[HN Gopher] Companies should probably pay $2k per person for ope...
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Companies should probably pay $2k per person for open source (2017)
Author : mattbk1
Score : 104 points
Date : 2021-09-29 13:57 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gratipay.news)
(TXT) w3m dump (gratipay.news)
| dystopiabreaker wrote:
| 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.
| interactivecode wrote:
| I have no clue what half of these words mean. But why would any
| type of block chain coin be better than regular subscriptions
| or licensing?
|
| Note: Im purposely ignoring the pyramid scheme like effects
| from rising currency values.
| gibba999 wrote:
| * Well, the links on the front page point somewhere random -- to
| a clipart site.
|
| * There's nothing about who is doing this or why.
|
| * There's no way to actually pay that I could find.
|
| * There's no information about overhead, or if the GratiPay is
| pocketing the money.
|
| It's just a half-baked half-finished web page. I think a good
| not-for-profit here might be helpful? But I'm not sure how to
| structure it so that it is. I don't see why a business would
| actually want to pay. Most managers believe they have a fiduciary
| duty to maximize shareholder value. This doesn't help.
|
| And the money raised? I'm not sure a serious analysis has been
| done by anyone. As an open source author, I'm not inclined to
| even deposit a $0.32 royalty check.
| dhosek wrote:
| If you look closely you'll see that the banner on the linked
| site says:
|
| "Gratipay: A pioneer in open source stability nee gittip
| 2012-2017 RIP"
|
| Apparently, after five years of trying to make a business of
| it, he gave up.
|
| The article, by the way is from 2017. Perhaps a mod should add
| that to the link title.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| This is very true and based on well-researched, well-founded
| premises.
|
| At Arist (YC S20) we donate $1k/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!
| whit537 wrote:
| I guess that would be $2,232.11/yr/eng in today's dollars. :D
| bob229 wrote:
| Lol good luck with that companies are greed freeloaders
| whichdan wrote:
| I wish more open source projects had an "enterprise" plan with a
| few inconsequential features and maybe priority support - just
| enough to justify a line item on a tech org's budget.
| GordonS wrote:
| Ah, I wish it were so simple!
|
| One of the reasons why devs at enterprise scale companies like
| OSS so much (except GPL, obviously) is because trying to
| purchase anything is a _nightmare_.
|
| If you've worked at such an org, you know exactly what I mean,
| otherwise you might even find it difficult to believe.
| Purchasing anything can take several _months_ , with _hundreds_
| of manhours wasted on call, meetings, legal review, approvals
| from random people etc. And if you 're the one that initiated
| it, you'll be the poor sod that has to keep pushing that
| boulder up the hill all the time, otherwise it just stalls
| forever. It's honestly should destroying.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I have general complaints about modern "business schools"
| still not properly teaching (assuming they exist to ACTUALLY
| train business people and aren't just fancy badges)
| information technology in a world where your business is your
| software.
|
| Businesses teach accounting and finance, very numbers-
| oriented subjects, as a minimum, so this is not entirely
| outside of the wheelhouse of business schools.
|
| And yet this near-universal problem of software procurement
| continues across enterprises, a problem traced basically to
| equally universal teachings on cost control policies and
| other nuts and bolts that come out of explicit teachings of
| b-schools and the general literature of running businesses.
|
| Since I posted a wandering treatise on american
| antiintellectualism and the fundamental lack of cool of the
| "nerd", and how b-schools want to appear as cool, cutting
| edge producers of captains of industry (that adopt learning
| nerdy accounting as a necessary hurdle to get as much money
| as possible), I doubt they will properly pivot anytime soon.
| foo92691 wrote:
| How do you provide these pay-only features on an open source
| project?
|
| And who is doing the support?
|
| It sounds like you are envisioning something like Red Hat.
| whichdan wrote:
| I was thinking more like Sidekiq -
| https://sidekiq.org/products/enterprise.html
| infogulch wrote:
| The problem with this is that a single enterprise customer may
| not pay enough to support: 1. an individual dedicated to
| provide that priority support, and 2. the overhead of managing
| two independent releases with different feature sets.
| Fiahil wrote:
| Just drop the features, priority support with SLA are really
| what they are looking for on critical pieces.
|
| Note that you can have a one week (or more) lead time for
| support requests: the timing doesn't matter, you only need a
| maximum window so they can share visibility and socialize
| issues like this: "ticket opened with vendor, next update in
| one week".
