[clue] Business and Software Libre

[Quentin Hartman]

It obviously depends on the org and the personalities involved. In the
past, this strategy has worked for me.

I always made a point of highlighting the savings we were enjoying by using
Free software when I was proposing projects or putting together budgets,
etc. Then, I would include a line item "Free Software Contributions", which
I line itemed at about 20-50% of the amount I had said we saved. That would
usually trigger a discussion about what it was for, which would lead who I
thought it should go to, etc. A few times I got checks written to various
projects, but more often we came to the agreement that the org should "give
back" but really needed the money elsewhere. That was common when I was
working in K-12, where we had way more time than money, and I was already a
sunk cost. In those cases we figured out a roughly equivalent dollar amount
of my time that I dedicated to doing OSS work during my workdays, usually
bug triage and user support since at the time I wasn't really much of a
coder.

hth

Q

On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 9:19 AM, David L. Willson <DLWillson at thegeek.nu>
wrote:

> I put this on Facebook, but then I thought that someone here probably has
> a good idea.
>
> Should a business that receives great value from software libre, give
> money to the makers? If so, how much and to whom?
>
>
> Let's say it's time to plan some spending. Non-free software costs a
> certain amount per licensed system, per year, and all Jo(e) Manager has to
> do is decide from whom (s)he will buy the software. But what about software
> libre / free software? How much should be given to the debian team, samba
> team, apache team, postgresql team, and so on? A business just wants to
> "pay the bill", they don't want to have to be expert. I can find no simple
> answer, but with no decision made, these wonderful contributors get
> nothing, and that doesn't seem right, either.
>
>
> Do you have ideas? How have you addressed this with your managers or in
> your business?
>
> --
> David L. Willson
> Teacher, Engineer, Evangelist
> RHCE+Satellite CCAH Network+ A+ Linux+ LPIC-1 UbuntuCP NovellCLA
> Mobile 720-333-LANS(5267)
> http://sofree.us
>
> This is a good time for a r3VOLution.
>
>
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