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Comment by piquadrat | Hacker News Reader

Instagram is a great story for Django, it's the best argument to bring against doubters of Django's scalability. But I wonder how much Instagram contributes to Django itself. I follow Django's development relatively closely, and I'm not aware of any major work contributed by Instagram engineers. They aren't listed on Django's fundraising page, neither.

https://www.djangoproject.com/fundraising/

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The fundraising page is depressing. They're only asking for US$200,000 and they only have 19% at half way through the year. In other news... Instagram hits half a billion monthly active users... but not on Django's fundraising page.

I'm not knowledgeable about open-source issues, pros/cons, etc., but man... only 19% of $200K. Doesn't seem right given Python is one of the major languages and I believe Django is the most popular web framework in Python.

You'd think that companies who profit from open source projects would support them financially. Considering how big django is there should be many other companies who profit from the projekt.

200k/year should be collected in no time...

I've found that the engineers who build products on open source software very rarely have the authority to donate company money, and the businesspeople that do have the authority rarely understand the benefits of it.

I think a guide on how to get your company involved in donating to OSS projects would be beneficial. Has anyone come across any good advice, or have any experience in influencing your employer to donate?

No, but I'd love to contribute to something like this.

I tried to organize some OSS donations at the last big company I worked for. Everybody approved of the idea in theory but the red tape involved in making it happened killed it.

I think the problem in many cases is that the finance and legal people at companies big enough to make a sizable donation are so busy that stuff like this never makes it to the front of their priority queue.

I think an easier strategy might be to work into your contract that if you happen to fix FOSS software on company time (to fix things your client notices), your patches go back upstream.

This, at least, is the implicit policy at the company I work for. It's used in the pitch ("we use and contribute to open source software, which we believe leads to a better internet" and so on) to the clients who appreciate such things.

That said, there might be too much legal tape to get that into a contract.

Funding an open source project you use means funding the competitors.

A is a company, B is an individual with lots of spare time.

B feels that he can help the company by writing a tool for them. He also envisions that the tool could be used by other companies and so wants to open source it so he can provide services around the tool.

B says to A : see, I'm going to develop the tool for you for free, in exchange you test it.

Note the tool is the n-th implementation of common business practices, such as an ERP. The tool is not about something specific to A.

B thinks : I'm independent, I'm not hired by A, I write the code as free software as it pleases me.

A then says : wtf? you're going to publish that code on the web ? Therefore my competitor might get it so, no way. I'd be liable for giving away some value of the company to the competitor

So, instead of saying something like "hey, I use that program so let's fund it a little", A actually says "by helping B to develop the program, I may actually help my competitors, I'm in legal trouble".

B is somewhat screwed :-(

(I let you figure out if this actually happened to me :-))

I don't think that this applies to this very case though. Django was not made for Instagram, it was made available to the general public for free, as an open source framework. Instagram engineers only decided to use what was on the table.

I also believe that Instagram needs Django to be OSS, and the same goes for any other framework/language/library that other companies use, as OSS in itself is an extremely powerful label for a project. It brings together developers to form a community with lots of great minds and inputs. It helps feasible projects become production-ready and stable much faster than if it was closed source as its use-cases are far more wider than what a single company would provide.

Taking this from a competetive standpoint isn't very realistic in my opinion. I dare say that if either Django or Python weren't open source software, Instagram wouldn't be built on it in the first place.

I think it's absurd how Instagram can grow financially fat from the hard work of the Django Software Foundation without even contributing a dime to their fundraising or provide engineers exclusively to the DSF. IMHO Instagram should bring that fundraising up to at least 100%, considering Instagram revenue is estimated to hit $5.8 billion USD by 2020, $160,000 USD per year is a small price for the amount of value Django brings them.

It's a topic of morale though, Instagram does not owe the DSF anything, but I guess this shows where Instagrams appreciation lies.

You're right

>>> It's a topic of morale though, Instagram does not owe the DSF anything, but I guess this shows where Instagrams appreciation lies.

That's the point I was actually making. My experience that when you have people brainwashed with "competitive advantage", "profit maximization", and such, well, morale just doesn't exist anymore. In my case, I was surprised to see how quickly someone I trusted can actually switch to this brainwashed brain...

That's the state of the entire Python community. To get money, you need to get hype, and Python is anti-hype. We are people prioritizing on robustness, clarity, documentation, etc. Proven useful things. But because it disregard what we consider superficial and frivolous, we cut ourself from the same enthousiam and energy you can see in other community like JS or Ruby. And from money.

Look at the PSF budget, it's so small it makes you cry.

My thoughts on this:

* Let's stop talking about 'Donations' and start talking about 'Investment' - the conversation needs to be about the pay-off that businesses will get, not some altruistic "give-back"

* Make the case that collaborative investment has a great cost-reward, as the cost is spread over a bunch of companies.

* Make it clear that ecosystems that are well invested will be more competitive that those that are not. If your company has $$$ worth of engineers experienced in Django, you'd be daft not to ensure that Django remains competitive vs other frameworks.

It's an atypical pitch to make, and as with all investments it's difficult for folks to judge, because the pay-off is at a distance. I still believe it's still possible for us to change how collaboratively funded OSS is seen, once companies start to recognize well-invested ecosystems as a competitive advantage.

And yeah, this is pretty much the pitch I'm making for funding Django REST framework, where I'm currently 1/3 of the way towards being able to focus on it 100% of the time, with a full-time salary... https://fund.django-rest-framework.org/topics/funding/

As far as I know, Disqus (https://disqus.com/) and Eventbrite (https://www.eventbrite.com/) are also major users of Django.

Some of the most prolific Django developers work at Eventbrite. I can't say how much, if any, of their contributions to the Django ecosystem are on Eventbrite's dime, though.

Well... Andrew Godwin ( https://twitter.com/andrewgodwin ) works at Eventbrite. I think he doesn't need any introduction :)

For lazy people: he wrote South, Django migrations and he's currently working on Channels.

From the perspective of scraping their website, it was React & GraphQL that I was interfacing with. So what does Instagram use Django for? Perhaps that's why their contributions to the project are low.

From Instagram's medium post

> Instagram currently features the world’s largest deployment of the Django web framework

I think it is fair to assume that they use Django pretty heavily from that.

No need to assume when there's evidence to the contrary. Do as they say, not as they do. :)

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