| axegon_ wrote:
| 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: "all intellectual property and code, developed during
| or outside working hours, regardless of it's nature or purpose
| belongs to {COMPANY_NAME}". Somehow if my employer pays me extra
| for working on personal(albeit open source) projects will make me
| incredibly suspicious.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| That's just flat out unenforceable in California.
| maccard wrote:
| And yet it's still in a contract. Just because it's
| unenforcable doesn't mean you're not going to have a shit
| time dragging your employer to court over it.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Just strike it out and get it removed.
| maccard wrote:
| And what happens if your employer says "no sorry that's
| our standard contract"?
| axegon_ wrote:
| That's what happened in my case. I signed it regardless
| because the law in my country makes this worth as much as
| the paper it's written on but you know... Your options
| are either to roll with it or move on to the next job.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| That's a red flag.
|
| Hope the option package is worth it.
| vlunkr wrote:
| That's a good point, and also, what a horrendous thing to have
| in your contract. I wonder if it's even legal for them to claim
| ownership of unrelated code done outside work hours.
| throwdecro wrote:
| I actually check the laws in a US State before moving there
| just to make sure it this type of intellectual property grab
| is not allowed. By rights any jurisdiction that allows this
| should have zero people producing intellectual property, but
| there's so much friction in moving elsewhere for most people
| that companies can push it and get away with it.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It's not just code either, it's all intellectual property.
| Can't write a book without the company owning it.
| xupybd wrote:
| Really the best way to go about this is a mixed license. If you
| want commercial users to pay then require them to pay.
| [deleted]
| kderbyma wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| kiba wrote:
| PSA: Gratispay is dead. RIP.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| What happened?
| mtmail wrote:
| https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981 "Gratipay is
| shutting down at the end of the year" "However, funding open
| source is almost entirely about marketing, and we spent most
| of the past year writing code instead."
|
| https://liberapay.com/ a different team/company took over the
| assets.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| uncomputation wrote:
| 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.
| whit537 wrote:
| > 2k is a rounding error to the cost of most enterprise
| software
|
| 2k _per engineer_ ... that 's more than a rounding error. It'd
| be interesting to compare to per-seat licensing for commercial
| software. Anyone have examples?
| dnautics wrote:
| It's not far off for a developer in the US. You figure they
| make somewhere from 80-150k in the median, X2 all-in cost as
| a rule of thumb for employment in the US, so 2k/dev is ~1% or
| "rounding error"
| whit537 wrote:
| Sure, but I'm saying compare it to something like Oracle
| (what other commercial software is still out there? I don't
| know). What does a company pay annually for Oracle
| (expressed per engineer for comparison)?
| whit537 wrote:
| Okay this is really complicated. D:
|
| https://wintelguy.com/oracle-db-licensing-calc.pl
|
| https://www.orskl.com/what-is-the-cost-of-oracle-
| database-li...
| whit537 wrote:
| Soooooo I realized that commercial software is no longer
| onpremise (Oracle) but SaaS. :D
|
| Anecdotally, $2,000 per user per year would be a really
| expensive SaaS app (right?). Not exactly apples to apples
| but so far I think $2,000/user/yr is a good ballpark for
| open source value. Note also that the blog post indicates
| a 50% markdown in labor value because companies pay a tax
| to direct employee time, so people should expect to get
| paid less when working self-determinedly on open source.
| coolspot wrote:
| Can you please elaborate what are "X2 all-in cost" for a
| $150k software engineer?
|
| I can imagine it would include things like an office space,
| snacks, yoga classes, etc. I don't think it is anywhere
| close to additional $150k, maybe $10-20k.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Your software engineer, have a manager, was hired by the
| Human Resource department based on a contract written by
| the legal team. Your company also most likely has sales
| persons, marketing, project management and a product
| development team. Then you have office cost, health
| insurance plans, etc.
| tester756 wrote:
| it's amortized between all devs.
| mmiyer wrote:
| Health insurance and other benefits add up.
| [deleted]
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Worst case scenario, I guarantee you if you open an issue on a
| repo (especially a small / one-person repo) saying you want to
| donate $1k/yr, or some non-trivial amount, you'll get a
| meaningful response.
