I work for a big company (Apple) but I have no idea who Frank is, nor how to sponsor them; and even if I knew them and how to sponsor them, the money would come directly from my pocket instead of Apple’s banking account.
If libsodium is useful to you, please keep in mind that it is maintained by one person, for free, in time I could spend with my family or on other projects. The best way to help the project would be to consider sponsoring it, which helps me dedicate more time to improving it and making it great for everyone, for many more years to come.
Hope that helps.
However, donating money to an open collective is prohibitively hard for most big companies. Maybe the world should be different (or maybe not, since it would be easy for employees to embezzle money if they could direct donations easily), but that's how it works currently.
AFAICT, there is also no fiscal sponsor, so the donation matching suggested in a sister comment won't apply.
This is why Geomys (https://geomys.org) works the way it does, and why it has revenue (ignoring the FIPS and tlog sides of the business) which is 30-50x of some GitHub Sponsors "success stories": we bill in a way that's compatible with how companies do business, even if effectively we provide a similar service (which is 95% focused on upstream maintenance, not customer support).
I am not saying it's for everyone, or that Frank should necessarily adopt this model, or that it's the only way (e.g. the Zig foundation raises real amounts of money, too), but I find it frustrating to see over and over again the same conversation:
- "Alice does important maintenance work, she should get professionally funded for it!"
- "How does Alice accept/request funding?"
- "Monthly credit card transactions anchored at $100/mo that are labeled donations"
- no business can move professional amounts of money that way
- "Businesses are so short-sighted, it's a tragedy of the commons!"
Anyway, looking at the model you propose, it seems like the main difference is that Frank just doesn't explicitly say "you can retain my services"? Is that all that's stopping Apple from contacting him and arranging a contract?
Otherwise, I agreed with him, and am genuinely curious whether the stopping factor here is maintainers like Frank simply not saying "you can email me to retain my services"
Having spent the last ~6 years in big tech consistently frustrated by the rigidity of the processes and finding clever ways to navigate (see: wade through the bullshit), this isn’t as easy as you’d hope. The problem is that someone has to spend a non-trivial amount of time advocating internally for something like this (a “non-standard process”) which generally means asking pinging random people across finance, procurement, and legal how to deal with it and 99% of people will just throw up their hands (especially in this case because they don’t understand the importance of it). If things don’t fit a mold in these big companies, they fall into the event horizon and are stretched out to infinity.
A reminder that companies are not a hive mind.
Many people at Apple surely would love to funnel piles of money to open source. Maybe some of them even work in the Finance or Procurement or Legal departments. But the overwhelming majority of Apple’s procurement flow is not donations, and so it is optimized for the shape of the work it encounters.
I bet there are plenty of people working at Chick-fil-A who wish it was open on Sundays. But it’s not ~“blaming the user” to suggest that as it stands, showing up on Sunday is an ineffective way to get chicken nuggets.
It's like suggesting that Chic-Fil-A really does want to open on Sunday, but the only thing stopping them is customers not telling them they want it open on Sunday.
You are absolutely correct. However, that's the mechanism that Frank has made available, and that's what the comment I was replying to was asking, so I was just connecting the dots between the question and answer.
https://www.apple.com/careers/us/life-at-apple/benefits.html
But it is on a case by case basis, and it does take work to get the IRS to accept it.