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Tarsnap has given 2^18 dollars to open source
- benreesman 3y ago@cperciva is just such a class act.
- lemper 3y agoconsidering he's been doing it consistently since 14 years ago, he's a responsible businessman and smart guy (i.e., putnam awardee). good for you, mate! hope your business reaches the spot where you want it to be.
- switch007 3y ago“2^18” is a subtle way of saying the amount. Classy
- Jenk 3y agomy initial interpretation was 2x10^18 and was very intrigued.
- lifthrasiir 3y agoIsn't that 16? wink
- dukoid 3y agoI am happy to give 2^20! Oh wait it's not xor?
- sophacles 3y ago$22 is significantly above the per-user average for OSS in general, I'm sure some project would be quite happy if you did that!
- Shadowmist 3y agoNo that’s two raised to the power of twenty factorial.
- pc2slow4webpack 3y agoTangentially related, apparently Sentry's own post mentioned in the article was removed from HN according this tweet https://x.com/bentlegen/status/1716884717394670015?s=20 https://x.com/bentlegen/status/1716884717394670015?s=20. Does anyone know the circumstances regarding why?
- cuu508 3y agoMaybe they removed a duplicate? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38001924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38001924
- dtech 3y agoThey probably mean the post manually removed or pushed down off the front page, not literally removed.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y ago> Does anyone know the circumstances regarding why? As someone working at Sentry my running theory of this is that we're not a YC funded startup and the posts are removed for marketing. Removal in this sense is that the post is still there, but it's pushed down in rankings artificially to be removed from the first two pages. //EDIT: the explanation given last year was that it "wasn't interesting": https://twitter.com/chadwhitacre_/status/1716947994338021885 https://twitter.com/chadwhitacre_/status/1716947994338021885
- radicalbyte 3y agoIt's well known that to get to the front page you have to submit then get two dozen friends (with good rep) to upvote you within a short period of time.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y agoThe post was on the front page for a while before it was removed.
- zirkonit 3y agoIf Apple, another big player in the BSD ecosystem, were to donate their December operating profit to open source, that'd be a game-changing $10 billion a year! Shoutout to Tarsnap, who's already doing awesome stuff like this.
- boeingUH60 3y agoShareholders will boot Tim Cook if he even thinks of that..
- evrimoztamur 3y agoWhich is why seldom good ever happens in the land of profit-driven business.
- lynx23 3y agoNo... seldom good ever happens in ... the universe Goodness is a human invention, and a rather young one at that.
- kriops 3y agoThat is just an outright lie. Even most of the open source stuff I'm going to assume you are thinking of could never have existed without adjecent profit-driven ecosystems. Profit drives innovation, and more importantly makes technology accessible at scale. Do you think most of the world would have access to washing machines (which are of ridiculous utility, especially when you factor in their price with profit margins and all!) if it were not for some schmuck wanting to line his or hers of pocket? Because it would not. At its heart, capitalism is a (greedy) solution to a planet-scale resource allocation problem, and there are no viable alternatives (give or take some modifications/variations). Tl;dr: Economics 101.
- meiraleal 3y agoLinux and git, probably the two most successful free software programs out there were both created by one person (the same person) WITHOUT relying on a "profit-driven ecosystem". His code made trillions of dollars but that wasn't what motivated him nor he got some % as those new kids (and their VC parents) joining FOSS wants to.
- shric 3y agoBut did you win the Putnam?
- nikbackm 3y agoMindboggling how much bigger 10^18 is, which is how I first read the subject line.
- asddubs 3y agoI didn't misread it but also initially felt like it was much more. I guess it should be obvious since 2^16 is 65536
- School-Cotton 3y agoA trick for easily estimating powers of two is to remember that 2^10 is about a thousand. Thus 2^20 is about a million, and dividing by four, 2^18 is about 250,000.
