It's a wonderful gesture, I don't want to take away from that. Just wondering how straight up donating compares to contributing.
I see what you mean. However, as a two person company we think the impact from supporting those projects is a better use of funds. It's all a bit of an experiment, but we wanted to put a stake in the ground somewhere because of how important open source has been to our existence as a company.
Joe (Eventbot co-founder)
One of the hardest things we've found is helping small projects (1 or 2 people) that don't have/need the structure of Open Collective but still could use the funds. PayPal is surprising bad since you can't even accept a recurring payment without going through hoops to set up a page/button.
Also, allocating 3% of my developers time is not super useful. That's less than 1 day a month per developer. Far better to allocate 1 developer for X time. By giving cash, you facilitate that for someone else. You could of course choose one person in your company to be that person and pay them directly, but thats hard for political reasons.
This was a great read: https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/library/reports-and-stu...
I have experience with many open source projects, and the large ones are generally closed to small new contributions (the ones that can be studied and written in a few hours). Most of the time, they will rot, even if they're useful (as in "solves an open issue" useful) and competently written.
Some time ago, there was discussion (commotion) about the years-old Python bug fix that was never mainstreamed. In the real open source world, that's routine. Even Torvalds once acknowledged this phenomenon; I stress that I'm talking about competently written code.
Once, the maintainers of a certain project, which is structured around donations, essentially ignored my company's development contribution offer, even if it was significantly more valuable than the donation(s) they typically get.
To summarize, for small projects, or those who desire traction, contributing by all means, but for large ones... money, or just shift the attention to smaller ones :-)
Maybe, maybe not. Projects can be rate-bound on other issues than rando's work-time e.g. maintainer's financial incentives or troubles, infrastructure, … in which case more contributors isn't necessarily helpful. Keep in mind 3% dev time is about a week / week-and-a-half, how relevant it is depends heavily on the specific project and developer.
And the 3% developer time is not necessarily equivalent to 3% revenue (e.g. because they're contributing heavily to revenue growth). Plus tax incentives could be a factor, for the company there might be more for the buck giving 3% revenue than keeping revenue and giving employee time.