 https://m.slashdot.org/story/84061).

117 points by mattbk1 5y ago

* Well, the links on the front page point somewhere random -- to a clipart site. * There's nothing about who is doing this or why. * There's no way to actually pay that I could find. * There's no information about overhead, or if the GratiPay is pocketing the money. It's just a half-baked half-finished web page. I think a good not-for-profit here might be helpful? But I'm not sure how to structure it so that it is. I don't see why a business would actually want to pay. Most managers believe they have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. This doesn't help. And the money raised? I'm not sure a serious analysis has been done by anyone. As an open source author, I'm not inclined to even deposit a $0.32 royalty check.

dhosek 5y ago
If you look closely you'll see that the banner on the linked site says: “Gratipay: A pioneer in open source stability née gittip 2012–2017 RIP” Apparently, after five years of trying to make a business of it, he gave up. The article, by the way is from 2017. Perhaps a mod should add that to the link title.

dirtyoldmick 5y ago

Companies like money too much and won't pay for something they already get for free. Ye of too much faith.

dpitkin 5y ago

Another attempt at this business model post-Gratipay is Tidelift https://tidelift.com/ https://tidelift.com/

whichdan 5y ago

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.

foo92691 5y ago
How do you provide these pay-only features on an open source project? And who is doing the support? It sounds like you are envisioning something like Red Hat.
- whichdan 5y ago
  I was thinking more like Sidekiq - https://sidekiq.org/products/enterprise.html https://sidekiq.org/products/enterprise.html
infogulch 5y ago
The problem with this is that a single enterprise customer may not pay enough to support: 1. an individual dedicated to provide that priority support, and 2. the overhead of managing two independent releases with different feature sets.
Fiahil 5y ago
Just drop the features, priority support with SLA are really what they are looking for on critical pieces. 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".
GordonS 5y ago
Ah, I wish it were so simple! One of the reasons why devs at enterprise scale companies like OSS so much (except GPL, obviously) is because trying to purchase anything is a nightmare. If you've worked at such an org, you know exactly what I mean, otherwise you might even find it difficult to believe. Purchasing anything can take several months, with hundreds of manhours wasted on call, meetings, legal review, approvals from random people etc. And if you're the one that initiated it, you'll be the poor sod that has to keep pushing that boulder up the hill all the time, otherwise it just stalls forever. It's honestly should destroying.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago

xupybd 5y ago

Really the best way to go about this is a mixed license. If you want commercial users to pay then require them to pay.

908B64B197 5y ago

Some businesses are incredibly dependent on open source components that can stop being maintained at any time. Having in-house contributors spend company time on these dependencies alleviates the issue.

dystopiabreaker 5y ago

We should not be building our infrastructure to rely on the incidental beneficence of the oligarchy. We should build tools for decentralized permissionless economic coordination. Quadratic funding as used in Gitcoin and others is promising.

interactivecode 5y ago
I have no clue what half of these words mean. But why would any type of block chain coin be better than regular subscriptions or licensing? Note: Im purposely ignoring the pyramid scheme like effects from rising currency values.

sam0x17 5y ago

This is very true and based on well-researched, well-founded premises. At Arist (YC S20) we donate $1k/month to the main open source project we make use of (Ruby on Jets). This has been a major productivity boost for us as issues critical to our business are fixed quickly. Definitely recommend it!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

prepend 5y ago

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.

decebalus1 5y ago
I disagree with that. Maintaining OSS projects is not easy. And it does not get easier when you have a plethora of people trying to contribute for the sake of contributing. Money is better IMO. It would serve as an actual payout for people who are actually working on the OSS project.
- prepend 5y ago
  The 200 hours could be by open sourcing a new project. There’s different motivators for different people. I would not want to pay open source developers and I would rather pay commercial companies. Of course, I would rather contribute back to the open source community through my own contributions as this leads to a stronger community. If there’s a transactional aspect to OSS then it could make the culture worse in the long run.
zamadatix 5y ago
> Cool, that’s easy. So each company should donate 200 hours of work to open source projects. 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.
david_allison 5y ago
This adds to maintainer burnout. During heavy periods this year I had ~20-30 code reviews per day. There's a balance between money and contributions. You can't just throw bodies at a problem and say it's better than any alternatives.

tyingq 5y ago

I can't tell what "Person" in the headline maps to. Like, for a non-tech company, is that every employee, every employee in the IT org, or every developer in the IT org?

whit537 5y ago
IC engineer. That's the brightest line for comparison across companies (dim though it may be), as well as the primary role whose productivity is materially multiplied due to open source (i.e., imagine if the engineer had to build everything they get from open source).
- whit537 5y ago
  So yeah for a non-tech company it'd be something like "every developer in the IT org."

saulhoward 5y ago

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.

