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Comment by rqtwteye | Hacker News Reader

In my company it’s easier to buy commercial software for $10000 than it is to donate $100 for open source voluntarily. I think they need to open up a store where you can buy donations disguised as licenses so the bean counters don’t even realize this could be free.

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Same here. We are all Linux users and people linked articles about openssl being underpaid and all that (back when that was a topic), but after migrating from a paid chat tool to Signal, nobody agreed with me that we should maybe donate to Signal now. Both chat solutions are open source SaaS, but the former tool has a paid subscription for commercial use (which does nothing more than the personal version) whereas Signal calls it a voluntary donation. I still don't understand my colleagues' opinion

Paying thousands of euros for some enterprise Java software as well as Microsoft Office licenses we barely ever use, meanwhile: no problem

This old comment by patio11 (Patrick McKenzie, the one behind „Bits about Money“ and the blog at kalzumeus.com) on this topic might be of interest:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863978

It explains why companies have a lot less problems with invoices than with donations.

Never heard of any NTA or of business expenses being converted into money to myself when it's not on my account. Looking up what an NTA is in relation to taxes, they're a nonprofit themselves and don't appear to have authority of any kind besides PR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Tax_Association

Regardless, if this were a concern in Germany, I'm sure our boss/director would have mentioned it on that call as a simple reason rather than finding excuses and saying we could pick a different nonprofit who needs it more to donate to

Companies donate all the time... this argument about it being considered income makes no sense, and if it did, just donate {income tax rate}% less if the company can't afford more and no problem either

The difference in quality is apparent though.

$10,000 and you have an account manager that will actually follow up on issues.

I recently paid $5k for software and its incredible the difference. Its like I have a part time contractor and software.

It's not clear from your comment, did you pay for commercial software or paid for an open source contributor's time?

And, regardless of the answer, what was your experience with the other option, for comparison?

That’s not my experience. We have systems that cost way into the six digits. You get an account manager that follows up and schedules a lot of meetings. But this doesn’t mean that difficult problems actually get resolved. Just a lot of talk. Even MS super premium support so far has never worked for me. They want an enormous amount of data and then go quiet.

Yeah but thats Microsoft.

Others aren’t much better.

Assuming you are at a big company, it's optimized for risk mitigation.

that just highlight ignorance of your company dept handling the purchase, which is exactly the point of the comment you're replying.

would they be more competent if they allowed the company to make the better "purchase"?

"we're not arrogant, we just can't be bothered to do things that don't annoy others in any other way that is the way we expect it to be, and volonteers working for free should also account for our way to expect things"

bloody hell, corporate world is unbelievable

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