[mfer]

One of the issues with this is the dynamic of donations. People keep talking about how public corps don't give out donations to developers for projects they use. I'm beginning to think it's not something they can do and I've been poking at tax and legal code on it. There's likely a reason they don't do it.

I would suggest people try to get funded through methods that functionally work through the big corps/public companies instead of donations (unless they are looking for a corp to donate to a legally registered non-profit).

[hinkley]

A lot of big companies do donation matching, and as near as I can glean this is a political thing.

If I as a C suite decide to donate to the NRA, I may discover an angry mob outside my office who inform me that the majority of the company is anti-NRA, or planned parenthood, or Susan G Koman or or or.

If I earmark a half a million for matching, then my employees 'vote' on where that money goes, and it's not my 'fault' that employee A hates employee B's decisions. "We" didn't decide anything. Our employees did.

You could however do the same thing without the matching part and just allocate $200 per employee that they can allocate how they want. If I think jquery deserves $5 and five coworkers all think that should be $10, then a check for $55 goes to jquery.org. Or perhaps the cutoff is $100 (because some administrator has to write all these checks), and either they get nothing or I find more people who like jquery.

I think where we can help this sort of process is by pointing out how much money we are saving by using these tools, and try to convince our employers to allocate a couple % of that to donations, regardless of whether they get a tax break due to the group being a 501c3.

We just switched a number of services off of Oracle. I know some of them went to postgres but probably not all. I bet postgres, mysql, redis, elasticsearch haven't seen one thin dime of that money.

[mfer]

There is a difference in donation to a legally registered non-profit and an individual. I was reading some us legal code for public companies and it covers stuff like this. Each of the examples here is for a legally registered non-profit.

[rndhouse]

OpenFare does open the door to an alternative non-FOSS strategy for funding for small software libraries.

Commercial payment plans defined in code can be managed programmatically. Which means that small payment obligations can be managed at scale. Consequently, trivial software dependencies could raise meaningful capital from micropayments.

See: https://github.com/openfare/openfare#micropriced-commercial-...

However, software for a fee is not FOSS.

[mfer]

> However, software for a fee is not FOSS.

Now this is moving into differences between Free and open source software.

You can have open source software which has some form of support and specialized feature development for a fee. Many many many do this through companies today. They do it as a company rather than an individual due to the way you need to work to get paid by public companies.

One issue I keep seeing is setups that don't work for the constraints public companies have on them. People want their money but aren't willing to work within their constraints.

[rndhouse]

Yes, I agree. There are two different audiences: public software developers and public companies. And they both need different interfaces. I love it.

[sokoloff]

What makes you think that corporations can’t pay developers of open source code? You may not be able to characterize it as a “donation” but I don’t think you have to in order to get the money to flow.

Corporations make all kinds of “ordinary and necessary” business expenditures. (See IRS publication 535.)

Note that “necessary” in that phrase is more like “helpful” than “absolutely required and unavoidable” in definition.

If the dev wants the money and the company wants to pay it, I’m sure they can make it happen.

[DarylZero]

The private corporations build all the wrong code.