- loeg 3y agoYeah. Just remember that each multiple of 2^10 is approximately 10^3 (1000) and then memorize the single-digit powers of 2: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512. It's useful for doing order of magnitude estimates of multiplications in your head.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y agoThis is great. I really hope that efforts like this will spread around more. If smaller companies like Tarsnap can do it, then what stops others? > If you're at a startup which relies heavily on open source software, please take a moment to ask yourself: How much does your company contribute back? And this deserves emphasizing.
- yakubin 3y ago> If smaller companies like Tarsnap can do it, then what stops others? Shareholders. Tarsnap enjoys the benefits of being a privately-owned company.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y agoI recognize that it's hard for a public company, but there are plenty of private companies that have plenty of cash and benefit from Open Source. Aside: I think for a public company it might even work well if ESG stared incorporating Open Source contributions.
- whit537 3y agoNot a public company but Bloomberg's FOSS giving falls under their overall corporate philanthropy program, for example. They're involved in FOSSFunders.com behind the scenes but lots of bureaucracy to actually adding their logo.
- peterhadlaw 3y agoI think for the public, might be better if we stopped incorporating ESG in gnereal.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kelnos 3y agoIn practice I doubt this is much of a barrier. Shareholders don't inspect every line item of a company's budget. For a decent-sized company, a few hundred thousand or even a million or so $$ per year would probably go more or less unnoticed by shareholders. Remember that it's a common -- incorrect -- trope that public companies are legally required to seek maximum profit, etc. It's a lot more complicated and nuanced than that.
- Joker_vD 3y agoThat's 1.11^120 dollars! Or even 1.0161^784 dollars! On the other hands, it's only 12.2378^5 dollars... which looks arguably a bit less impressive.
- raverbashing 3y ago64^3.011 is very non-impressive
- 0x000xca0xfe 3y agoWell, it's more than the United States GDP ^ 0.4 :)
- swazzy 3y agoDidn't know tarsnap was so successful
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y agoTIL Tarsnap is clearing ≈275K USD net per month.
- iudqnolq 3y agoCloser to per year. That's the lifetime sum of December earnings, not per.
- promiseofbeans 3y agoYeah, so closer to $20k/month
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kelnos 3y agoAs the sibling pointed out, that would be the per year amount, not per month. But also it's safe to assume Tarsnap's December profits have been steadily growing over the past 14 years (or at least for some of those years), so the number is probably a bit higher than $275k/year. $275k/year is more like the average profit for the past 14 years. (Even then, that assumes that the profit numbers are roughly the same every month, which may not be the case.)
- gizmo 3y agoKudos to cperciva for his generosity. But am I reading this right? 274k is 1/12th of tarsnap profit over 14 years, so tarsnap has made 274 * 12 / 14 = 234k profit annually? That's only 234,000,000,000,000,000 picodollars!
- Maro 3y agoOn average. Factoring in growth 2023 annual profits is probably ~$500k. Probably $1m/yr is achievable, great success for such a simple (in a good way) and cool project, and very inspiring for the rest of us!
- dinkblam 3y agopeople always complain that companies don't "do good", but a little-known fact is that this is often down to this being actively discouraged by governments. in most countries, it is basically impossible to write off donations as expenses. this means the company have to pay taxes for money that isn't even there anymore. if people want companies to support good causes, the first item on the agenda should be to lobby for changed tax laws.
- talkin 3y agoIt might also be an issue too, but it’s not actually a hard blocker. Just ask the author for a proper onetime invoice. Maybe not all OSS authors will do it, but I woud be happy to make a quick PDF for a nice buck. :) Now the real reason that doesn’t happen more often: Our financial departments and/or bureaucracy inside the org are actively hindering frivolous acts as being nice to others.
- bgribble 3y agoIt makes sense to me. We tax companies on the money they make in excess of what they needed to spend to operate, and deciding not to make a donation would have no impact on their income. I would not expect it to be considered an operating expense. In personal income taxes, I have always seen the deductibility of charitable donations and (in the US) mortgage interest as being a form of social engineering -- donating to charity and home ownership are individual behaviors that the government wants to promote, so it effectively subsidizes them for most people. Businesses are generally run to maximize profit so you could assume a deduction for charitable giving would be immediately weaponized by creating a charitable arm of the company and donating most profits to yourself, or something equally repulsive.
