[nwhatt]

Taking that 3% and allocating towards your own developers contributing to OSS gives everyone more bang for the buck right?

It's a wonderful gesture, I don't want to take away from that. Just wondering how straight up donating compares to contributing.

[joewadcan]

> Taking that 3% and allocating towards your own developers contributing to OSS gives everyone more bang for the buck right?

I see what you mean. However, as a two person company we think the impact from supporting those projects is a better use of funds. It's all a bit of an experiment, but we wanted to put a stake in the ground somewhere because of how important open source has been to our existence as a company.

Joe (Eventbot co-founder)

[piamancini]

Hey Joe, I'm one of the founders of Open Collective (opencollective.com) Happy to help if you have any questions on how to implement or if we can help out somehow.

[joewadcan]

Hi Pia, we love Open Collective and are using it to donate to one of our sponsored projects. The platform is a great way to relieve a good deal of pain that OSS devs would have to endure in running a funded project.

One of the hardest things we've found is helping small projects (1 or 2 people) that don't have/need the structure of Open Collective but still could use the funds. PayPal is surprising bad since you can't even accept a recurring payment without going through hoops to set up a page/button.

[piamancini]

For those projects in countries with stripe, they can use open collective with their own stripe account. Fees are half since we don’t do fiscal sponsorship (they would self host) and the benefits is that we have the whole subscription / tiers / badges system set up. If you think some of this projects might be able to use it, feel free to send them my way. I’m happy to help them.

[simplify]

Maybe https://donorbox.org would be better for those small projects?

[epanchin]

I can see why you’d not want to give up the time to train, but improving the open source projects you rely on could be a really nice job for a summer CS intern - if 12 weeks intern salary is < 3%.

[watwut]

There is non-zero chance that the project owner will appreciate the direct money more.

[nwhatt]

Makes sense, exciting to hear how the experiment goes.

[eximius]

Specialization and competitive advantage are a thing.

Also, allocating 3% of my developers time is not super useful. That's less than 1 day a month per developer. Far better to allocate 1 developer for X time. By giving cash, you facilitate that for someone else. You could of course choose one person in your company to be that person and pay them directly, but thats hard for political reasons.

[Asooka]

Maybe if you're a team of 30-40 people, you could pay one full time developer to work on a project of your choice, but of course that would mean that developer works mainly for the project of choice and not directly for your company's needs, even if your own bugs would take priority.

[beatgammit]

Or have two developers split time with the OSS project and your internal needs. That way you have resident experts in that OSS project and you're more flexible in meeting deadlines since you can shift time.

[jacobobryant]

Agreed, the funds will probably only make a difference if each OSS project gets at least enough to sustain a developer full-time. Otherwise the authors still have to maintain their day jobs.

This was a great read: https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/library/reports-and-stu...

[phkahler]

I've been thinking about that analogy a lot lately. Eventually (or soon) software will be much like infrastructure. People might be paid to make specific improvements to public projects. This is already starting to happen in some places.

[JoachimSchipper]

Why would you assume that? Presumably the maintainer is pretty knowledgeable about their project, and the maintainer may be willing to "sell" their time (on the project) for less than market rate.

[pizza234]

It really depends on the project and the contribution(s).

I have experience with many open source projects, and the large ones are generally closed to small new contributions (the ones that can be studied and written in a few hours). Most of the time, they will rot, even if they're useful (as in "solves an open issue" useful) and competently written.

Some time ago, there was discussion (commotion) about the years-old Python bug fix that was never mainstreamed. In the real open source world, that's routine. Even Torvalds once acknowledged this phenomenon; I stress that I'm talking about competently written code.

Once, the maintainers of a certain project, which is structured around donations, essentially ignored my company's development contribution offer, even if it was significantly more valuable than the donation(s) they typically get.

To summarize, for small projects, or those who desire traction, contributing by all means, but for large ones... money, or just shift the attention to smaller ones :-)

[tmoravec]

This is what a company where I work does. 10% of developer time (half a day a week) to open-source contributions outside of the company direct products. As long as it helps the broader community we're a part of.

[masklinn]

> Taking that 3% and allocating towards your own developers contributing to OSS gives everyone more bang for the buck right?

Maybe, maybe not. Projects can be rate-bound on other issues than rando's work-time e.g. maintainer's financial incentives or troubles, infrastructure, … in which case more contributors isn't necessarily helpful. Keep in mind 3% dev time is about a week / week-and-a-half, how relevant it is depends heavily on the specific project and developer.

And the 3% developer time is not necessarily equivalent to 3% revenue (e.g. because they're contributing heavily to revenue growth). Plus tax incentives could be a factor, for the company there might be more for the buck giving 3% revenue than keeping revenue and giving employee time.

[Smithalicious]

Development performance does not increase linearly with time. I could not do any meaningful work with 3% of my time. Maybe if you have 33+ developers and dedicate one to fulltime open source development, this might be the case.

[ed_elliott_asc]

If every company did this then it would help