Comparing salaries isn't easy. Europeans get more vacation, more sick days, other (better?) Health care, retirement funds, unemployment insurance ... also they eventually pay less rent etc.

Compering this objectively ain't easy.

What also doesn't help, is that, at least in my experience, Americans usually mention pre-tax wages, while Europeans usually talk about their wages after tax (not sure if that is the case here, since nobody in this thread mentions taxes). $11k is roughly €9k. With Belgian tax rates, you'll have about €4.4k left after tax. (Belgium is where I live, so those are the rates I know. In Easter Europe, tax rates are lower)

> Americans usually mention pre-tax wages, while Europeans usually talk about their wages after tax

Some Europeans. AFAIK all the Nordic countries are similar in discussing salaries as pre-tax. Dunno for sure how it's done around the Mediterranean, but I wouldn't jump to the assumption that it's net-in-the-hand there either. Could well be that this "European norm" is just a German and perhaps French (and apparently Belgian?) thing.

Everyone I know in Berlin (including Germans, French, and Belgians) talks about pre-tax salary.

An open source project funded by donations is not the vehicle to use to try to hike developer wages. Especially when that project is already underfunded.

The concerns about the project not making efficient use of the donations it recieves seem spot on.

I think you've misread this chain, the poster above me wasn't talking about OpenSource, just hiring in general, and my initial comment was saying 132k isn't going to get you very far.

I was responding to that poster's general comment about hiring quality engineers.