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Donations can be very expensive to a large company. The labor cost is often huge. If you don't prevent fraud at the $500 level you'll have two problems: Lots

by VLM 4y ago

Donations can be very expensive to a large company. The labor cost is often huge. If you don't prevent fraud at the $500 level you'll have two problems: Lots of repeated fraud at the $500 level, and people trying to get away with fraud at the $5000, $50000, all the way up to FTX levels of fraud. So you need multiple people in different depts to agree to fund something while other people watch over to make sure the people being funded are not the spouses or shell companies of the approvers. Meanwhile there's paperwork costs to make sure the donation paperwork gets to accounting so accounting gets their tax deduction. At a "really big company" the labor cost of paying an invoice might be $2000. Now does the average programmer get more than $2K of annual value out of urllib3, given the alternatives (which could involve up to architecting around needing it?) Before you laugh and say "no way" to the $2K figure, imagine spending half of an hour long team meeting of ten software devs getting paid $100/hr but overhead etc costs the company $150/hr for them to attend that meeting, that's $750 of labor costs just to have the dev team possibly agree to support urllib3. Then its got to go up the chain to someone with signing approval, someone has to chase the paperwork to make sure it happens, frankly $2K is on the very low side of the cost of getting an invoice paid. Commercial non-free software is "put up with" where its not that some rando piece of required software costs $50 thus the cost of the company including labor and overhead is $2050 and they're happy to pay it, its more similar to if you don't dot all the Is and cross all the Ts that software will cost $10M in some crazy lawsuit, and $2050 is cheaper than $10M, so they pay up or they'll get a huge lawsuit or more likely someone will get fired after the audit, and I'd rather pay $2050 for something worth $50 if it prevents me from getting fired and better yet its not my $2050. But nobody never got fired for not paying for urllib3, so nobody's paying urllib3. Companies will pay for support and I could see a large company paying $10K/yr for a written guarantee if a dev at that company runs into a use problem or bug with urllib3 then an actual dev from the project will help them up to twenty hours per year or similar, even if no one asks for help. In contrast feel good donations are very expensive so they don't happen often, so trying to run a business off feel good donations doesn't work too well..

dotancohen 4y ago
Could this be outsourced? I could create a tool - or a suite of tools - to parse e.g. a Python, PHP, Javascript (Node), Java, or other codebase and determine the dependencies. Hell, the requirements.txt file would probably be enough. Maybe I'll manually see how they use Linux, Firefox, LibreOffice, Anki, Inkscape, etc too. The company then cuts me - a reputable business that distributes funds fairly to open source projects - a check and I divvy it up, keep n% for myself, and distribute it to the projects and to the FSF. With enough clients some open source projects could see significant funds increases, and the companies would be alleviated of responsibility and worry. I could even issue "badges" to significant donors.
bkor 4y ago
> The labor cost is often huge. In a big company it's often a hassle to pay something to a "new vendor". It usually takes a long time. > If you don't prevent fraud at the $500 level you'll have two problems I had a colleague who used to work in the Auditing section. He had various stories of people committing fraud (stories of 50k USD+). There's a cost to trying to prevent all cases of fraud and that might hurt more than to try and prevent everything. I've also heard cases (not from the auditing guy) where a vendor notified that we paid them 1000 times too much (caused by an input error with the , and the .). That happened despite several layers of checks. > At a "really big company" the labor cost of paying an invoice might be $2000. At a "really big company" if something is a good idea then it'll get done. And those handling administrative tasks are often "outsourced" to cheaper countries, e.g. India/Philippines/China/etc. There have been several donations to "good causes". Those were handled without trying to figure out the cost of someone working in an entirely different part of the world and company. This as it's not like someone will specifically will be hired, or it really matters. They usually made an event out of an donation (e.g. handing out something in person in an office). Funny enough the event surrounding that was often poorly attended. > that's $750 of labor costs just to have the dev team possibly agree to support urllib3 You're not talking about a donation any more.
H8crilA 4y ago
> At a "really big company" the labor cost of paying an invoice might be $2000 If that's the case all those credit card bills from corporate trips to other offices must have costed A LOT, like billions. Maybe even hundreds of billions.

by VLM 4y ago

dotancohen 4y ago

Could this be outsourced? I could create a tool - or a suite of tools - to parse e.g. a Python, PHP, Javascript (Node), Java, or other codebase and determine the dependencies. Hell, the requirements.txt file would probably be enough. Maybe I'll manually see how they use Linux, Firefox, LibreOffice, Anki, Inkscape, etc too. The company then cuts me - a reputable business that distributes funds fairly to open source projects - a check and I divvy it up, keep n% for myself, and distribute it to the projects and to the FSF. With enough clients some open source projects could see significant funds increases, and the companies would be alleviated of responsibility and worry. I could even issue "badges" to significant donors.

bkor 4y ago

> The labor cost is often huge. In a big company it's often a hassle to pay something to a "new vendor". It usually takes a long time. > If you don't prevent fraud at the $500 level you'll have two problems I had a colleague who used to work in the Auditing section. He had various stories of people committing fraud (stories of 50k USD+). There's a cost to trying to prevent all cases of fraud and that might hurt more than to try and prevent everything. I've also heard cases (not from the auditing guy) where a vendor notified that we paid them 1000 times too much (caused by an input error with the , and the .). That happened despite several layers of checks. > At a "really big company" the labor cost of paying an invoice might be $2000. At a "really big company" if something is a good idea then it'll get done. And those handling administrative tasks are often "outsourced" to cheaper countries, e.g. India/Philippines/China/etc. There have been several donations to "good causes". Those were handled without trying to figure out the cost of someone working in an entirely different part of the world and company. This as it's not like someone will specifically will be hired, or it really matters. They usually made an event out of an donation (e.g. handing out something in person in an office). Funny enough the event surrounding that was often poorly attended. > that's $750 of labor costs just to have the dev team possibly agree to support urllib3 You're not talking about a donation any more.

H8crilA 4y ago

> At a "really big company" the labor cost of paying an invoice might be $2000 If that's the case all those credit card bills from corporate trips to other offices must have costed A LOT, like billions. Maybe even hundreds of billions.