I think the point was that this is a company that is willing to pay for the work, but corporate procurement doesn't work like that.
If you don't have a discretionary spending limit that will accommodate it, then trying to get OSS through procurement is difficult. Who is providing the support contract? What level of indemnity insurance is the supplier covered by? Can you get a spread of three quotes from competitive providers?
Not to mention that if the supplier isn't VAT/GST registered, the accounts department can be operationally incapable of accepting an invoice or issuing payment.
Not malicious, this is best practice for a large organisation that needs to prove that it is not doing fraud. But it does present a huge obstacle to buying from small organisations, startups, and one-person OSS maintainers.
Agree. Does solving this itself a good product idea? A company specializing in making these deals happen? Taking on the legal and corporate aspects? Kinda like freelancer platforms work.., but, more corporate forcused?
I'm not a corporate procurement specialist - I've just hit this wall before. So I might be talking out of my arse in terms of solutions.
One way around it is that you get an existing consultancy, who is already on the corporate approved suppliers list and has jumped through all the hoops, to resell the product. They take a hefty cut, usually, but can also pay more punctually (in general large corp purchasing departments negotiate/demand looong invoice payment deadlines).
That still leaves more problems - like the sales cycle, it can take two years or more for a large corp to go from an "we want to buy this" from a department head to an actual purchase order from procurement. You could short-cut that if you were already an approved supplier, and had a team who knew the process and could respond much more quickly to the insane amount of bureaucracy involved.
You'd need to be large (large corps hate buying from small companies), well-funded (so there's no argument that you'll run out of funds, or not be able to compensate them if something goes wrong), heavily insured (see above), with a team who knows their way around everything that a large procurement department could throw at you. You could pro-actively try getting on the approved suppliers list for every large corp in a sector, and then advertise your services to OSS/startups/small corps, who would be your customer.
Dayuum!!! I guess then we should focus only on making that "pay something to this OSS developer" easy.. everything else still stays the same... no guarantees, no offloaded liabilities, no expedited timelines, etc.
I'm not sure making the payment part easy is going to help that much. The ideal, of course, is to get the cost under the departmental discretionary budget; most large corps allow small purchases to go through with less oversight.
Atlassian managed to do this during their initial B2D selling-to-devs stage, so it might be worth reading up how they did it.
If you don't have a discretionary spending limit that will accommodate it, then trying to get OSS through procurement is difficult. Who is providing the support contract? What level of indemnity insurance is the supplier covered by? Can you get a spread of three quotes from competitive providers?
Not to mention that if the supplier isn't VAT/GST registered, the accounts department can be operationally incapable of accepting an invoice or issuing payment.
Not malicious, this is best practice for a large organisation that needs to prove that it is not doing fraud. But it does present a huge obstacle to buying from small organisations, startups, and one-person OSS maintainers.