Comment by squigz
1 day ago
While it might be frustrating to see non-viable options presented as ways to fund critical FOSS, it's even more frustrating to see blame effectively being placed on the maintainer; particularly because, if companies like Apple really wanted to fund this work, I'm pretty sure they could figure something out.
Anyway, looking at the model you propose, it seems like the main difference is that Frank just doesn't explicitly say "you can retain my services"? Is that all that's stopping Apple from contacting him and arranging a contract?
> if companies like Apple really wanted to fund this work, I'm pretty sure they could figure something out.
Having spent the last ~6 years in big tech consistently frustrated by the rigidity of the processes and finding clever ways to navigate (see: wade through the bullshit), this isn’t as easy as you’d hope. The problem is that someone has to spend a non-trivial amount of time advocating internally for something like this (a “non-standard process”) which generally means asking pinging random people across finance, procurement, and legal how to deal with it and 99% of people will just throw up their hands (especially in this case because they don’t understand the importance of it). If things don’t fit a mold in these big companies, they fall into the event horizon and are stretched out to infinity.
Couldn’t you just go up your chain to the VP or whatever and use their backing / negotiating at the VP level to organize? It might not work for random projects but if Apple is using libsodium for security this could presumably be pitched as an investment into their own software supply chain.
Bless, 7 years of this at Google razed my soul (to a point)
Filippo is another maintainer, of extremely similar open source software with entirely the same customer base, offering (important) advice to a peer, so I don't think policing his tone is helpful here.
I know who he is and what he does. I think we probably disagree on whether that makes the comment in better or worse taste.
Otherwise, I agreed with him, and am genuinely curious whether the stopping factor here is maintainers like Frank simply not saying "you can email me to retain my services"
[flagged]
> if companies like Apple really wanted to fund this work, I'm pretty sure they could figure something out
A reminder that companies are not a hive mind.
Many people at Apple surely would love to funnel piles of money to open source. Maybe some of them even work in the Finance or Procurement or Legal departments. But the overwhelming majority of Apple’s procurement flow is not donations, and so it is optimized for the shape of the work it encounters.
I bet there are plenty of people working at Chick-fil-A who wish it was open on Sundays. But it’s not ~“blaming the user” to suggest that as it stands, showing up on Sunday is an ineffective way to get chicken nuggets.
The idea that donations are the only way they could fund this work is what I was talking about. I'm sure Apple has various contractors and other forms of employees.
It's like suggesting that Chic-Fil-A really does want to open on Sunday, but the only thing stopping them is customers not telling them they want it open on Sunday.