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by prepend 1720 days ago
Cool, that’s easy. So each company should donate 200 hours of work to open source projects.

Encouraging more volunteer time is better than trying to collect and allocate cash. And better improved OSS. I think.
3 comments
decebalus1 1720 days ago
I disagree with that. Maintaining OSS projects is not easy. And it does not get easier when you have a plethora of people trying to contribute for the sake of contributing. Money is better IMO. It would serve as an actual payout for people who are actually working on the OSS project.
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prepend 1719 days ago
The 200 hours could be by open sourcing a new project.

There’s different motivators for different people. I would not want to pay open source developers and I would rather pay commercial companies.

Of course, I would rather contribute back to the open source community through my own contributions as this leads to a stronger community.

If there’s a transactional aspect to OSS then it could make the culture worse in the long run.

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zamadatix 1720 days ago
> Cool, that’s easy. So each company should donate 200 hours of work to open source projects.

The article proposes that per person not per company.

> Encouraging more volunteer time is better than trying to collect and allocate cash. And better improved OSS. I think.

Depends on the size of the company and the number of projects you want to support. A bunch of low level commits across a bunch of projects by 100 companies would leave things off a lot worse (due to the maintenance burden vs improvement amount provided) than a bunch of donations from 100 companies to get a dedicated resource dedicated to each project year round.

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david_allison 1720 days ago
This adds to maintainer burnout.

During heavy periods this year I had ~20-30 code reviews per day.

There's a balance between money and contributions. You can't just throw bodies at a problem and say it's better than any alternatives.

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prepend 1719 days ago
You also can’t throw money at problems.

I think that contributions can be done in a smart manner that doesn’t overwhelm maintainers.

Mostly I think the expectation is that companies should sponsor more open source work.

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