I am nowhere near their numbers, but I run a boostrapped business that would never be possible if it wasn't for Clojure (and specifically ClojureScript). A while ago I decided that I'd be permanently setting aside a percentage of revenue that will go towards sponsoring open-source developers that write and maintain libraries that my project uses. The contributions are very small, but growing steadily.<p>I think what matters mostly is not the contribution size, but the mindset. If every company using open source contributed at least a little, we would have a healthy ecosystem.
I run a small ~10 person startup and we spend $2-3k/mo sponsoring various open source projects we use.<p>I highly encourage other founders to do the same. It doesn't require your company to be massively profitable with hundreds of employees to make a $20-30k annual commitment to supporting open source.
I think it is crazy that a brazillian bank owns Cognitect, the creator of Clojure, and Plataformatec, the creator of Elixir. I had never heard of them or new about them being acquired by the same company until a few weeks ago. It must be a really interesting bank to work at :)!
This is potentially the savviest of business models. For companies which can't employ full time staff to work on open source they use, they still need the ecosystem to provide updates, features, fixes, and tools for integration. There are an infinite number of startups to be born based on leveraging open source software, and getting engaged to ensure software is reliable, secure, and robust is key to a successful launch.
Imagine you have a bunch of fishermen surrounding a lake. After a while, they notice that each year they catch fewer and fewer fish. One realizes that what they're doing is unsustainable and they need to change their practices. He buys a billboard that says, "We must stop fishing at the lake." The others correctly point out that <i>he</i> still fishes there. "Fine", he says. "I'll stop." So he stops, and his income stops. Eventually he can't afford to keep that billboard up. Meanwhile, the others are doing better than ever now that the man isn't taking any fish out. They use the extra income to put up billboards saying, "Fishing here is fine."<p>In general, I'm a big fan of leading by example. But in situations like open source where there's a tragedy of the commons effect, leading by example can simply mean deliberately putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage. Companies that pay open source developers are doing the right thing morally, but end up with less money available to compete against other companies that don't.<p>I don't know what the right solution is. Maybe it requires organized action and legislation. Maybe it requires the open source developers themselves to restrict who they let use their code. (Sort of like the fish choosing which fishermen get to catch them.) I don't know. I applaud what Cognitect is doing, but I don't know if it will have any ability to influence other companies that extract value from open source without giving anything back. It may just make them relatively more powerful.
The Clojure community seems to be getting open source support right.<p>puredanger - how does this overlap or affect the Clojurists Together support effort?
While many companies support LARGE open source projects by supplying dev time, I'm glad to see this sort of corporate monetary support that helps developers pay for dinner.<p>This appears to be a great side effect of Cognitect joining Nubank.
I am so thrilled to see this. This is a vastly better thing to be trying to do than promoting UBI.<p>Please take a minute to peruse their services page and see if they might be doing something you might want to hire at some point.<p>Their services page: <a href="https://cognitect.com/services.html" rel="nofollow">https://cognitect.com/services.html</a>
This is great. They should also consider spending money on less mainstream or well-adopted Clojure projects.<p>After all, if an open source project hits off with users without the money, it clearly didn't need the money. While who knows what really great things die because the authors needed to focus on stuff that pays them directly instead.
Does any online resources exist showing life-time contributions to open-source projects from various organisations?<p>The reason I'm asking is that I've noticed companies often use their contributions for own marketing. And this is obviously great.<p>However, how can one validate if a company says "we're contributing $X/month", that it's really contributing and that it's ongoing?
Are there any pledges one could try and get companies to sign up to? Like there is a the 'fair tax mark' in the UK. Is there a similar? e.g. % of profit or revenue donated to open source mark
Sponsoring of open source projects is a problem that bitcoin aims to solve. That and many others. The electronic cash bitcoin not the currency bitcoin. The owners of the project will be able to construct an electronic company, and any value that a user gives, will be shared to the shareholders, in line of the shares any shareholder has to the project, i.e. how much he has contributed. A user wants a new feature or a fix of a bug? He gives coins to the open source company, and they will implement it. This will give incentive for programmers to increase the quality of the code, better documentation etc.