I'd like to ask a question in earnest: Does $500 reflect the value and developer time savings you've received from the project over the years?
I'd like to ask a question in earnest: Does $500 reflect the value and developer time savings you've received from the project over the years?
Sooooo ...
> Does [$155,999.89] reflect the value and developer time savings you've received from [all community-run open source projects] over the year[]?
Yes. We believe that contributing $2,000 annually per engineer is a meaningful amount that fairly compensates the value we receive from open source volunteers.
May I flip the question? Does $500 reflect the value and developer time savings you've given to Sentry over the past year?
You certainly may, but without knowing how much Sentry uses Rollup it’s hard to say.
> May I flip the question? Does $500 reflect the value and developer time savings you've given to Sentry over the past year?
It must be frustrating no one would have said anything if Sentry gave $0 instead of $500. Your response seems disingenuous though. They didn't ask about just this year or any other project. The brackets show you knew that.
What's a good (practical, repeatable, reasonable) way to determine fairness?
If, by magic, these OSS components you use disappeared: How much would it cost to build them?
I'm not taking a stance here, I'm just interested.
Hmm... I'm not sure that's a reasonable metric. If Microsoft disappeared it would no doubt cost millions to rebuild SQL Server. That doesn't meant that it would be reasonable for them to charge a 1 million dollar license fee to use it. The cost is amortized across their entire customer base. Similarly I don't think it's reasonable to expect Sentry to pay the NGINX developers 1 million just because it'd cost them that to redevelop in house. One would instead hope ALL dontations summed to something reasonable.
A simpler way to say this: What's the average compensation for a developer, and how many hours do you think it would take for one of your developers to build some small foss component? I bet it's more than the $500 donation.
This feels like a great incentive not to use Open Source.
> As a company we wanted to arrive at a budget through a global view and then allocate from there.
Looking at some individual results seems a good way to check that process.
The flip-question leaves me a little confused. I hope it wasn't asked out of irritation or to be snide, as my question was very much asked in earnest. I've only ever used Sentry through employers who had a subscription. My experience with the product is mostly positive and I'd say that the folks I worked for thought it was a good value.
Back to your original question, then:
> Does $500 reflect the value and developer time savings you've received from the project over the years?
I guess the binary answer is yes, though I quite agree with you that it's difficult to gauge value in open source a priori.
Thanks for the kind words about Sentry ... and thanks for making Rollup! :)
It's pretty much impossible to reflect/match the value received over time. Think about a SAAS that charges 5$ per month, even though the time it saves you is months, if not years.
It's also impossible to accurately know what the value received over time is.
The best we can all do is support OSS in a way in which we are comfortable, whether that is more or less than the objective received value.
Nice try, people are not paid by the amount of "value" they add. This is a common sales tactic to find and establish an arguable ceiling.