[antt]

>We pay our employees $20/hr for contributions to OSS and tech communities, whether it’s a third-party library we use in our work like React, Next.js

While I applaud the sentiment $20 per hour is too little to make me care and enough to make me start thinking about money.

A much better way to deal with this would be pushing laws to allow for tax offsets for contributing time to charities (open source ones). Seeing $10 per hour (after tax) that doesn't inspire me much.

Being able to write off my full time wage as a tax deductible would make me vastly more motivated to document what I've been working on and work on a lot more of it.

[jevakallio]

This is a great idea. I don't know if it's even a starter, tax code wise, but would be amazing if it could be done.

For the time being, we are happy with $20 for the reasons outlined in the post itself. It's not an incentive, it's a reward, and a purely optional one. Many people in the company (I'm the author) do work on Open Source and don't make use of the benefit, because they don't care about the money. This, for us, is fine.

[antt]

I don't care about it now as a full time employed adult. As a university student I could have well become a full time maintainer of some of the scientific libraries that have been neglected since the 80s.

Now as a gainfully employed productive member of society I like the idea of going on a legal tax strike when the government does something I absolutely detest.

>Oh by the by, since you are trying so hard to destroy civil society again this year, here's my bill for keeping it running. You're welcome.

Which is precisely why it would never happen. But you should definitely spend some ~money~ speech on politicians and lobbyists to start some of them thinking about it.