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Comment by wyuenho | Hacker News Reader

While I appreciate that Sentry stepped up to the plate to fund open source, I'd also like to point out the obvious which is this is just 1.5 person's salary in Silicon Valley, for a year. I hope that companies instead of donating money, can pool their resources together to start a non-profit fund invests their money that will grow in time, so in time, more engineers can be funded.

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Because these are maintainers that are working on projects that Sentry depends on for their product, and they can’t write their rent checks with “well intended someday funds”. I mean imagine your boss a work telling you that your not getting a paycheck but not to worry because he invested it and might get around to paying you someday.

Many of these people have kids and mortgages while living off this work.

If they can’t afford to actively continue their work now and go private sector that leaves Sentry holding the bag with abandoned dependencies.

150k direct donation will cover long term investment in the things their company needs to run.

Nobody said anything about not withdrawing from the fund to pay the devs. What gives you that idea?

If these devs want to pay bills now, the best thing to do is for Sentry to hire them. What's so hard about that?

I think it's closer to 0.75 of a Silicon Valley developer's fully loaded salary than 1.5.

Hopefully, these donations are going to developers outside the US/Silicon Valley since the value/cost ratio is much, much better in other parts of the world.

This is less than 1 person's salary in SV

Adjusted for each company's market capitalization, this is the equivalent of Google ($1.9T market cap) directly injecting ~$290,000,000 into the hands of open source maintainers.

I think instead of getting fixated on the dollar value and its impact, it's more meaningful to think about the message this sends. $2k/engineer is a more meaningful metric.

Disclosure: I am a Sentry employee.

Probably should disclose that you're a Sentry employee.

Done.

Why is market cap relevant? Google isn't going to raise capital in order to make OSS donations.

It is merely an exercise to place in context the scale of the contribution relative to Sentry's size as a company.

FWIW, Google has $136B cash in hand[1], and that figure has historically grown $10-20B year-over-year, so it does not have to raise capital to make OSS donations. The figure I cited – $290,000,000 – might sound like an insane number, but it is a rounding error on their balance sheet.

(Also, to be clear this was not a shot at Google, their history of OSS contribution, or anything like that – I just chose some random mega cap company.)

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-plenty-cash-with-n...

I'm genuinely curious what they donate, maybe it's already that much? More? Less? No idea. Also, at their scale cost of FTEs dedicated to upstream open source becomes a significant consideration. How many kernel hackers do they employ?

The math on this is great.

Every engineer worth retaining is realistically responsible for at least $2000 more in real corporate income or institutional savings than was anticipated in any single year. The bigger the organization the more I would think they leverage the same engineering successes to higher dollar amounts than that.

Many of course get bonuses well in excess of this baseline when even larger contributions are recognized.

I would like to see someone prosperous & generous donate to the Syslinux Project so they can update to a point where they have a Microsoft-signed SecureBoot universal multiboot solution for UEFI so it will be as useful as it was under BIOS booting. Ideally, if a signed "shim" is involved it would be universal so it would boot any form of Linux using either GRUB or Syslinux, once the official update is released and adopted by the distros.

Google probably injects way more than that to fund open source projects: it is called working at Google. $290M is a measly, 600 avg employees or so (let's just assume ~500k for an average gSWE in Bay Area). These cash donations may be nice for indie projects but they are really too small to move the needle at scale. Real-world open source is by-and-large built and funded by corporate employees.

Not everyone works in Silicon Valley. This donation could easily cover the yearly salaries of 3-4 developers in Europe.

UK Anecdata: xe.com says $155k is currently £112k which is, at best, two maybe-high mid level devs in, e.g., London (outside of FAANG.) Maybe 3 mid or low-senior levels outside of London but even then it'd be a stretch. I think.

What about France? Or Italy?

Or Poland or Ukraine?

I appreciate that "UK Anecdata" might be misconstrued as "Ukraine Anecdata" (and I could have been clearer that it was UKOGBANI or GB, sure) but in what world could "UK" encompass Poland?

Literally said "UK Anecdata" in the first two words of my reply to highlight this was entirely UK based.

Right. Interesting perspective. Why not invest the money and make it grow instead?

Long term vs short term

But when would you have enough to start paying people? When the average return on the investment is $150K/year? Do you start paying at $15K/year? Should you raise more money and wait until you can fund $1.5M/year?

Sure there are some details to iron out lol.

But the point is that using a long-term approach - you will be able to pay people orders of magnitude more than if you take the short-term approach.

Long-term becomes the short-term in the future ;). If some businesses had started such an initiative in the past, people would be getting paid in the present - consistently.

100 companies 100k each gives you 10 mill. Just the return on that on any meager performing stock can fully fund 1 SV dev, indefinitely. Or, you can withdraw a couple mil from the fund per year, fully fund the entire project for 3-5 years or so. Investment is just a way to stretch out the fund.

Why give a starving man a sandwich, when you could plant some wheat and an avocado tree?

If you've got the wherewithal to grow significant wheat and an avocado tree to fruition, I would think you could afford to give out more than just one sandwich along the way.

So, do both.

In a way they are already investing the proceeds of the open source into their own private company.

What they pay out to maintainers is like a dividend.

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