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Comment by schnebbau | Hacker News Reader

You ungrateful nerds.

Kudos to Bloomberg for doing this, and whoever championed it inside the company. Now if more companies would do the same we might be getting somewhere.

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This! What all these ungrateful nerds seem to disregard is whether one company should take the responsibility of paying the curl author enough to match a year's worth of salary? Or should more companies (and there are many that make much bigger revenues) each contribute 10K to this project to total a year's worth of salary?

You don’t get to decide on someone’s salary for this kind of work. The value should be determined by the market. If 10,000 big companies find curl useful and they all value on a $10,000 contribution then curl should receive 100 million.

Of course, I don't get to decide it. That's exactly my point! You seem to be restating my point. Each company is free to decide for themselves how much they want to contribute.

No I'm not. I'm disagreeing with you because you seem to have the assumption it's for a year's salary. But this isn't a salary job, it's work that's valuable. So it shouldn't limited to someone's decision about a salary because you're not employing him. It's just however much he can make.

I am making no such assumption. I am only expressing my gripe against those commenters who are not happy that this grant is like 1 month's salary. So I am only making the point that it may not be one company's responsibility to pay enough money to equal any number of months or years of salary. On the other hand any single company is free to pay as littile or as much money as they want and if all companies did the same thing then it might be enough money to appease some of these commenters who seem to expect that the developers should be paid much more than a month's worth of salary.

I am personally all for paying hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions of dollars if the companies are up for it.

> … like 1 month's salary

Mm, ok, sure, yeah. Well, I just don’t think salary is what we should benchmark it off.

> … equal any number of months or …

I agree it’s not. But for two reasons, one we shouldn’t be benchmarking it off salary. Two: companies should pay what they value, not about salary. It could be a lot more than salary. It could be a lot less. It should be: What’s the value of this OSS to the company?

> … appease …

Sure, right? I just think let’s not keep talking about salary. This is a different costing.

> … 100s 1000s or even 1000000s …

Great, man! Me too ;p :) xx ;p

Exactly. PR wise it seems to be safer to be in camp zero, than standout by giving something.

Yep. And people don't realize how difficult it can be in a large company to get finance to pay up for something like this.

Years ago before I was at the Free Software Foundation, they offered a bundle of books and t-shirts and even compiled copies of free software to companies for a few thousand dollars because it was a way corporate departments could donate with a credit card by way of buying some merchandise. Later, this morphed into a straight-up donation program -- http://patron.fsf.org

I'm only seeing two negative comments among like 15 positive ones. Maybe you jumped the gun a bit with the flaming.

When I posted there was 5 or 6 negatives and a neutral. Maybe you jumped the gun a bit with the judgment.

Fair enough.

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