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Open Source Pledge

opensourcepledge.com

34 pointstosh6 comments

Sounds like a great idea but a minimum of $2k/yr/developer ??? That's a lot. I mean I don't think the perks I get total that. I think getting $2k/yr total would be a lot to get from the places I've worked at.

>$2k/yr/developer ???

Depends upon the company, but for some it could be a lot. Personally I think it should be a percentage of the Company's revenue split between various Open Source Orgs.

For example, almost every company uses OpenSSH from the OpenBSD people, so companies should toss some funds to OpenBSD.

In 2023 I see Amazon, IBM and Apple gave 0 to OpenBSD, where Microsoft and Google gave a decent amount. I know IBM uses OpenSSH on AIX and Red Hat. Apple and Amazon I have to assume uses OpenSSH.

https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html

So I think these same companies should split their donations between various gropus, at the minimum it should be FSF, OpenBSD and OpenSSL.

https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html

An easy way to automate distribution of funds to dependencies is https://thanks.dev. I'd love to see even wider distribution as well in terms of projects like OpenSSH, so being able to say "we use Linux on our servers, here's our Dockerfile, so divy up funds accordingly in addition to dependencies of our main repos" would be nice.

thanks for the recognition we'd love to help more companies support & fund their dependency tree :)

> I mean I don't think the perks I get total that.

It's disappointing to see this undervaluation of OSS. The pledge to pay $2k/dev/yr is about meaningfully giving back to the OSS community that supplies us with invaluable tools -- tools which we build businesses on top of -- for free. It's about giving back for the many "perks" we partake in, even though many undervalue them or even feel entitled to them.

You're right that not every company can afford $2k/dev/yr, and that's okay. But I think this pledge is for the ones that can.

There are other initiatives like https://fossfunders.com that don't have such a high bar.

You mean that a company that employs 10 devs for 60k (way below real salary of US companies - that the pledge is focused at the moment) which is 600k is not able to pay additional 20k to various maintainers, that will not even get entire 20k just just a small percentage?

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