> 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?
> 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.
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.