5faulker 5y ago
Ultimately it boils down to the difference between traditional business model and the non-profit model.
- _wldu 5y ago
  Non-profits take in money too (just like for profit companies). The only big difference is they do not profit (money over and above expenses). Employees at non-profits are still paid, receive benefits, etc.
bcherry 5y ago
I think this is a good proposal and have also been interested in an expanded version of this where the company donates $X to _any_ profit cause, but directed by the employees. This way you can pay Vim one month and the NAACP or the ACLU the next month. 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.
pessimizer 5y ago
I've always thought that governments should do this to fund the arts in general, and political campaigns. Some of your taxes directed to the recipients of your choice. In the case of the arts, it would of course be a floor, but in the case of political contributions, it could be a ceiling.
5y ago

ginko 5y ago

Sure, but WHO are you supposed to pay those $2k to?

phkahler 5y ago
I'm sure there will be several people and organizations willing to step in and be a clearinghouse / middleman to "make it easy".
- blitzar 5y ago
  I will just need to take a modest 25% to cover costs and we are good to go ...
  - mattbk1 5y ago
    When Gratipay existed, they didn't take a cut (financial transaction fees were covered by donor or recipient). They survived on dogfooding[1]. Liberapay operates the same way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
reginold 5y ago
I can make something up, but would love to see a guide to how to donate broadly to open source. Apache, GNU, Ubuntu, libinput? I've been doing this myself with a combo of one-off donations (Ubuntu, Pop OS, libinput) plus experimenting with Github Sponsors on one project. Here's an example from TripleByte of their employee-directed donations: https://triplebyte.com/open-source-donations https://triplebyte.com/open-source-donations
- smoldesu 5y ago
  https://my.fsf.org/donate https://my.fsf.org/donate
  - reginold 5y ago
    Would this just be one org to donate to? Or do they donate to lots of other orgs?

Gormisdomai 5y ago

> At Gratipay, we believe that companies want to pay for open source, and will pay for open source if it’s easy enough—bureaucratically, technically, and socially. I think this is the right insight, but clicking around the links on their website I don't think they were executing on that insight particularly well. This looks more like it was a platform for individuals to make recurring donations than for companies to support the tools they use.

whit537 5y ago
> I don't think they were executing on that insight particularly well. Probably why they don't exist anymore.
mattbk1 5y ago
There was a lot of pivoting going on near the end, unfortunately. The "companies pay" version of the site wasn't around for very long.
- whit537 5y ago
  Thrashing, one might even call it. :)
  - mattbk1 5y ago
    Glad to see you're still around!
    - whit537 5y ago
      <3 Funny timing, btw. :) https://twitter.com/chadwhitacre_/status/1431368348886052865 https://twitter.com/chadwhitacre_/status/1431368348886052865
      - kawsper 5y ago
        You were such an inspiration to me seeing how you were running Gratipay, I only did one PR, but it was so interesting following from the sidelines.

axegon_ 5y ago

Overall this is a good idea but with too many options to turn ugly fast. You need to carefully examine the situation: For instance at an old job my contract contained the following sentence: "all intellectual property and code, developed during or outside working hours, regardless of it's nature or purpose belongs to {COMPANY_NAME}". Somehow if my employer pays me extra for working on personal(albeit open source) projects will make me incredibly suspicious.

908B64B197 5y ago
That's just flat out unenforceable in California.
- maccard 5y ago
  And yet it's still in a contract. Just because it's unenforcable doesn't mean you're not going to have a shit time dragging your employer to court over it.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    Just strike it out and get it removed.
    - maccard 5y ago
      And what happens if your employer says "no sorry that's our standard contract"?
      - axegon_ 5y ago
        That's what happened in my case. I signed it regardless because the law in my country makes this worth as much as the paper it's written on but you know... Your options are either to roll with it or move on to the next job.
      - 908B64B197 5y ago
        That's a red flag. Hope the option package is worth it.

kiba 5y ago

PSA: Gratispay is dead. RIP.

axiosgunnar 5y ago
What happened?
- mtmail 5y ago
  https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981 https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981 "Gratipay is shutting down at the end of the year" "However, funding open source is almost entirely about marketing, and we spent most of the past year writing code instead." https://liberapay.com/ https://liberapay.com/ a different team/company took over the assets.

uncomputation 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aordano 5y ago
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 quid pro quo with the community.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  That would only work for the largest companies hiring for the largest FOSS projects, without some sort of independent administration.
  - jimmaswell 5y ago
    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.
    - xboxnolifes 5y ago
      An issue with that is that even if you use a FOSS solution, your devs might not have the domain experience to contribute. Of if they could, it may be pretty inefficient to or take a while to get up to speed to get any meaningful contributions in.

ortusdux 5y ago

Github has a sponsorship program for open source developers. https://github.com/sponsors https://github.com/sponsors

mattbk1 5y ago
It also includes the ability to sponsor through Liberapay, the remaining Gratipay fork.

bob229 5y ago

Lol good luck with that companies are greed freeloaders

ItsMonkk 5y ago

This is a positive externality problem. A public goods problem. There is no incentive for each company to pay into a pile if another company doing so for them would get the same results. 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.

whit537 5y ago

I guess that would be $2,232.11/yr/eng in today's dollars. :D

bronlund 5y ago

Yeah, reminds me of this letter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobbyists_ocr.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobb... We all know how that went :D

kderbyma 5y ago

I may be alone, but I believe that open source should be wholly free except for the contribution of returning and modifications to the public domain. The reality is, if these tools are so worth it, the company will support them in house as needed, but the idea that community needs to pay for software suddenly because some people want to work on it full time is a bit odd.

