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

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.

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.

&gt; 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.<p>I think this is the right insight, but clicking around the links on their website I don&#x27;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.

I wish more open source projects had an &quot;enterprise&quot; plan with a few inconsequential features and maybe priority support - just enough to justify a line item on a tech org&#x27;s budget.

PSA: Gratispay is dead. RIP.

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.<p>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.

$2k&#x2F;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.<p>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&#x2F;or a Mac, etc.) cost them $100k a year, they&#x27;d both drop all of it and move to cheaper commercial solutions.<p>Pick a field. Pick commercial tools that a technical person in the field uses. Check prices spread over the lifetime of the tool.<p>Not even close.<p>Art people - $2k&#x2F;yr buys a lot of solid software that open source doesn&#x27;t come close to.<p>Software - $2k a year buys a significant amount of commercial tooling.<p>CAD - Open source doesn&#x27;t even have an answer here.<p>Finance - Open source sucks here too.<p>Scientific computing - Matlab&#x2F;Mathematica&#x2F;etc - open source not close, $2k a year buys all your tooling over the lifetime of the tools.<p>And so on....<p>The reason I use some open source solutions is because they&#x27;re adequate for the needs, and the cost reflects it. Had I needed to pay $2k a year for them, I&#x27;d have dropped them and bought decent commercial alternatives.

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

This is very true and based on well-researched, well-founded premises.<p>At Arist (YC S20) we donate $1k&#x2F;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!

The whole &quot;corporations owe open-source developers remuneration&quot; movement feels like the setup for a big grift. Maybe we&#x27;ll get some laws passed that enforce this. Maybe we&#x27;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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;84061" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;84061</a>).

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

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: &quot;all intellectual property and code, developed during or outside working hours, regardless of it&#x27;s nature or purpose belongs to {COMPANY_NAME}&quot;. Somehow if my employer pays me extra for working on personal(albeit open source) projects will make me incredibly suspicious.

Another attempt at this business model post-Gratipay is Tidelift <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tidelift.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tidelift.com&#x2F;</a>

Github has a sponsorship program for open source developers.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sponsors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sponsors</a>

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.<p>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.

I guess that would be $2,232.11&#x2F;yr&#x2F;eng in today&#x27;s dollars. :D

Cool, that’s easy. So each company should donate 200 hours of work to open source projects.<p>Encouraging more volunteer time is better than trying to collect and allocate cash. And better improved OSS. I think.

I can&#x27;t tell what &quot;Person&quot; 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?

* Well, the links on the front page point somewhere random -- to a clipart site.<p>* There&#x27;s nothing about who is doing this or why.<p>* There&#x27;s no way to actually pay that I could find.<p>* There&#x27;s no information about overhead, or if the GratiPay is pocketing the money.<p>It&#x27;s just a half-baked half-finished web page. I think a good not-for-profit here might be helpful? But I&#x27;m not sure how to structure it so that it is. I don&#x27;t see why a business would actually want to pay. Most managers believe they have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. This doesn&#x27;t help.<p>And the money raised? I&#x27;m not sure a serious analysis has been done by anyone. As an open source author, I&#x27;m not inclined to even deposit a $0.32 royalty check.

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

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.