- sokoloff 3y agoI see the deduction of mortgage interest on owner-occupied property as putting prospective owners on closer to equal footing as prospective landlords when competing for housing. (Business interest is a deductible expense.) I don’t want the net financing costs for a rented property to be significantly lower, which would serve to help a landlord outbid an owner-occupant. (Yes, there is also a social engineering component, but there’s a practical economics-based argument for it as well.)
- jwr 3y agoThis is fantastic and so important! If your company uses open source software, please contribute back, financially. For large projects, there are foundations, for smaller projects there are other ways (like Github Sponsors). There are some ecosystems where this is becoming commonplace (I mostly live in the Clojure world), which is a great thing! This matters, even if the amount of money isn't huge. What is important is for it to be recurring: a subscription. If you use the software and rely on it, keep contributing to ensure continued maintenance and development. Far too many people associate "open source" with "free". I have been trying to do this for the last two years, and while the amounts are not huge, I try to increase them along with my SaaS revenue growth.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gehsty 3y agoClearly this should be expressed as 1.79 x 10^17 Pico dollars.
- pegas1 3y agoThere is no accident in the amount 2^18: https://bje.org.au/knowledge-centre/jewish-symbols/chai-the-number-18/ https://bje.org.au/knowledge-centre/jewish-symbols/chai-the-...
- dang 3y agoPlease don't do this here.
- quags 3y agoThanks for all the contributions @cperciva. FreeBSD update doesn’t get talked about much but going from having to rebuild FreeBSD for updates from source to binary updates has been incredibly useful.
- touisteur 3y agoAnd following the work on booting FreeBSD faster and making it firecracker-friendly has been very inspiring to follow.
- alberth 3y ago> ”Tarsnap has spent 100% of its December operating profits [$274,482 over 14-years] on supporting open source software” Off topic: if you extrapolated that math, it should be hugely encouraging to aspiring indie/solo developers that you can earn a fantastic income as a 1-2 person business.
- bdcravens 3y agoTrue, but I doubt it's linear, and I wonder if there's something unique about December (new customers paying annually to use up their budget, etc)
- hobs 3y agoUsually its fourth quarter where many businesses move into the black for the year based on how they budget for things, hence things like "Black Friday".
- cperciva 3y agoNothing unique about December in terms of revenue. Even if people were prepaying large amounts in December (which isn't happening as far as I can tell) that would go into the "unearned income" reserve; profits are only realized when the service is actually delivered.
- somsak2 3y agois it really a fantastic income? tarsnap is well-known and we're seeing the value after 14 years of work. $250k/y is much less than what you would be making at a FAANG.
- blumomo 3y ago2^18 == 262,144
- bill3478 3y agoIs that the power operator or the xor operator?
- vhodges 3y agopower: https://www.google.com/search?q=2%5E18 https://www.google.com/search?q=2%5E18
- bill3478 3y agoOf the top 10 languages on https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/, only Visual Basic uses ^ as the power operator. Google must really like Visual Basic.
- vhodges 3y agoHuh... I've always thought of it as power. It probably comes from my ancient past ;).. Note bc -l it's power of.
- jedberg 3y ago2^18 Canadian dollars. :P Joking aside, this is awesome. It's great that supporting Open Source is just baked into your business plan from the start!
- cperciva 3y agoNo, that's USD. Most of the amounts were in USD to begin with; the rest (e.g. the $1000 award at my alma mater) I converted at the relevant exchange rate for the month, which is why they're not round numbers.
- bch 3y ago> BSD Now, being produced by actual developers, bridges the two solitudes. This[0], however, is uniquely Canadian… [0] https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/two-solitudes https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/two-solitu...
- cperciva 3y agoHeh, I wondered if anyone would catch that. I do think it describes developers and journalists though.
- jedberg 3y agoYou ruined my joke with your generosity man. But again, good on you for baking it right into your business plan!
- jl6 3y agoWow, more than 100k in Knuth hexadecimal dollars!
- saaspirant 3y ago2,62,144 USD