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I scream into the void after reading this post: "Please give even a 10th of that money you wasted on that SaaS to the maintainer(s) of the OSS alternative, even while you're trialing it internally!"

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Would never happen. I was working for a company which for C++ projects used open source CMake package manager called Hunter. Thousands of packages (ours and third-party) for multiple platforms were causing building and linking problems constantly. Literally every day devops would waste hours on those issues. Many of the problems come from our not-understanding of the build processes and some were Hunter bugs so we were happy to jump to every new release. And one day the Hunter maintainer make announcement that he will abandon the project if someone would not help him financially. I pointed this out to my manager. He said that it's very unfortunate but he would need to talk to his manager who would need to talk to next manager and so on, some finance department would need to allocate funds for that but they would not do that without the approval of some other department and so on. So my manager said we must wait, see what Hunter maintainer would do and if he really abandon the project then we will think what next. Ruslo (Hunter maintaner) abandoned the project so I told my manager that we should simply contact Ruslo and try to hire him as he clearly would be the right person to solve all our building problems. Guess what... My manager would need to contact his manager and so on, and so on, so nothing was done.

Truly a sad state of affairs.

Please check out thanks.dev to possibly get your company to start paying OSS Devs that they rely on.

(No affiliation)

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