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Comment by the_mitsuhiko | Hacker News Reader

This is great. I really hope that efforts like this will spread around more. If smaller companies like Tarsnap can do it, then what stops others?

> If you're at a startup which relies heavily on open source software, please take a moment to ask yourself: How much does your company contribute back?

And this deserves emphasizing.

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Quite a few years ago, Gabriel Weinberg from DuckDuckGo launched a "FOSS Tithe" website which encouraged companies to donate some percentage of their profits to the FOSS projects they rely on. I've tried to encourage my former employers to do this when possible, or to pay people to contribute features to FOSS tools we were using. With varying degrees of success.

Now that I'm self-employed again, I can simply donate some of my profits, and am more able to contribute patches.

Sponsoring contributors to build features for your org is probably the best way to go. Your org will get an invoice, you'll get a feature. The project will be happy, and the developer will be happy.

> FOSS Tithe

TIL, thanks! Found this: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2227761/a-tithe-for-ope.... Looks like the original blog post is gone. Wonder if Gabe wants to revisit. :thinking:

A couple other refs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1890574

https://www.technologyreview.com/2010/11/15/120320/should-co...

I don't find the original in archive.org or archive.is. :-/

> If smaller companies like Tarsnap can do it, then what stops others?

Shareholders. Tarsnap enjoys the benefits of being a privately-owned company.

I recognize that it's hard for a public company, but there are plenty of private companies that have plenty of cash and benefit from Open Source.

Aside: I think for a public company it might even work well if ESG stared incorporating Open Source contributions.

Not a public company but Bloomberg's FOSS giving falls under their overall corporate philanthropy program, for example. They're involved in FOSSFunders.com behind the scenes but lots of bureaucracy to actually adding their logo.

I think for the public, might be better if we stopped incorporating ESG in gnereal.

In practice I doubt this is much of a barrier. Shareholders don't inspect every line item of a company's budget. For a decent-sized company, a few hundred thousand or even a million or so $$ per year would probably go more or less unnoticed by shareholders.

Remember that it's a common -- incorrect -- trope that public companies are legally required to seek maximum profit, etc. It's a lot more complicated and nuanced than that.

The post says that all of December operating profits are donated. I don’t think such an amount could go unnoticed in a public company.

> I don’t think such an amount could go unnoticed in a public company.

It would not go unnoticed, but say if the CEO is >50% shareholder, he could just say “if you don’t like the way I run the company, sell the stock”.

Large companies regularly give a lot to various charities. Open source is just another.

Supporting open source is not charity.

Is it really that black-and-white? It certainly has at least some characteristics of charity, such as being non-compulsory, and often done out of a sense of goodwill.

From a corporate point of view it is often black and white based on the tax classification of the recipient.

That might be an issue for smaller projects but at larger scales there is often an associated charity. For example https://apache.org/ and https://numfocus.org/community/mission are both 501(c)(3) registered charitable organizations.

In the sense of being "charitable", sure; but the legal sense of being "a charity" is quite a different matter. I record most of this as "sponsorship" and get Tarsnap's logo put in various places; if the Canada Revenue Agency asks any questions I can absolutely point to evidence that this brings in customers to justify it as a business expense.

To me it is more similar to giving money to a busker.

The busker is there doing his thing, he's not asking for money to play. He's working though, and payment acknowledges the value of his work.

Charity, on the other hand, is supposed to expect no work in return. You help people whether they did some work or not.

The fact that the OSS dev didn't charge for the software in the first place doesn't mean paying him for that software is charity. It's acknowledgement, and a possible investment if you depend on the software he provides.

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