This is great. I really hope that efforts like this will spread around more. If smaller companies like Tarsnap can do it, then what stops others?
> If you're at a startup which relies heavily on open source software, please take a moment to ask yourself: How much does your company contribute back?
Quite a few years ago, Gabriel Weinberg from DuckDuckGo launched a "FOSS Tithe" website which encouraged companies to donate some percentage of their profits to the FOSS projects they rely on. I've tried to encourage my former employers to do this when possible, or to pay people to contribute features to FOSS tools we were using. With varying degrees of success.
Now that I'm self-employed again, I can simply donate some of my profits, and am more able to contribute patches.
Sponsoring contributors to build features for your org is probably the best way to go. Your org will get an invoice, you'll get a feature. The project will be happy, and the developer will be happy.
In practice I doubt this is much of a barrier. Shareholders don't inspect every line item of a company's budget. For a decent-sized company, a few hundred thousand or even a million or so $$ per year would probably go more or less unnoticed by shareholders.
Remember that it's a common -- incorrect -- trope that public companies are legally required to seek maximum profit, etc. It's a lot more complicated and nuanced than that.
Tangentially related, apparently Sentry's own post mentioned in the article was removed from HN according this tweet https://x.com/bentlegen/status/1716884717394670015?s=20. Does anyone know the circumstances regarding why?
> Does anyone know the circumstances regarding why?
As someone working at Sentry my running theory of this is that we're not a YC funded startup and the posts are removed for marketing. Removal in this sense is that the post is still there, but it's pushed down in rankings artificially to be removed from the first two pages.
> The guidelines define “interesting” as “anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.” Surely a real contribution to the OSS sustainability crisis counts?
Arguing about whether the submission meets the guidelines is pointless when it ignores that users downvote what isn't interesting in their own opinion. The moderators are never going to artificially keep a submission active after users have downvoted it just because it meets a definition in the guidelines.
It's well known that to get to the front page you have to submit then get two dozen friends (with good rep) to upvote you within a short period of time.
Speaking of Sentry's program... I recently received a notification that as an open source developer, I am eligible for a payout from this program. Excited, I logged in to eventually find out that the payout amounted to... $15.
Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate the thought and effort that went into this, and I really hope more companies that use open source software follow suit, but I wish they would adjust their formula to not bother with the payout if it's less than a certain amount. It's just more hassle than it's worth, and the nice gesture can easily be mistaken for something else when it gets that low.
It's $15 per month so $180 allocated overall. Would it be more worth it for you if it were paid out in one lump sum for the year vs. doled out monthly?
Where is the evidence it was removed by a moderator? I know that's the first thought, but HN doesn't have many moderators, and usually the moderators leave a comment on a submission after taking a moderator action.
I regularly come across a submission on the front page that looks interesting, read the article, then come back and notice it's been pushed to the 2nd or 3rd page. My assumption is that it was downvoted by a bunch of people, but it's still annoying. I wonder if there are any sites that track these movements?
> ”Tarsnap has spent 100% of its December operating profits [$274,482 over 14-years] on supporting open source software”
Off topic: if you extrapolated that math, it should be hugely encouraging to aspiring indie/solo developers that you can earn a fantastic income as a 1-2 person business.
Nothing unique about December in terms of revenue. Even if people were prepaying large amounts in December (which isn't happening as far as I can tell) that would go into the "unearned income" reserve; profits are only realized when the service is actually delivered.
Usually its fourth quarter where many businesses move into the black for the year based on how they budget for things, hence things like "Black Friday".
is it really a fantastic income? tarsnap is well-known and we're seeing the value after 14 years of work. $250k/y is much less than what you would be making at a FAANG.
Just because it's less than a FAANG doesn't mean it's not a fantastic income. I make less than this, in a HCOL area, and I think I have a pretty fantastic income. $250k/yr is 3.3x the median household income in the US ($74,580 according to the 2022 Census).
Your math only makes sense if you’re assuming they got all their customers year one and have had no growth since. Who’s to say the donations last year weren’t $100,000 putting the estimated profits at $1.2m (assuming all months are roughly equal)?
If Apple, another big player in the BSD ecosystem, were to donate their December operating profit to open source, that'd be a game-changing $10 billion a year!
Shoutout to Tarsnap, who's already doing awesome stuff like this.
You know GitHub sponsors is a broken experience when you find out GitHub only supports 7 people on their own platform https://github.com/github companies really need to fund their dependency tree…
I recently learned that Kubernetes is running on a lot of free labour. The main draw and ever increasing underpinning for lots of services provided by the behemoth infrastructure entities…
Depends. Giving $1m to free open source is “bad” but hiring 4 engineers and have them write core code and then open source that is good. Microsoft basically does this (more than 4 of course)
Put the FOSS grants under the Marketing budget, call them "sponsorships" or "comarketing" or whatever. Corporations have a budgets for warm fuzzy stuff like that.
