whit537

It's tough, I think it depends on the framing and is definitely something worth talking about. Part of what we were trying to do with this initiative is start with some _global_ concept of "fair" and then allocate that amount as best we could. The total amount we came up with is $150,000 which is $2,000 per engineer on staff.

Sooooo ...

> Does [$155,999.89] reflect the value and developer time savings you've received from [all community-run open source projects] over the year[]?

Yes. We believe that contributing $2,000 annually per engineer is a meaningful amount that fairly compensates the value we receive from open source volunteers.

May I flip the question? Does $500 reflect the value and developer time savings you've given to Sentry over the past year?

Yup, it was https://www.softwareheritage.org/, they accept donations in Euro only. :)

TIL. Neat! :)

https://www.opendental.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Dental

> solid software that open source doesn't come close to

> Open source doesn't even have an answer here.

> Open source sucks here too.

> open source not close

> But it sucks for the vast majority of product categories used by professionals.

This is all irrelevant to me. Companies should pay for the open source software they use today, not for the bad and non-existent alternatives that they don't.

> Offering something for free, then calling it mooching when someone uses it for free, is simply childish emotional blackmail.

Meh. As my kids would say, "That sounds like a you problem." :D

Just because open source maintainers legally allow companies to mooch doesn't mean they're not mooching. ;)

But I mean don't get me wrong, maintainers can be a whiny bunch sometimes for sure. ;)

> open source being unable to meet market demand

Open source software is a public good, and markets are so bad at efficiently provisioning public goods that this is in fact their text-book failure mode:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketfailure.asp

In other words, _of course_ Photoshop trounces GIMP. Use Photoshop, by all means! :D

But! What if we can evolve our markets? That's the macro opportunity here:

1. A critical mass of companies voluntarily pay for the open source software they use today. This is primarily in developer tooling as you point out (Linux, web frameworks, etc.).

2. Existing open source projects become more professional, by which I mean they get better at things besides coding, like design, sales, support, management, etc.

3. Software other than developer tools starts to be built as open source. This depends on the first two things happening.

Why is this interesting? To me it's interesting because it's a slight glimmer of a real opportunity to decouple work from employment, so that individuals can work collaboratively more out of intrinsic motivation than for a paycheck. This doesn't solve all the world's problems and doesn't come without its own challenges, but I think it's an interesting and generally positive evolution of society that is fun to be a part of. :)

[edit - formatting]

> either of these fields you claim provides reinforcement for that amount being a reasonable spend

My statement was based on these two statements of yours:

> Art - $2k/yr buys a lot of solid software

> Software - $2k a year buys a significant amount of commercial tooling

I read that and thought, "Okay, well, I want a lot of solid software, so $2k/yr ... check!" I guess that's not what you intended. :)

> Care to detail an annual software spend approaching $2k for either of these fields

In any field, the approach I would take is to think about the SaaS products that a professional uses, because that's where the bulk of the software spend is these days. In software dev we have things like GitHub, Bitbucket, Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, Logrocket, AWS, GCP, Vercel, Figma, Canva, Slack, Discord.

I spot-checked GitHub, and their enterprise tier is $21/user/month or $252/user/yr:

https://github.com/pricing

Slack is $150/user/yr for business, so enterprise is probably 2x that ~= $300/user/yr:

https://slack.com/pricing

Seems like at Salesforce $300/yr is the low end, and they go up to $3600/user/yr(!):

https://tech.co/crm-software/salesforce-pricing-how-much-doe...

Let's say the average enterprise SaaS login is $250 or $300/yr. Six or eight of those gets us to $2k/user/yr, and six or eight SaaS logins seems pretty reasonable to me.

Note that in the OP blog post the 2k/user/yr number is arrived at from the top down, not from the bottom up as we're doing here. What I'm interested in in this thread is cross-checking the order of magnitude ... so far this thread confirms for me that 2k/user/yr is probably in the right ballpark for large companies to spend on their open source dependencies.

