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Comment by osigurdson | Hacker News Reader

Every company should give developers $100 per year to donate to the open source project of their choosing. Right now the conditions are such that maintainers are incentivized to rug pull.

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I love this. I've also been bandying about the idea of an open source equivalent of a B Corp sort of accreditation where a company can essentially brag about auditably donating to the open source projects that it depends upon.

Have you heard of the Open Source Pledge? Not exactly what you're suggesting but in the ballpark: https://opensourcepledge.com/

We'd probably just end up in a place similar to carbon and offset credits.

Hmm. My company gives everyone a $500 a year allowance for training and/or tools that we can use through OneRange. It shouldn’t be that hard to get approval to donate to an open source project.

This is all hypothetical. There isn’t any open source project I depend on that isn’t backed by a large corporation.

I've tried that and got heavy push back from other developers funnily enough.

Why? How does it affect them if you decide to use your allowance to donate?

Not affect them personally but more around what value is the business getting. We agreed to disagree :(

The value the business gets is continued development of free resources that they depend on. Not very hard :)

every company must pay enough to allow developer to donate from his own pocket (and each state to allow vat free donations without paper work).

Surely you don't expect someonoe that uses a particular piece of software only during work to donate to that from their own salary.

Obviously that'd be completely unheard of.

It literally puts food on your table?

Does it? If it didnt exist my company would need to develop it which still puts food on my table.

In fact it probably would put more food on your table.

One need to see how many developers are already getting paid enough and out of them how many actually donating to OSS projects.

AFAIK developers are full of excuses like "these trillion dollar companies need to pay fair share while my hundred thousand dollar salary in this big expensive city leaves me with nothing to donate.

Developers can always contribute as well but the benefits aren't really accruing to them. If open source libraries didn't exist there would be commercial offerings or things would have to be built in house. Also, $100 / year / dev is a rounding error and would add to a company's engineering brand.

It seems like a win / win to me but, of course, no one has to do anything at all. Just don't get upset when maintainers pull the rug out from under you because that is the behavior that is being incentivized: 1) make your thing widely used and hard to replace, 2) get in to large companies that can afford to pay 3) change license, pull rug and get your legal team ready to fight.

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