Bloomberg Launches Open-Source Funding Initiative

[Vistaus]

If I fund an open source project with 1 euro per year, will anyone be grateful for that or say that it is a nice gesture?

If I was running said project and I knew it was you, then yes, I'd be very grateful for any euro (so that includes 1 euro) per time/month/year donated and you would get a personal thank you from me. And no, I'm not kidding: this is the kind of person I am.

[unis_torvalds]

If I fund an open source project with 1 euro per year, will anyone be grateful for that or say that it is a nice gesture? I don't think so, and definitely it will not make any news. However if you compare 1 euro/my annual income to the sum that bloomberg spent/bloomberg's revenue, the former is multiple times higher.

PS. No an individual funding 1 euro to open source should be a news headline. However,if bloomberg spends at most 120000 on open source funding, they should still not make news headlines.

I agree that $120k is a pittance for Bloomberg, but projects and developers are funded on absolute dollars, not relative dollars. Therefore $10k makes a bigger impact than 1 euro, regardless the depth of the giver's pockets.

All in all, this is a positive development. Many profitable enterprises depend on FOSS software for their livelihood. Bloomberg is setting a positive example by tacitly recognizing this. Hopefully others join the trend.

[[email protected]]

One can argue that, if the bean counters start to notice huge amounts of money being thrown at opensource software, they will start to argue why not adopt closed source software anyway, since those selling them will say theirs come "with a warranty".

Do not tempt fate. Technical people are not in charge of most companies, and moronic decisions like the above can still deprive opensource developers of valuable money.

[unis_torvalds]

One can argue that, if the bean counters start to notice huge amounts of money being thrown at opensource software, they will start to argue why not adopt closed source software anyway, since those selling them will say theirs come "with a warranty".

Do not tempt fate. Technical people are not in charge of most companies, and moronic decisions like the above can still deprive opensource developers of valuable money.

Or they will simply cut costs (i.e. cut back on donations), seeing as these expenses are optional.
To the (in your words) bean counters, a zero-cost (or optional) expense will always be preferred over a fixed-cost expense. Enterprise software vendors don't come cheap.

[stormcrow]

If I fund an open source project with 1 euro per year, will anyone be grateful for that or say that it is a nice gesture? I don't think so, and definitely it will not make any news. However if you compare 1 euro/my annual income to the sum that bloomberg spent/bloomberg's revenue, the former is multiple times higher.

PS. No an individual funding 1 euro to open source should be a news headline. However,if bloomberg spends at most 120000 on open source funding, they should still not make news headlines.

The proper and polite response is "Thank you." People like you are one big reason why companies don't contribute meaningfully. They're damned if they don't, and damned even harder when they do.

First of all, you don't know how much FOSS Bloomberg even uses. They haven't (and won't) make a manifest public detailing what and where. Second, if I had a project that was awarded a sum from this fund, so long as the strings were not onerous, I'd be effin grateful whether it was $2k or $80k. Why? Because it's more money than I had to begin with. It helps defray costs. And no matter how much money Bloomberg actually makes, I'm not so greedy as to care either because individually that's entirely irrelevant to the helpful gesture.

[abott]

It's a pittance. Apparently to accept the pittance, I'll be required to be happy with it, too? Uh, no you don't. I'd be happier with $1 rather than $0, however if $10 is the critical point of my work and continuance, so what good is that $1 in reality besides being slightly compensated for work I should be getting paid for?

There would be 1000x more money in open source today if the companies profiting with it paid 0.1% of those profits their systems generate to the open software developers that maintain the systems they use daily.

That's sad, not okay, but that's the bad part of open source. And it needs a solution. This is it, but we need EVERY company putting in, and more. But considering most businesses love paying starvation wages, and screwing people's lives in general, we have 0 chance of that.

I feel the best thing to do, is nothing. Unless someone is paying you, maybe don't maintain your library, don't. I've seen that one kernel hacker Rene do sort of a "write it, show it off, and hold it until they pay me for that work." and at first it rubbed me the wrong way, but it honestly just makes sense. These companies can't even be bothered to document their protocols/hardware shit for the people writing stuff for tons of these drivers, making this shit. Fucking them any way you can is almost the only ethical method, honestly. lol. You know their guys have it all, and it's organized, yet they can't even be bothered to do that. So why bother making useful things for them? Sadly, people could get caught in the crossfire, but the abuse has to end at some point.

Bloomberg is at least on the right track, if this is for 1-3 dev projects this would be huge. We just need hundreds of more companies doing it so their software stack can actually be supported and not mirror how they treat all other people they hire. Like (sometimes literal) slaves.

[geearf]

Nobody likes a Karen

I'll never understand why you people use a first name as an insult... You know some people are named like that right?

[mathletic]

Bloomberg does also contribute by donating code. See for example 186 public repositories:

https://bloomberg.github.io

[AmericanLocomotive]

If I fund an open source project with 1 euro per year, will anyone be grateful for that or say that it is a nice gesture? I don't think so, and definitely it will not make any news. However if you compare 1 euro/my annual income to the sum that bloomberg spent/bloomberg's revenue, the former is multiple times higher.

PS. No an individual funding 1 euro to open source should be a news headline. However,if bloomberg spends at most 120000 on open source funding, they should still not make news headlines.

While I agree it's a small, essentially negligible amount of money for Bloomberg, up-to $10k USD per quarter is not a negligible amount for many, if not most open-source projects. It could even be game-changing for some. The ability to hire the services of other professional programmers to help solve a difficult problem, reach a certain milestone, etc.. is huge.

[Quackdoc]

glad to see at least some contribution back