It doesn't sound like you or I have the expertise to go much further down this line of questioning. I'm sure people who control IT budgets at large companies have visibility into their average annual per-user software spend. It would be interesting to hear their view. :^)

[edit - formatting]

Haha ... jinx! :D

Found it! :D

https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/pull/2883

Per-user closed-source software cost for other technical fields is an interesting comparison. Thanks for surfacing it. :^)

Of your five examples, the first two reinforce $2k/yr as a reasonable spend, the second two are no-ops since you don't give a number, and the fifth case is unclear to me (a quick check of Matlab shows a $2k perpetual license with some fine print about support contracts, or an $860/yr annual license).

To your secondary point: the fact that in some fields there are no good open source alternatives suggests that there's room for open source alternatives to exist, if our companies can become self-enlightened enough to fund them. Yes, there will always be companies that mooch. I, for one, prefer to work for companies that don't. :)

<3

Not seeing you at github.com/kawsper so not sure what the PR was ... but thanks for the PR! :)

<3

Funny timing, btw. :)

https://twitter.com/chadwhitacre_/status/1431368348886052865

So yeah for a non-tech company it'd be something like "every developer in the IT org."

Soooooo I realized that commercial software is no longer onpremise (Oracle) but SaaS. :D

Anecdotally, $2,000 per user per year would be a really expensive SaaS app (right?). Not exactly apples to apples but so far I think $2,000/user/yr is a good ballpark for open source value. Note also that the blog post indicates a 50% markdown in labor value because companies pay a tax to direct employee time, so people should expect to get paid less when working self-determinedly on open source.

Okay this is really complicated. D:

https://wintelguy.com/oracle-db-licensing-calc.pl

https://www.orskl.com/what-is-the-cost-of-oracle-database-li...

Thrashing, one might even call it. :)

Sure, but I'm saying compare it to something like Oracle (what other commercial software is still out there? I don't know). What does a company pay annually for Oracle (expressed per engineer for comparison)?

I like deps.

https://raw.githack.com/getsentry/deps/fy2022/fundable.html

IC engineer. That's the brightest line for comparison across companies (dim though it may be), as well as the primary role whose productivity is materially multiplied due to open source (i.e., imagine if the engineer had to build everything they get from open source).

> I don't think they were executing on that insight particularly well.

Probably why they don't exist anymore.

> 2k is a rounding error to the cost of most enterprise software

2k per engineer ... that's more than a rounding error. It'd be interesting to compare to per-seat licensing for commercial software. Anyone have examples?

I guess that would be $2,232.11/yr/eng in today's dollars. :D

Back!

https://jekyllrb.com/

"13:37" https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/f3xzj5fgfq5b ;)

I just noticed that GitHub uses https://www.atlassian.com/software/statuspage for https://www.githubstatus.com/ ("Subscribe to Incident" references Atlassian in the fine print). I remember when GitHub used to use GitHub Pages for their status page, and then they had an issue with GitHub Pages and they couldn't report on status. Oops! Makes sense to use a third-party service, kind of ironic that it's an Atlassian product, given the competition between the two. Looks like they rolled it out in 2018, over two years after Atlassian acquired Statuspage. https://github.blog/2018-12-11-introducing-the-new-github-st... https://www.atlassian.com/blog/statuspage/atlassian-acquires...

Does appear to be global. Some random sites:

http://xenocrypt.github.io/ https://evey-pea.github.io/ https://powershell.one/ https://jekyllrb.com/

Thank you pjz and everyone who ever used or hacked on Aspen.

Thank you jordanmessina and steveklabnik and joeyespo and everyone who put us on HN way back at the start. Thank you marvinpinto for putting us back here one more time. ;)

Thank you everyone who funded my/our Gratipay habit directly by giving to myself or the Gratipay team on Gratipay. Especially UkuleleRod.

Thank you Jessica and Leah and Miriam and Sammy and Ruthie and all of our friends and family for absorbing so much stress over the years.

Tee-hee. :)

In my experience HN actually does a pretty good job of filtering signal from noise. All of our attempts to _force_ something to the homepage failed, but when we have had genuinely interesting news to share (such as this) we glide there effortlessly. The take-away for me is to focus on doing genuinely interesting things! :^)

<3

Thank you kzisme and webmaven and deafferret and bret and ChrisJohns and RichBrey and jacqueline and peterdavidhello and citruspi!

Ahhh, sorry for the surprise. :( Best of luck!

https://hnrss.org/ ;^)

Yeah it's a little awkward tbh. There are so many other people that also put heart and soul into Gratipay! See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15614009.