Comment by dmantis
3 years ago
If you are a company and not an individual, nobody prohibits you to pay bounties to maintainers to focus on your needs instead of paying some try-to-hook-you-up-with-subscriptions company.
Moreover, lots of OSS contributors are from China, Russia, India, Ukraine, etc - so a company may spend even less paying them for particular commits than buying software from bay area company.
It's more about management mindset rather than insolvable problem.
upd: And everybody wins - more quality OSS code, help developers in poor countries, less money to shitty companies like Adobe.
> nobody prohibits you to pay bounties to maintainers to focus on your needs
company or individual, that's true. but there's still big opportunity costs and time factors. Pay someone $1000 now to perhaps get some polish/bugfixes in a release 2 months from now... and do what in the meantime? Deal with 15% more time spent in sub-par-for-my-needs software?
You can, but it's not a slam dunk decision, and just because you paid that money, you may still not get things as you want (or when you want).
I don't think I've ever successfully gotten a SaaS or other paid product to fix a bug for me. I mean sure I've paid a lot to upgrade _hoping_ that an upgrade comes with bug fixes, but that usually doesn't pan out either. On the other hand I've seen great responsiveness on open source projects.
In one year you’ll be one year older. Won’t you wish you’d invested in yourself, org, and community?
It’s a marshmallow test for adults.
> Won’t you wish you’d invested in yourself, org, and community?
Many might prefer to have shipped features/products in a timely manner instead and how their performance reviews would look, as opposed to some notion of community.
The situations where you can say: "I'm blocked and am waiting on the library/tool developer to have a look at my GitHub issue, so no new release will be shipped until then," are probably not plentiful. Situations where the person in question can contribute a solution of their own are also not as plentiful as we might like. Situations where the person in question is capable of either solving the problem just for themselves (with a custom build of the tool/library) are also not as plentiful as one might hope, due to possibly different skillsets.
Making the functionality someone else's problem behind a contract of some sort feels like a decent choice in an enterprise setting, which is why you see many purchase something like RHEL licenses because of the support, or why many prefer to overpay for cloud services instead of running everything on prem, or even use paid tools that are "standard" within the niche of the industry that they work in.
For many, the circumstances in which they'll adopt FOSS primarily centers around someone else already having done the majority of the work and the solution being good enough: something like MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL in the database space and something like Angular/Vue/React in the front end space, or any number of libraries/frameworks for back end development, tools like Visual Studio Code or Git, OSes like GNU/Linux or other Linux distros and so on.
One might also argue that a lot of the successful FOSS projects out there actually have corporate backing, but perhaps that's besides the point.
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I donated like 4K early into GIMP 15 years later it’s still an unusable mess in a professional environment.
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Hire devs and use OSS as a base to create the tools you need!
Hire dairy farmers to get the milk for your coffee - absolute insight into how it's produced. Also they got to raise cows from calves so no milk in the office for a while. But once you get it you can be sure it's organic !
That's not even going into the dev market situation right now ...
I mean seriously have you people ever been near a situation where these kind of decisions are made ?
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Sure, this is ideal given unlimited time and money, but hiring dedicated devs for tooling is going to be expensive. And once they fix "the problem," they're still on payroll. Yay they'll keep fixing problems and improving the software, but it's basically the most expensive software subscription model imaginable.
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Economics prohibits it. Consider a feature that will cost 1 month of developer time, let’s put that at $10k. 20 companies using the product want that feature, and each would be willing to pay $1k for it. No problem, right? The community would be willing to pay $20k total, and the feature would only cost $10k to implement, so why can’t it get done?
It can’t get done because every company wants to let some other sucker pay for the feature, and then free-ride after it’s implemented. No individual company would pay the $10k, because the feature is only worth $1k to them, even though it’s worth $20k to society.
So how did Penpot come into existence? Because some 'sucker' paid for it?
Kaleidos, the creators of Penpot, built a tool that they need and invested to make it open. And they get recognition for it which builds their brand and gets them more customers and employees.
Paying for feature X and having that advertised in the ChangeLog and on the sponsors page is a sound business decision.
Soon enough, businesses pay fees to Adobe only to have their data taken hostage in the cloud will be known as suckers.
But on the other hand a lot of companies are quite happy to pay a subscription of 1000k a year (which increases if the company grows) to get the same features. Let's be real purchasing decisions are often not based primarily on economics otherwise companies wouldn't have large marketing and sales departments which throw huge parties at trade shows.
In the long run, a company that wastes money on purchases will be beaten in the market by a company that isn't so wasteful. Marketing and sales is not wasteful, but actually creates profit.
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Project managing all the tools that we use to get our job done seems very distracting.