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Knowing most large corps, they would rather pay a contractor $175/hr for two months than sign a $20/month license. Also, you usually cannot hire the open-source maintainer as the contractor, you have to use some company with insider relationships.

It isnt the engineering manager's fault at any large company. The policies make no sense, but there may be a larger wisdom that I do not understand.

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So become a contractor, work for an inflated fee for two months. Then take a month off and work for yourself on whatever you want. Or just do nothing, if you prefer that to working on your own projects.

Economic injustices and inefficiencies can and do exist in free-ish markets. But this isn't one of them. It's more like "old man shouts at supply and demand".

absolutely true - once sat around in a meeting which the combined cost of the contractors in that meeting was ~$2500 per hour - we met for 90 minutes arguing about which of the customer departments would be responsible for paying the $50/month subscription fee for twilio services for the year.

We could have paid for 50 months of that service with the money we spent trying to figure out who would be responsible for the bill.

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