|
| True though that for larger projects there can be a lack of
| ownership problem. The conversation could become "hey we'd like
| to lend you our legal resources to help you set up a foundation
| for this project, and then we'd like to donate $X/month to the
| foundation going forward." When it comes down to it, if a
| project is able to cut releases, there is some sort of
| structure in there that is working, just have to figure it out.
| uncomputation wrote:
| Right, this is the most common model I've seen: forming a
| foundation and companies contribute via that foundation,
| either workers/staff/people or money.
| aordano wrote:
| I think a possible solution may be paying not in terms of
| money.
|
| For a free and open source project, the ultimate goal IMO is
| growth and usability, to fulfill the reason why the software
| itself exists, and that can be done by donating that money in
| the shape of a hiring dedicated to work on the software. Some
| companies already do this, and i don't see why the practice
| couldn't be more established as a way to ensure a quid pro quo
| with the community.
| GordonS wrote:
| I have a few small-time OSS projects, the most popular only
| has ~50 stars on GitHub.
|
| A couple of years back, someone asked if they could donate
| $250 to me - that was the first (and until now, only) time
| anyone did such a thing. I was really happy about it - not so
| much about the money, but more the fact they liked the
| project so much they were _willing_ to hand over money.
|
| Anyway, I asked if they could donate it to a charity instead,
| and I suggested a few that have personal meaning. They were
| quite happy with that, and actually donated $500 instead :)
| pessimizer wrote:
| That would only work for the largest companies hiring for the
| largest FOSS projects, without some sort of independent
| administration.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Hiring a full time dev just for FOSS submissions probably
| isn't justifiable to most employers, but diverting just a
| little employee time seems reasonable, especially if it's
| directed at bugs/feature improvements impacting the devs'
| use of the thing.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Instead of a little time from a lot of employees (which
| might be as much a burden for the project as a blessing),
| it might be better for many companies to pay into a pot
| that provides someone's salary, while one of the
| companies donates the desk. This is what I meant by
| administration.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| An issue with that is that even if you use a FOSS
| solution, your devs might not have the domain experience
| to contribute. Of if they could, it may be pretty
| inefficient to or take a while to get up to speed to get
| any meaningful contributions in.
| [deleted]
| malwarebytess wrote:
| There's several 100+ million dollar businesses where I live
| that make their money on phone support/installation/deployment
| of open source software they maintain. Nobody pays for the
| software, but they'll pay out the nose on a yearly basis for
| support.
| curryst wrote:
| That creates a perverse incentive where you want your open
| source stuff to be hard to use so people have to pay you.
|
| Plus there's no guarantee that the developers will be the
| ones making money. There's a lot of ire at Amazon because of
| that.
| dudus wrote:
| Or even worse, it creates an incentive for the big cloud
| conglomerates to offer that software as a managed service
| and pocket the revenue.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| perhaps this is something DAOs can fix.
| uncomputation wrote:
| Could you elaborate? My understanding of what you're saying
| is the organization will be specified in code, whether that
| be compensation via commits or transactions or what have you,
| and then companies pay into this DAO contract?
| inter_netuser wrote:
| essentially it could license the open source for commercial
| use transparently and automatically, when you pull the
| library/package.
|
| zero negotiations, zero lawyers, just a commandline one-
| liner or something.
|
| micropayments for package management.
| ginko wrote:
| Sure, but WHO are you supposed to pay those $2k to?
| dr-detroit wrote:
| Half wits sudo-apt-getting donated code only to turn around and
| insist that they don't need to implement any code
| appropriately. You owe them new features. And more And more.
| Until they break your mind body and/or soul.
| phkahler wrote:
| I'm sure there will be several people and organizations willing
| to step in and be a clearinghouse / middleman to "make it
| easy".
| whit537 wrote:
| I like deps.
|
| https://raw.githack.com/getsentry/deps/fy2022/fundable.html
| reginold wrote:
| I can make something up, but would love to see a guide to how
| to donate broadly to open source. Apache, GNU, Ubuntu,
| libinput?
|
| I've been doing this myself with a combo of one-off donations
| (Ubuntu, Pop OS, libinput) plus experimenting with Github
| Sponsors on one project.
|
| Here's an example from TripleByte of their employee-directed
| donations: https://triplebyte.com/open-source-donations
| smoldesu wrote:
| https://my.fsf.org/donate
| prepend wrote:
| Cool, that's easy. So each company should donate 200 hours of
| work to open source projects.
|
| Encouraging more volunteer time is better than trying to collect
| and allocate cash. And better improved OSS. I think.
