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Comment by whit537 | Hacker News Reader

It's tough, I think it depends on the framing and is definitely something worth talking about. Part of what we were trying to do with this initiative is start with some _global_ concept of "fair" and then allocate that amount as best we could. The total amount we came up with is $150,000 which is $2,000 per engineer on staff.

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?

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> > Does [$155,999.89] reflect the value and developer time savings you've received from [all community-run open source projects] over the year[]?

> 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.

Right, I was intentionally reframing the question. As a company we wanted to arrive at a budget through a global view and then allocate from there. Rather than look at 100+ projects individually and build up from "How much value did we get from this one? Or that one? And that one?" ... we wanted to reason about a fair amount overall. Is that bad?

What's a good (practical, repeatable, reasonable) way to determine fairness?

> 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.

> If, by magic, these OSS components you use disappeared: How much would it cost to build them?

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.

MSSQL isn't foss; you pay what it's worth to you as part of the licensing. That's one of the issues at play here, paying for software licenses versus using foss components to build your own saas, and then donating something to the foss maintainers.

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.

I'm still now following this logic. In this scenario, I can either use Microsoft Office for $200, or I can use Libre Office, where a $500 donation is insufficient because I can't pay a programmer <$500 to contribute to it?

This feels like a great incentive not to use Open Source.

Reframing a question is when the questions are equivalent in the end. Editing someone's words into a different question is something else.

> 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.

How would Rollup know how much value Sentry got out of it? Seems like only Sentry would have that info.

Appreciate the additional insight. It wasn't something I gleaned from the blog post. It's something extremely difficult to measure, and open source funding is nebulous in reason and highly inconsistent due to difficulty in gauging value, among other reasons.

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.

Not meant to be snide, no. It's something we thought about when allocating our budget: how are projects going to perceive this? Is giving $100 or $500 worse than giving nothing at all? So my question was also asked in earnest! :D

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! :)

> May I flip the question?

You certainly may, but without knowing how much Sentry uses Rollup it’s hard to say.

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