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> If you are talking to a manager and you can't get them to understand why they need to pay the Nuitka author, talk about insurance. "If this guy doesn't get paid, he will abandon a key piece of our infrastructure (which speeds everything up by at least 3x, saving us X dollars/year) and we will be stuck with a maintenance time bomb in our system. If we pay this tiny fraction of what he is worth as a consultant, we are effectively joining an industrial alliance to support this technology.

I've burned myself twice on this approach. Shortly after I/we started supporting them they changed their license terms. Of course since we were now paying customers we could still use it, but a significant reasons why I advocated for that software in the first place was because it was open source, and now I feel cheated and the advice I gave the company I worked for at that point turned out to be less valuable.

I do sometimes feel that once one get the taste for that sweet sweet recurring revenue it is hard to not start optimizing for it.

For completeness; it has also worked beautifully at least once.

And I guess I'll probably argue again for supporting open source.

But maybe I'll be a little more careful and try to ensure they can't pull these kinds of tricks on me (if a project accepts code contributions and doesn't have a CLA, it will be hard for them to pull such a bait and switch).

> If you are talking to a manager and you can't get them to understand why they need to pay the Nuitka author, talk about insurance

Finance is a significant obstacle to this goal. Multiple times I have been told, “There is a budget surplus-does anyone have any nice-to-haves we should purchase?” More than once, I have suggested (modest) donations towards open source project X that enables us to operate. Not once have I succeeded.

Not a real charity. Not a real purchase. Good will towards something already free does not make a compelling business case up the chain of command.

Except that your marginal payment doesn't actually work as insurance - if you're the only one to do it then Nuitka would still be abandoned, whereas if lots of others pay then your one payment is probably not going to make much difference to their decision.

I'm playing devil's advocate there: I do actually think it is the right thing to do to pay the author. But I don't think your argument would work with a manager.

This. The whole argument for donating is wrong, at least from the enterprise point of view.

If you want $$$ from enterprise, offer them cost saving or money making tech and charge for it. It can be built on top of your OSS, in fact this is a great way to get in touch with the companies... But don't rely on charity. In the companies I worked for paying for something you can get for free is simply not done, ever.

What this will do is get the gears moving on finding a good-enough alternative that is not a ticking time bomb.