[Boygirl]

Disclaimer- formidable employee and open source maintainer

Formidable does pay folks their full engineering salaries to make targeted contributions to open source during work hours. We can't afford to do a ton of this, so it mostly happens when folks are between projects. The extra $20/hour is extra. It's meant to be fun and encouraging. It's basically the "buy me a beer" license, but Formidable actually buys us a beer.

[peterwwillis]

It also devalues open source work, while at the same time taking away the potential for others to get paid a salary for it. From an economics standpoint, this is bad for developers in the long run, but good for Formidable.

[exogen]

Before (the status quo): $0.

Now: $20/hour.

If that's devaluing something, I would like to devalue my worth by several orders of magnitude please. :)

[meheleventyone]

The problems more related to a fear of anchoring the price.

Before: This costs nothing but I’m avoiding paying for the engineering time that is $$$.

After: $20 an hour is the going rate for developing this sort of software.

[exogen]

There's a big difference in paying for something because you need it done and paying for something you don't even necessarily want but someone did anyway. If you're thinking about "what did this software cost?" and engineering time, then it sounds like the software is already a business need and is being considered from a business perspective.

If I'm furnishing my new empty home and don't have a couch, I'm going to shell out approx. $2,000 for a couch because I need one.

If my house is completely furnished and someone shows up at the door with a couch, I'd either turn them away completely or possibly offer them a small amount after evaluating whether I can even accept it.

IMO claiming that rewarding people for doing any random OSS work they'd do anyway devalues software development in general is concern-trolling.