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by Joe8Bit 3413 days ago
I really think there's an opportunity to make it easier for companies (large and small) to pay for work on open source projects. The complexities I see (as someone who has done it often):

* Knowing who (as an individual or an organization) you can give money to to reliably perform the work. So working out a way of managing this would be huge e.g. I want a feature added to Postgres, who the hell do I speak to? Are they reliable? Is their contribution likely to be accepted upstream?

* The tax/employment logistics can be painful, an intermediary could make that simpler. For large contributions you often have to support multiple people, and this becomes logistical complex VERY easily

* A lot of folks who make their living being supported to work on open source are scornful or outright malevolent towards the things that corps need (e.g. invoicing, statement of work, liability protection)
3 comments
BuuQu9hu 3413 days ago
PostgreSQL have a list of companies that can help:

https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/

Debian has a list of consultants, many of them are Debian developers:

https://www.debian.org/consultants/

In addition there are a bunch of general and specialised open source consultancies, some examples:

http://www.credativ.us/ https://www.igalia.com/ http://collabora.com/ http://codethink.co.uk/ http://catalyst.co.nz/ http://www.sysmocom.de/ https://www.savoirfairelinux.com/

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whit537 3413 days ago
Fwiw, I've copied your comments over to https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/987#i....
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whit537 3413 days ago
It sounds like you've mostly tried to pay for new development on projects? As opposed to remunerating for existing product? Does that sound right?
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Joe8Bit 3413 days ago
Yes. Not that I disagree with the other way of paying, but it needs to be handled differently:

* The 'pay someone to do X, which has Y value for us in return' is a very simple value proposition for even the most luddite of finance/legal folks to grok. The details are different, but you're essentially hiring a contractor.

* On the other hand, it's much less clear to those people what the value proposition is for paying for 'past work' or some amphorphus future work that it's difficult to quantify will have any value to the organization.

* That's why the above is much better framed as 'sponsorship' and put under PR/dev relations/talent/HR. They're the ones who can best track value from concepts like community engagement and enhancement, improved standing of the company etc

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