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edent

And you gave a sizable donation, right?

https://ffmpeg.org/donations.html

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I have a feeling the ~$2b wasn't his

Still, good reminder to speak up about the products to leadership and see if we can get them to donate.

Absolutely. For the first startup that I worked for, I earned a position with budgeting authority. Once we achieved profitably, I added donations to the open source tools we relied upon. I received some pushback and defended it. Looking back, I am proud of that choice. I encourage you all to do the same.

Can you share what you chose as your points and what convinced them at the end?

What likely works better in conservative environments, are not donations, but (generous) support contracts. This is something buisness people can understand.

Oh, this goes w/o question, but not all F/OSS projects are incorporated and/or can provide a contract. Even more trouble if the entities are in yhe different countries.

While I'm sure you are right, I can't help but to be irked by this strange environment we live in where we have to treat business people like infants who need things mashed and mushed into something they can digest and understand.

Nobody had to explain to me the concept of donating to support somebody working on something my business relies on, it's just common sense.

If I was really reliant on books documenting tolls and laws in regards to international trades, and you wanted to give a donation to support this work, I wouldn't be all "me no understand, please explain it in programmer-speak for me".

If you relied on a set of books and found out the author and publisher were head of the 'Defund STEM; Make Everyone Get Lit Degrees (DSMEGLD, prounced De-smegol'd, cause they are LOTR nerds)' lobbying organization and actively spent a good portion of their day convincing education organizations from kindergartens to Universities remove all their math, science, and programming classes and teach crystal healing instead, would you donate to them?

You love programming and wouldn't help a group of people try to destroy it, right>

Well, business people love money and don't want to help people not give it to them or not let them keep it.

(toungue in cheek but 60% serious...)

Have you spent much time around business people? I’ve spent years around them and open source software truly confuses them. Why would you ever use your time to make something and then give it away? I once suggested we make a donation and they laughed at me. Their response was if people are dumb enough to make something and give it away for free, then they get nothing.

One argument I made was sponsoring a project, especially buys you support / developer relations. For example, we replaced a commercial PKZIP license with 7-zip. Was able to use the fact that one of the project we donated to, 7-zip, implemented a feature request that helped in this transition. That combined with the fact that these donations relative to our proprietary software costs were insignificant, made it an easy sell to my boss.