Proven 5y ago

LOL. That's bullshit.

ChrisLomont 5y ago

$2k/year per technical employee is likely more than is paid to commercial licenses per technical employee. At these prices open source would cease to be of value. I work with a few companies with ~50 tech employees each. Both use significant commercial tooling. Both pay far less than $100k a year for it. If their use of open source (some scattered linux, but everyone has also a Windows PC and/or a Mac, etc.) cost them $100k a year, they'd both drop all of it and move to cheaper commercial solutions. Pick a field. Pick commercial tools that a technical person in the field uses. Check prices spread over the lifetime of the tool. Not even close. Art people - $2k/yr buys a lot of solid software that open source doesn't come close to. Software - $2k a year buys a significant amount of commercial tooling. CAD - Open source doesn't even have an answer here. Finance - Open source sucks here too. Scientific computing - Matlab/Mathematica/etc - open source not close, $2k a year buys all your tooling over the lifetime of the tools. And so on.... The reason I use some open source solutions is because they're adequate for the needs, and the cost reflects it. Had I needed to pay $2k a year for them, I'd have dropped them and bought decent commercial alternatives.

whit537 5y ago
Per-user closed-source software cost for other technical fields is an interesting comparison. Thanks for surfacing it. :^) Of your five examples, the first two reinforce $2k/yr as a reasonable spend, the second two are no-ops since you don't give a number, and the fifth case is unclear to me (a quick check of Matlab shows a $2k perpetual license with some fine print about support contracts, or an $860/yr annual license). To your secondary point: the fact that in some fields there are no good open source alternatives suggests that there's room for open source alternatives to exist, if our companies can become self-enlightened enough to fund them. Yes, there will always be companies that mooch. I, for one, prefer to work for companies that don't. :)
- ChrisLomont 5y ago
  >Of your five examples, the first two reinforce $2k/yr as a reasonable spend How so? Annually? Nowhere I know spends that per employee in (software) tooling. Here's the first 2 you mention as reinforcing $2k as reasonable spend: Art people - Photoshop creative 600/yr, and there is nothing close to it in opensource at any price. Many creatives don't need all of ps, only a piece or two, much cheaper. OS is order of $100, lasts 5 years easily. Or maybe they're doing high end video editing in DaVinci Resolve, again with nothing even close in open source, for $295, again good for many years. Some artists will use a few tools, but then again many places also have floating licenses. Software dev: OS again $100, lasts 5 years easily. VS Pro 2019 $499, again many places keep a version about 5 years. So far we're at $120/yr for a significant amount of dev tooling. Again, some people use multiple paid for tools (say Resharper, etc.) but many don't. And again, lots of commercial tools have floating licenses to lower costs. Care to detail an annual software spend approaching $2k for either of these fields you claim provides reinforcement for that amount being a reasonable spend? I'd be curious how you spend $2k/yr for the average developer using commercial tooling. >the fact that in some fields there are no good open source alternatives suggests that there's room for open source alternatives to exist Actually, it points to open source being unable to meet market demand. That there is no CAD system comparable to a professional CAD tool, despite there being CAD tools for over 60 years, and despite it being a huge market, shows that open source simply cannot compete for many markets. This is true is nearly all products except a tiny few: Linux is a good OS, a few good web stacks, thunderbird, etc. But it sucks for the vast majority of product categories used by professionals. For CAD, basic SolidWorks is $4K, is insanely powerful, and a version easily lasts many, many years. And it has floating licenses. >Yes, there will always be companies that mooch. I, for one, prefer to work for companies that don't. I prefer to work for companies that apply the best tools for the job. If the tools are open source, so be it. If they're closed source, so be it. It's fine to raise money to fund open-source, it's fine to make closed source and sell it. Offering something for free, then calling it mooching when someone uses it for free, is simply childish emotional blackmail.

phendrenad2 5y ago

The whole "corporations owe open-source developers remuneration" movement feels like the setup for a big grift. Maybe we'll get some laws passed that enforce this. Maybe we'll get something like the RIAA which tried to claim royalties for all streaming audio, regardless of if the copyright holder was a RIAA member (https://m.slashdot.org/story/84061 https://m.slashdot.org/story/84061).