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by thn-gap
1259 days ago
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That's still $20k above what they have to pay for the right of usage of the library. What donation amount above would you consider reasonable? Or how would you budget Spotify's donation accross all open source projects that they use? You can dual-license to avoid comercial exploitation. Why then set an expectation on how much should be donated for complete open source projects? |
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See: https://liberapay.org (and also patreon.com has a number of projects)
The idea is that people that can give would give, and those that can't won't. And who can give can also choose how much they think the project is valuable and how much maintenance it needs. Hopefully that would be covering the needs of the developers at a fair salary. It would be nice if open source projects were more transparent about this as well: "I need X/month to reach a fair salary and good maintenance, and could expand, hire devs and add functionality for Y/month." (milestones in patreon partially fulfill that role).
The problem is when there are others that rely on the work as well. How much should each give, such that the system would be fair? From a theoretical perspective, I think the money should be always coming from the source with the lowest marginal counterfactual return. That is, the organizations who have funds going to investors and other orgs with the lowest ROI should instead divert those funds to [something else], where [something else] is OSS in this case, until an equilibrium is reached and everywhere is operating at equal and optimal ROI. In practice things are not so easy. And this analysis (and financial analysis) tends to only value economic ROI, where we should be thinking of social ROI as well as environmental ROI.
But to give a rule of thumb, for now, I think it would be reasonable to pay
(a) if it is less than a % of the (internal) project cost: a % of the budget of the OSS project, depending on how valuable it is internally (say, 50% if their budget is low, or just 1% if their budget is high);
(b) a % of the (internal) project cost otherwise (e.g. at most 5% of project cost).
Ideally there would be some kind of system or framework to streamline this sort of evaluation and allocation to the devs.
I actually think a whole complementary economic system (i.e. enhancing capitalism or socialism) should be developed around this idea. We should be paying whomever is providing value to society, according to their needs to provide this value (and also give them a good life of course! -- and provide a reward/incentive to do valuable things, even ones that don't currently have an incentive). So some kind of organizations, that could be tied to companies or governments too, would be responsible for evaluating on a reasonably objective basis which projects need money and then allocating it (sort of as an outsourcing of the resource allocation job to specialized entities). But meanwhile individual and voluntary giving is basically that without outsourcing. I try to do this personally through Effective Altruism (which is essentially just that: give effectively) and giving what I can to Open Source and other impactful causes.