Kudos to Bloomberg for doing this, and whoever championed it inside the company. Now if more companies would do the same we might be getting somewhere.
This! What all these ungrateful nerds seem to disregard is whether one company should take the responsibility of paying the curl author enough to match a year's worth of salary? Or should more companies (and there are many that make much bigger revenues) each contribute 10K to this project to total a year's worth of salary?
You don’t get to decide on someone’s salary for this kind of work. The value should be determined by the market. If 10,000 big companies find curl useful and they all value on a $10,000 contribution then curl should receive 100 million.
Yep. And people don't realize how difficult it can be in a large company to get finance to pay up for something like this.
Years ago before I was at the Free Software Foundation, they offered a bundle of books and t-shirts and even compiled copies of free software to companies for a few thousand dollars because it was a way corporate departments could donate with a credit card by way of buying some merchandise. Later, this morphed into a straight-up donation program -- http://patron.fsf.org
Why the anger? It may not be a ton of money, but this is a lot more than what the utterly vast majority of companies do for the open source ecosystem they profit from.
The Curl author made the choice to give away his project for free, no one owes him money. So it is nice to see a company giving back, because they did not have to.
The anger may stem from the fact that many entites feel like they're owed instant fixes, free support or backwards compatibility etc. from libre/open software. 10k$ doesn't come close to some demands people expect
However, I agree with the fact that it's nice that Bloomberg gives back and it may encourage people in other orgs to push their org to do the same.
> The Curl author made the choice to give away his project for free, no one owes him money.
Technically true, yet in some cases I'm reminded of folks playing music for tips in public. No one enjoying the music owes the musician, though some of them could record / stream it (perhaps supplemented with commentary) for a profit. Would it be ethical for them to contribute nothing or only pennies?
If the musician puts up a sign that says "Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this performance for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted", then yes, it would be ethical to record/stream it for profit - they've explicitly told you it's okay. Substituting "software" for "performance", that's what the curl license says.
This seems like the real story right here. It looks like the first grants went to curl, celery and apache arrow. I think it's great to see large companies doing this.
In my opinion, it's less about the amount and more about setting an example that this is something that moral companies should be doing.
My startup sponsors 25 projects/developers on Github [0], curl including, and none of them with a significant amount of money. However, if majority of companies that use OSS were to do so, the amount of funding would suddenly be a game-changer for almost all of these projects.
Total amount was around $175/mo at one point, though recently I had to cut it back (now at $85, at $5/mo per project) when I switched from a paid project to a pre-revenue “startup” I'm now working on.
Not as sexy as $10'000 donations, of course :^) Hopefully I can scale it back up when my financial situation gets more sound.
A lot of people each pitching in an insignificant amount suddenly make up a ton. I think most of us have a Netflix subscription's worth to spare for the things that enable us to make money (but even less still totally matters).
True. Unfortunately, there are many projects that are even unsexier and much less prominent than curl. I happen to maintain a project which is about as ubiquitous and only receives a fraction of curl's funding.
I think you could be bold and reach out to these companies (directly or via notices in the README, website, docs, install logs, etc) that you maintain these libraries and need money for it. Have developers champion for it, etc.
I think one of your issues is that your libraries are mainly used indirectly, e.g. a dependency on more prominent libraries / applications.
bagder could probably be a Staff level engineer at $BIGCORP, so at the very least, enough to pay him a hefty sum of money per year, plus all the overhead of actually running the project.
Readit News
Kudos to Bloomberg for doing this, and whoever championed it inside the company. Now if more companies would do the same we might be getting somewhere.
Years ago before I was at the Free Software Foundation, they offered a bundle of books and t-shirts and even compiled copies of free software to companies for a few thousand dollars because it was a way corporate departments could donate with a credit card by way of buying some merchandise. Later, this morphed into a straight-up donation program -- http://patron.fsf.org
The Curl author made the choice to give away his project for free, no one owes him money. So it is nice to see a company giving back, because they did not have to.
"The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it"
https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
We’re all horrible for not donating. According to that interpretation
However, I agree with the fact that it's nice that Bloomberg gives back and it may encourage people in other orgs to push their org to do the same.
Technically true, yet in some cases I'm reminded of folks playing music for tips in public. No one enjoying the music owes the musician, though some of them could record / stream it (perhaps supplemented with commentary) for a profit. Would it be ethical for them to contribute nothing or only pennies?
https://curl.se/docs/copyright.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/company/stories/bloomberg-ospo-lau...
My startup sponsors 25 projects/developers on Github [0], curl including, and none of them with a significant amount of money. However, if majority of companies that use OSS were to do so, the amount of funding would suddenly be a game-changer for almost all of these projects.
[0]: https://github.com/orgs/ProteinQure/sponsoring
Total amount was around $175/mo at one point, though recently I had to cut it back (now at $85, at $5/mo per project) when I switched from a paid project to a pre-revenue “startup” I'm now working on.
Not as sexy as $10'000 donations, of course :^) Hopefully I can scale it back up when my financial situation gets more sound.
$10,000 to CURL
$10,000 to Apache Arrow
$10,000 to Celery
Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/company/stories/bloomberg-ospo-lau...
I think one of your issues is that your libraries are mainly used indirectly, e.g. a dependency on more prominent libraries / applications.
I see lots of people saying this is basically like crumbs for pigeons, but no idea what a fully funded curl project would be.
The former is at least somewhat resistant to conflicts of interest.