And in practice, it also "buys" you all of the other bug fixes and releases from helping to fund the developer. So while the bug itself might only take a day, the infrastructure around being in a position to do that takes much more time.
If anything, it'd probably exceed expectations.
I want to live in the fantasy world some of you live in where you expect corporations to cut you a $100k check, no strings attached.
Also, I've seen companies cut larger checks for sillier things with minimal conditions, so...
And yes, this would be the only voice they get in the development process. Why shouldn't it be? Apple's had a 12 year free ride so far.
Of course this also incentivizes people to add bugs in on purpose
$10K is way too cheap. I recommend putting some thought into the idea of business value.
If they want it fixed, let them add resources to the project like submit a pull request, donations or charge people support fees for urgent bugs, which many OSS projects do...
First of all, I believe that everything people do is according to some ethic, or set of criteria that motivates them, so there's no such thing as "unethical."
Secondly, it's not charging money because of who they are, it's charging them because of what they have, which is money, which is a desire to have a bug fixed, and which is not expertise in doing so.
Thirdly, charging money like this is not antithetical to free software, and as a matter of fact is promoted by FSF. Here they are dispensing with your argument in the first sentence: [1]
Fourthly, if they were going to submit a PR they would already be doing so (and maybe they have), but as the story goes, the lion's share of coding is performed by Stenberg. PR's are free and money is also a resource. Why not put the resource in the place with the most expertise?
In what way is the money I suggest not a donation or support fee? Lack of contracts to complicate things? Lack of tax writeoffs? These companies don't pay taxes anyway.
OK, that's one way to look at it. In that case I mean bad ethics...
> Secondly, it's not charging money because of who they are, it's charging them because of what they have, which is money, which is a desire to have a bug fixed, and which is not expertise in doing so.
That sounds reasonable and is similar to taxing the rich I suppose, but to me it's discrimination on WHO you are.
> Thirdly, charging money like this is not antithetical to free software, and as a matter of fact is promoted by FSF. Here they are dispensing with your argument in the first sentence:
That's their opinion, my opinion is that charging money for open source software (usage, support) usually results in bad incentives for the people controlling the software (more bugs = more money), which is bad for the consumers of the software.
Allow people to contribute money/resources to the project if they want/need, is the best for everyone.
> These companies don't pay taxes anyway.
True, but a whole other issue.
Are you aware of how much price discrimination these corporations do to everyone (including yourself) every single day? Most stuff we buy everyday, including the name brand generic stuff, is priced at what we will spend and is completely divorced from any kind of cost to produce. You will be charged more if you live in a wealthy area, you will be charged more just for living in a developed country, you will be charged more for shopping at certain times of day, you will be charged more because advertising manipulated you.
It's unethical, but giving them a taste of their own medicine isn't.
My off the cuff solution is for project owners to add a status flag to their issue trackers: PAID. Anybody can submit a bug as PAID, but it costs $50,000-100,000 to do so, per bug. And no private fixes: there is one version and everybody gets the benefit. No badgering on ETAs either.
If Ford thinks it has value, then the developer should get some of that value, and $100K for a suitable patchlevel of cURL might even be a low estimate.