At every company I've worked I've lobbied for us to make donations to open source projects we depend on. Every single time it quietly dies in legal. There must be a better way.

I mentioned this elsewhere on this thread. I completely agree with the sentiment.

In a "when I'm king" kind of way I thought it would be great if tech leads had a modest budget for open source contributions (with a minimal amount of oversight to assure it wasn't being funneled off to their friends account).

It might also help with legal / finance to have these funds earmarked so that they only had to approve it in the beginning.

OSS could use similar licensing as some SaaS where it's free for personal use or commercial use up to certain limits and then you have to pay. This would ensure developers can use it freely but at some time a company would have to either pay it or ditch it.

However I see two issues with this model: - the community will shit on it like it's not real OSS - big companies will start banning the use of such licenses

The other alternatives many are doing are paid support, priority issues for sponsors, paid for issues, etc.

If OSS used a non-OSS license like what you suggest then of course it wouldn't be "real OSS".

https://opensource.org/osd - "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" includes "it may not restrict the program from being used in a business".

"paid support" means you have to make sure your software is good enough to use and crappy enough to need support.

That is the AGPL (free)/Commercial(paid) dual license. Its pretty popular.

I am not from legal, but too me there the problem would be: you use a product, but you dont 'buy' it, you 'donate' to the guy who made it, who is also 'super nice' and fixes some stuff about the product you need. This looks like a work/service/purchase agreement in disguise. Actually you dont want that to be possible.

From what I gathered the problem is often that most corporate legal departments are overworked so small donations to open source projects are just never high priority enough to displace other tasks they have in their queue.

Would making them large donations solve the problem there? ;)

I tried commercial FOSS development. An older version was available at no cost, the newest version cost money. Both were MIT licensed.

If you were a company, and wanted to pay me, it was easy - send me a PO and you would get the source code to the newer, faster, more capable version.

Nothing in that looks like a donation.

I did it this way precisely because giving someone money for being "super nice" and distributing no-cost FOSS software DOES NOT FIT with the accounting mechanisms of most companies.

Even with this, I was at one pro-FOSS workshop. One of the presenters described how they used my no-cost version and how great it was. (Did I know they used the software? Not until that day.) I pointed out that many FOSS projects are underfunded. Their response was that it was so hard to get their company to fund FOSS projects (along lines that cageface observed).

I pointed out that it's really easy to pay for my project.

They still never bought a copy or support contract.

I came out of that workshop convinced that the primary reason companies like FOSS is because it's generally available at no cost. Not because it reduces long-term dependencies on external parties, not because it improves software development methodologies, and not because it's an essential liberty. But simply because of the cost.

> "I came out of that workshop convinced that the primary reason companies like FOSS is because it's generally available at no cost. Not because it reduces long-term dependencies on external parties, not because it improves software development methodologies, and not because it's an essential liberty. But simply because of the cost."

This was, or at least should have been, known from the beginning; I've certainly been saying it since the '90s. When people were proclaiming FOSS to be "free as in beer and free as in speech", it was pretty clear that most people stopped listening after the first four words.

Yes, most FOSS business models of the 1990s were based on secondary effects. Like "people will pay you to add features / support the software / integrate your software in their system."

I deliberately did NOT use that model. Rather, you pay $$$ and get commercial software, which happens to be under a FOSS license.

In other words, I wanted to see what happens if it's not "free as in beer". If you are willing to pay for software, will you pay more, or less, for a FOSS license instead of a commercial one?

Turns out, people don't care - they want the cheapest one. At least, my customers' willingness to pay more for a FOSS license doesn't match my economic risk for selling under a FOSS license.

That cost is measured in dollars and in friction, not just dollars. There’s no software that I won’t pay $25 for if it helps my work. There’s some software that I’ll pay $100 for. It’s again difficult in the $100.01 to $1000 range and opens up again over that (only if the value is there of course).

It’s fair to assume that slightly different purchasing approvals are needed in the buckets above. In all cases, I’m making an RoI calculation and a return-on-effort calculation.

$0 and not AGPL hits a sweet spot on both RoI and RoE.

The software was in the $25K+ range. It's a rather different market, and different sales techniques -- made harder because my FOSS-only distribution model meant I couldn't distribute an evaluation version with more restrictive licensing.

The non-FOSS pricing is cheaper, but still in the $10K range. My last sale took about 15 months from start to finish.

FWIW, I got strong feedback that people wouldn't buy it with GPL licensing. It's library software designed to be embedded wherever you need it, so I can understand that.

Getting a new supplier in our ERP system is a nightmare. Also for each order three quotations needed from different suppliers...

One of my customers' ERP system is a nightmare so they outsource many purchases to a reseller. I didn't understand what was going on when the reseller contacted me, and ended up being added as a supplier to my customer's ERP.

I then got paid twice. After 9 months and multiple inquiries I still don't know how to give them their money back!

That actually happens more than you might think. I've worked at a couple of open source product companies in the data management field. In both cases we had deals from corporate users who wanted to ensure we would continue to maintain software they liked. The sums are not small either--I've seen them run into hundreds of thousands USD.

It definitely helps keep the lights on--and also helps justify the open source model to investors and the like. (Anyone reading this who has done such a deal, y'all rock.)