The problem is that enterprises have one mechanism to purchase software, and a totally separate mechanism for charitable donations. The two budgets are run by separate groups, and never interact.<p>The solution? Offer your code under an open source license, but also have a purchase option to buy a commercial license. In many cases, the commercial version is a compiled and validated official executable, available with a support contract. But there is no reason that the came code can't be made available under both licenses, or that the commercial license can't actually be the same GPL (or whatever) license the open source one is offered under.<p>This way, the technical team that chooses the software has an invoice that they can send to purchasing, to get corporate support dollars to the open source project.
This seems like a bad PR move. Having been in consulting everything is about perception of value. Why not just plan to spend some of your money (say 5%) on supporting open source projects and just raise your rates by 5%?<p>Ticketmaster is the perfect example of this. You buy a concert ticket for $35, but after all of their exorbitant bullshit fees, it's more like $50-55. But if they just told you "$50 is what you pay" then you'd probably not care at all.<p>So go ahead and charge whatever you want for a fee. Just don't penalize your customers for the things you want to personally support.
The most amusing thing about companies' technology budgets is their fear of price tags.<p>Pay for Enterprise support for that open source product? Way too expensive, no way.<p>Pay for 5 engineers in completely separate teams to badly implement, partially support, and later replace part of the Enterprise features as proprietary extensions over 2-3 years, while company's actual product languishes without the functionality it could have used? Take my money.<p>Meanwhile, keep paying for SaaS and proprietary software, because there's no alternative, supposedly.
specifically: "I will ask my clients for an hourly rate that is 1 Euro higher than I originally negotiated or I would usually charge. I will take that money (up to ~160 Euros per month) and support those projects on Open Collective that I'm basing my work upon in my client's project."
I've never been to church, except for the occasional funeral. So i'm not really familiar with how collection plates or tithes work. But maybe the church of open source could find a priest to get some advice. Or at the very least, lecture people about how much better a person you can be for supporting open source.
<a href="https://twitter.com/adamrackis/status/931195056479965185" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/adamrackis/status/931195056479965185</a><p>If you think your software is valuable enough to cost money (instead of offering it for free) then do so.
Its not my area of expertise but....<p>There are so many corrupt non-profits to which one can make tax deductible donations. Would it be possible to reform/tweak/hack the [existing] donations to help their bottom line?<p>I bet someone out there is already doing this.
I wonder if some sort of structure can be used where you split the invoice in two separate invoices. One for the work and a smaller one for the open source donation that can be deducted from taxes as an actual donation. It might not be legal because of tax evasion.
Imagine from the beginning of github, you do that, then OSS will die from day 1.<p>I'm sure it's not the right way to make OSS sustainable.<p>The only way (which i believe) to make OSS sustainable, is that, you open source the core or toolings, let others fork it, and you make contract to support enterprise clients, to support the open core.