<div dir="ltr">It obviously depends on the org and the personalities involved. In the past, this strategy has worked for me.<div><br></div><div>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.<div><br></div><div>hth</div><div><br></div><div>Q</div></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 9:19 AM, David L. Willson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:DLWillson@thegeek.nu" target="_blank">DLWillson@thegeek.nu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt;color:#000000">I put this on Facebook, but then I thought that someone here probably has a good idea.<br><br><div><p>Should a business that receives great value from software libre, give money to the makers? If so, how much and to whom?</p><p><br>
</p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>Do you have ideas? How have you addressed this with your managers or in your business?<br></p><br></div><div><span name="x"></span>--<br>David L. Willson<br>Teacher, Engineer, Evangelist<br>RHCE+Satellite CCAH Network+ A+ Linux+ LPIC-1 UbuntuCP NovellCLA<br>Mobile 720-333-LANS(5267)<br><a href="http://sofree.us" target="_blank">http://sofree.us</a><br><br>This is a good time for a r3VOLution.<span name="x"></span><br></div><br></div></div><br>_______________________________________________<br>
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