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Comment by Kirth | Hacker News Reader

> Do companies use GitHub sponsorships to judge the health of dependencies? Will they create budgets to support their dependencies systematically?

In my past I've worked with multiple places that absolutely loved open-source. Because to them it was "free". Something they could use in their products and then charge customers for. Often these opportunistic parasites would never contribute anything back; going out of their way to work around missing features or bugs rather than trying to fix or contribute towards the codebase.

I doubt that these companies now, despite depending on such OS, would pay paying money/contribute; no matter how administratively trivial it became.

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I've also worked at multiple companies where they were afraid of open source because the project might be abandoned.

They would happily pay thousands for a closed source dependency because they could guarantee it would be supported.

This could offer a nice medium where a company can be pretty sure that it will stick around (based on funding) and contribute to make sure that it does.

I like open source software projects and use them extensively on behalf of my employer. I care that they are healthy.

That said, there is a huge difference between getting authorization to spend company money on a subscription or support contract (easy), vs. getting authorization to donate company money to a person, informal group or nonprofit (extremely difficult).

A license or support contract is easy for the lawyers to understand, easy for procurement to understand, easy for finance to understand. That's how work gets done at a corporation, and they do those types of deals all day. Depending on the amount, I can sometimes turn around approval in hours.

A donation is not "how work gets done". It has no strings attached, which looks scary to lawyers and finance and PR folks. In my company at least, donations have a separate approval path that loops in the PR and corporate citizenship folks... and they want to see that money go to something fuzzy and feel good, like a charity. "Donations" is a line in the budget; it's not a big one and it's not mine.

So, I still think that the way forward for open source projects who want financial support from companies is to organize somehow (incorporate, nonprofit, etc) and sell support subscriptions. This aligns very well with how the corporation manages other dependencies, like office space, phone service, etc.

> Often these opportunistic parasites would never contribute anything back

So a user of open source to make money is a parasite? Are people that use LibreOffice to type legal documents they charge money for considered parasites if they don’t contribute to source code or financially to LibreOffice? If that’s the case, there is an incentive to use closed source software and just pay for it so as to avoid having to be called parasites and incur the pontifications. How many people here use Postgres but never contribute to it? I might guess it’s 99.99%. If I am running a business and there is an expectation that I pay for open source either in time or money, then that makes it no different from a cost perspective than paying for closed source — which lowers the incentive to use open source in the first place. “It’s free software, but if you use it for free, you’ll be called a parasite.” Sure. That’s a great way to promote open source. If open source people want to get paid for open source, then charge money for it, don’t simply use a passive-aggressive guilt trip, just be upfront.

Yeah I disagree that the users have to contribute something back. Half the value of a project comes from the users. The other half comes from the developers. If no one uses your software then it's worthless and it wouldn't matter if you spent all day playing video games instead. If someone else does end up using your software and builds a business around it and you don't like it then you should either start a business yourself or alternatively think of your work as returning the favor to all the other open source developers who have worked for free and will benefit from your project directly or indirectly by making proprietary software cheaper.

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