Nah, even purchasing a 500€/$ piece of anything involves a lot of talking, procurement and waiting. At least in most german companies.

Sure, but even in German companies if you want to purchase a 500€ piece of software there's a procurement process that you can go through.

There's no process for buying a laptop for an open-source dev who's code the business depends on but who is not an employee, so especially in German companies, you don't do that.

Well, correct, you wouldn't buy it for a donation

You would usually proceed as a donation from inventory or you'd give them some type of credit for purchase (might come off the marketing dept)

When donating something never go with the more expensive option (in this case, actually going and buying something you make on the market)

Can’t you donate the money and then they buy the hardware?

If by "you" you mean "the corporation", then no. A software BU doesn't make donations. It can purchase things, which is the point of the quoted comment, but it can't just give money away.

From a corporate accounting perspective, a "purchase" is "we pay money and we get a thing". Sometimes the thing needs to fit a stereotype; "a hardware", "a service", "a contract", but the dance is the same; request a quote, get a quote, place an order, get an invoice, pay the invoice, get a receipt, get confirmation of delivery.

Iff the transaction fits that mold, then it's generally straightforward. If it doesn't, then you need to find someone with the power to override the organisation; in an organisation resistant to internal tampering ("corruption") that can be quite difficult.

Could you elaborate on that? I am not German but a few months ago I contacted a German company because we use their open source products and want to move to their new SaaS model. Instead of being the typical few clicks automatic experience they start to engage in a personal conversation to define the correct price. From the business perspective I couldn’t understand their approach, it surely kills more sales.

Could it be something with European privacy laws for storing data?

I wish we could just buy licenses sometimes ... I really hate fucking around with procurement processes

I think this is why US way of business is unique in terms of business and goes beyond Europe or Germany specifically. US (as a multicultural platform) pushes toward the acquisition of the good, BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) approach. It should be fast and will be faster. There is a lot of criticism about credit debt but US offers a lot of credit, the problem is more about how education and health were inflated that to credit itself. (IMHO).

This is really common for b2b sales, it gives you both flexibility to negotiate price and terms, especially for more complex/niche products or services.

It is not common if we are competing with multiple companies where you sign up and onboard in 5’.

If you are taking a company to a Saas solution costing XXXXX euros surely it would be worthwhile to spend a couple of hours investigating how you get the best price?

Its not that much of a hassle, many open source folks have donation setups these days and some can send you an invoice for support/maintenance services. In my experience it isn't even hard for a company to hire random maintainers as contractors to add features that are needed by the company.

Most maintainers don't want to offer paid support though. It comes with expectations of support. I just want to hand someone $50 for many hours of work already spent. But that's tricky.

I expect that for a lot of projects/people it wouldn't be hard to send money. Either the project already accepts donations and sends those to maintainers, the person already has donation systems setup, or the person doesn't need the money and ask you to send it to a FOSS charity (like Software Freedom Conservancy) instead, or you send the person and email and they go sure, here is my PayPal/etc account number for transfers. Personally, I'd be very happy with money for paid support though, in my experience its pretty hard to extract money from most open source projects, basically no-one wants to give you cash because the project already meets their needs.

https://sfconservancy.org/

Relevant Patio11 comment from 2016:

> We don't donate to OSS software which we use, because we're legally not allowed to.

> I routinely send key projects, particularly smaller projects, a request to quote me a commercial license of their project, with the explanation that I would accept a quote of $1,000 and that the commercial license can be their existing OSS license plus an invoice. My books suggest we've spent $3k on this in 2015. My bookkeeper, accountant, and the IRS/NTA are united on this issue: they don't care whether a software license is OSS or not. A $1k invoice is a $1k invoice; as a software company, I have virtually carte blanche to expense any software I think is reasonably required, and I think our OSS is reasonably required.

> I would do this more often if OSS projects made it easier for me to do so. Getting me to pay $1,000 for software is easy; committing me to doing lots of admin work over the course of a week is less easy. Take a look at what e.g. http://sidekiq.org/ , which is an OSS project with a commercial model, does. Two clicks gets me to a credit card form. If I actually used Sidekiq, Mike would have had my credit card on file the day that form went up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939

Sending an invoice might require some sort of contract, which may imply some level of support. Something OSS devs generally cannot guarantee.

Most open source software licenses explicitly say there is no support.

> ... the commercial license can be their existing OSS license plus an invoice

Of course, Patio11 was running his own show, and a larger company might demand more, but it is worth asking.

Support contract:

1. For the given amount of $5000 for the period 2023-01-01 to 2023-12-31 you are entitled to

2. Create a feature or bug request on our support system

3. Have a first response back in 96h

4. No warranties explicit or implicit that we'll be able to solve your problem blah blah blah etc

And then you are on vacation and some asshole in legal sues you because you didn't respond in time when a dev had a small problem they could've solved by looking in the source code for 5 minutes but wanted support instead.

Way too risky.

Agreed, this is only an example (but as you grow you can have someone look at your email - this is part of why it's a good idea to offer support contracts)

Invoices seem like a great idea. Becomes a business expense and can claim it off taxes. Essentially gov't kicks in whatever your tax rate is.

Creating a recurring meeting that cost company >1000 weekly? Sure do it.

Mid-2020, when the ARM transition was announced, Apple had a program where they'd send out developer transition kits (a Mac mini with an A14Z), but you had to request one, and actually qualify.

But yeah, it should be in their best interest to reach out directly to the developers of software like curl, zsh, git, Python... Everything they've been shipping as a part of their OS for 20+ years.

A12Z, and you had to justify it and pay for it. And then return it, for which Apple initially offered a token incentive but later ended up effectively waiving the fee with.