| zamadatix wrote:
| > Cool, that's easy. So each company should donate 200 hours of
| work to open source projects.
|
| The article proposes that per person not per company.
|
| > Encouraging more volunteer time is better than trying to
| collect and allocate cash. And better improved OSS. I think.
|
| Depends on the size of the company and the number of projects
| you want to support. A bunch of low level commits across a
| bunch of projects by 100 companies would leave things off a lot
| worse (due to the maintenance burden vs improvement amount
| provided) than a bunch of donations from 100 companies to get a
| dedicated resource dedicated to each project year round.
| david_allison wrote:
| This adds to maintainer burnout.
|
| During heavy periods this year I had ~20-30 code reviews per
| day.
|
| There's a balance between money and contributions. You can't
| just throw bodies at a problem and say it's better than any
| alternatives.
| decebalus1 wrote:
| I disagree with that. Maintaining OSS projects is not easy. And
| it does not get easier when you have a plethora of people
| trying to contribute for the sake of contributing. Money is
| better IMO. It would serve as an actual payout for people who
| are actually working on the OSS project.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Some businesses are incredibly dependent on open source
| components that can stop being maintained at any time.
|
| Having in-house contributors spend company time on these
| dependencies alleviates the issue.
| tyingq wrote:
| I can't tell what "Person" 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?
| whit537 wrote:
| IC engineer. That's the brightest line for comparison across
| companies (dim though it may be), as well as the primary role
| whose productivity is materially multiplied due to open source
| (i.e., imagine if the engineer had to build everything they get
| from open source).
| whit537 wrote:
| So yeah for a non-tech company it'd be something like "every
| developer in the IT org."
| dirtyoldmick wrote:
| Companies like money too much and won't pay for something they
| already get for free. Ye of too much faith.
| bronlund wrote:
| Yeah, reminds me of this letter:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobb...
|
| We all know how that went :D
| saulhoward wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I've always thought that governments should do this to fund the
| arts in general, and political campaigns. Some of your taxes
| directed to the recipients of your choice. In the case of the
| arts, it would of course be a floor, but in the case of
| political contributions, it could be a ceiling.
| david_allison wrote:
| Google does this (each employee can nominate 3 people for $250
| each per round of funding. Recipients are limited to $500/year
| due to tax) [0]
|
| [0] https://opensource.google/docs/growing/peer-bonus/
| tpoacher wrote:
| I initially read that as "Beer Bonus Program"
| bcherry wrote:
| I think this is a good proposal and have also been interested
| in an expanded version of this where the company donates $X to
| _any_ profit cause, but directed by the employees. This way you
| can pay Vim one month and the NAACP or the ACLU the next month.
|
| An easier way to scale this might be to just have a set amount
| (say $10k/month for a large company) and a recurring ranked-
| choice poll open to all employees. The funds would be allocated
| according to the poll, with the winner getting say $5k and the
| two runner ups getting $3k and $2k or something like that.
|
| This way employees don't have to do the work of submitting
| donations and filing expenses, as there's just one person at
| the company who administrates it a few days a month.
| 5faulker wrote:
| Ultimately it boils down to the difference between traditional
| business model and the non-profit model.
| _wldu wrote:
| Non-profits take in money too (just like for profit
| companies). The only big difference is they do not profit
| (money over and above expenses). Employees at non-profits are
| still paid, receive benefits, etc.
| Gormisdomai wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I think this is the right insight, but clicking around the links
| on their website I don'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.
| whit537 wrote:
| > I don't think they were executing on that insight
| particularly well.
|
| Probably why they don't exist anymore.
| mattbk1 wrote:
| There was a lot of pivoting going on near the end,
| unfortunately. The "companies pay" version of the site wasn't
| around for very long.
| whit537 wrote:
| Thrashing, one might even call it. :)
| mattbk1 wrote:
| Glad to see you're still around!
| whit537 wrote:
| <3
|
| Funny timing, btw. :)
|
| https://twitter.com/chadwhitacre_/status/1431368348886052
| 865
| dpitkin wrote:
| Another attempt at this business model post-Gratipay is Tidelift
| https://tidelift.com/
| ortusdux wrote:
| Github has a sponsorship program for open source developers.
|
| https://github.com/sponsors
| mattbk1 wrote:
| It also includes the ability to sponsor through Liberapay, the
| remaining Gratipay fork.
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