Comment by wvenable
3 months ago
I will pile on that I don't use any commercial libraries in .NET at all. Ironically, I do purchase a commercial library for front-end JavaScript.
I agree that the commercial library offerings seem much more "in your face" with .NET but I don't find the actual breadth and depth of the free and open source library situation to be that troubling. It certainly continues to get better every year.
.NET is very "batteries included" as well so you don't need a huge base-line of competing open source packages just to do "hello world".
Every company should give developers $100 per year to donate to the open source project of their choosing. Right now the conditions are such that maintainers are incentivized to rug pull.
I love this. I've also been bandying about the idea of an open source equivalent of a B Corp sort of accreditation where a company can essentially brag about auditably donating to the open source projects that it depends upon.
Have you heard of the Open Source Pledge? Not exactly what you're suggesting but in the ballpark: https://opensourcepledge.com/
We'd probably just end up in a place similar to carbon and offset credits.
Hmm. My company gives everyone a $500 a year allowance for training and/or tools that we can use through OneRange. It shouldn’t be that hard to get approval to donate to an open source project.
This is all hypothetical. There isn’t any open source project I depend on that isn’t backed by a large corporation.
I've tried that and got heavy push back from other developers funnily enough.
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every company must pay enough to allow developer to donate from his own pocket (and each state to allow vat free donations without paper work).
Surely you don't expect someonoe that uses a particular piece of software only during work to donate to that from their own salary.
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Developers can always contribute as well but the benefits aren't really accruing to them. If open source libraries didn't exist there would be commercial offerings or things would have to be built in house. Also, $100 / year / dev is a rounding error and would add to a company's engineering brand.
It seems like a win / win to me but, of course, no one has to do anything at all. Just don't get upset when maintainers pull the rug out from under you because that is the behavior that is being incentivized: 1) make your thing widely used and hard to replace, 2) get in to large companies that can afford to pay 3) change license, pull rug and get your legal team ready to fight.
One need to see how many developers are already getting paid enough and out of them how many actually donating to OSS projects.
AFAIK developers are full of excuses like "these trillion dollar companies need to pay fair share while my hundred thousand dollar salary in this big expensive city leaves me with nothing to donate.