Re:Paying Maintainers Isn’t a Magic Bullet
by varispeed on Monday December 05, 2022 @09:31AM
(#33866098)
> Sure, but "free" is frictionless for most developers at any business while "cheap" would still incur going through the purchasing process (at bigger corporations and/or governments) or asking your manager to pull out the company creditcard.
This is really a non issue. Developers can evaluate whether the product meets needs and then get whoever is responsible to pay. In every company I worked, when I needed a commercial product, I put my case forward and most of the time got the company card to pay without issue.
I simply can't see how this is a valid excuse. No amount of friction can justify people not being paid for their work.
After all we can say why pay workers at all if there need to go through payroll, it's such a hassle...
Sure, but "free" is frictionless for most developers at any business while "cheap" would still incur going through the purchasing process (at bigger corporations and/or governments) or asking your manager to pull out the company creditcard. From my experience with bigger orgs, it would be MUCH cheaper for the organization to write most dependencies in-house than to go through the process of buying it off the shelf. Even if the OSS dependency would only cost 1 USD for lifetime use or something.
This goes for most small-ish dependencies like test runners, API clients and even simple ORMs. Very small things like left-pad or faker.js would be much simpler to write in-house.