You realize that people like retirees have parts of their savings invested in things like Apple stock?
So this is literally taking money that would otherwise go to grandma and giving it to open source.
Money that would go partially to hedge funds, sure. But money that's also partially going to grandmas.
How about you let individual shareholders themselves decide if they want to donate to open source personally, since the profit belongs to them? They can take their dividend and they can transfer it to open source. But not have Apple force them to.
I mean, I personally just don't like other people donating my things for me. And if I want to donate my money, maybe I want to donate it to something else like fighting poverty or disease?
It's awesome for a privately-owned two-person company to choose to donate to open source. It would not be cool for a publicly traded corporation to take a twelfth of the dividends I receive and send them to a charity that is not of my choosing.
Great! 55 year old+ have an average net worth of about a million dollars[1]. They can spare a few bucks for open source which they use to generate a huge pile of cash anyway.
considering he's been doing it consistently since 14 years ago, he's a responsible businessman and smart guy (i.e., putnam awardee). good for you, mate! hope your business reaches the spot where you want it to be.
A trick for easily estimating powers of two is to remember that 2^10 is about a thousand. Thus 2^20 is about a million, and dividing by four, 2^18 is about 250,000.
Readit News
> If you're at a startup which relies heavily on open source software, please take a moment to ask yourself: How much does your company contribute back?
And this deserves emphasizing.
Now that I'm self-employed again, I can simply donate some of my profits, and am more able to contribute patches.
Sponsoring contributors to build features for your org is probably the best way to go. Your org will get an invoice, you'll get a feature. The project will be happy, and the developer will be happy.
TIL, thanks! Found this: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2227761/a-tithe-for-ope.... Looks like the original blog post is gone. Wonder if Gabe wants to revisit. :thinking:
Shareholders. Tarsnap enjoys the benefits of being a privately-owned company.
Aside: I think for a public company it might even work well if ESG stared incorporating Open Source contributions.
Remember that it's a common -- incorrect -- trope that public companies are legally required to seek maximum profit, etc. It's a lot more complicated and nuanced than that.
Deleted Comment
As someone working at Sentry my running theory of this is that we're not a YC funded startup and the posts are removed for marketing. Removal in this sense is that the post is still there, but it's pushed down in rankings artificially to be removed from the first two pages.
//EDIT: the explanation given last year was that it "wasn't interesting": https://twitter.com/chadwhitacre_/status/1716947994338021885
Arguing about whether the submission meets the guidelines is pointless when it ignores that users downvote what isn't interesting in their own opinion. The moderators are never going to artificially keep a submission active after users have downvoted it just because it meets a definition in the guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38001924
Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate the thought and effort that went into this, and I really hope more companies that use open source software follow suit, but I wish they would adjust their formula to not bother with the payout if it's less than a certain amount. It's just more hassle than it's worth, and the nice gesture can easily be mistaken for something else when it gets that low.
It's $15 per month so $180 allocated overall. Would it be more worth it for you if it were paid out in one lump sum for the year vs. doled out monthly?
I regularly come across a submission on the front page that looks interesting, read the article, then come back and notice it's been pushed to the 2nd or 3rd page. My assumption is that it was downvoted by a bunch of people, but it's still annoying. I wonder if there are any sites that track these movements?
Dead Comment
Off topic: if you extrapolated that math, it should be hugely encouraging to aspiring indie/solo developers that you can earn a fantastic income as a 1-2 person business.
Just because it's less than a FAANG doesn't mean it's not a fantastic income. I make less than this, in a HCOL area, and I think I have a pretty fantastic income. $250k/yr is 3.3x the median household income in the US ($74,580 according to the 2022 Census).
Shoutout to Tarsnap, who's already doing awesome stuff like this.
GOOG, AMZN, MSFT really?
Looking at the dates, it seems they sponsor a few people each month? Or some variation of that.
10^10 / 31 / 24 / 10^6
To beat Sentry's 500k, they'd need to spend about 2 minutes and 20 seconds worth of December profit.
Deleted Comment
So this is literally taking money that would otherwise go to grandma and giving it to open source.
Money that would go partially to hedge funds, sure. But money that's also partially going to grandmas.
How about you let individual shareholders themselves decide if they want to donate to open source personally, since the profit belongs to them? They can take their dividend and they can transfer it to open source. But not have Apple force them to.
I mean, I personally just don't like other people donating my things for me. And if I want to donate my money, maybe I want to donate it to something else like fighting poverty or disease?
It's awesome for a privately-owned two-person company to choose to donate to open source. It would not be cool for a publicly traded corporation to take a twelfth of the dividends I receive and send them to a charity that is not of my choosing.
[1] https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/finance/average-net-worth-...