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Ask Slashdot: How To Get Open Source Projects To Take Our Money?
New submitter wkaan writes "Last financial year, we had an underspend at work, and it was suggested and agreed that we should give some cash away — $20k to be exact — to open source projects. Four projects were selected. A management catch was that it could not appear to be a donation and it had to be for something we had notionally received in the current financial year. At that time it was early June, our financial year finishes at the end of June. The four projects were emailed using the most relevant looking contact address on their website. Often this was 'Finance' or 'Donations' contact. What do you know, none of the projects that were contacted could work out a way to accept our money. We were unable to give a cent of the twenty grand away, not even a cent. All somebody needed to do was invoice us for something (perhaps 'support' or whatever) and they'd have received $5000. Of the projects contacted, two never replied to our mail — perhaps they thought it a scam? The other two contacted couldn't work out what to invoice and just went away. Is open source too rich to need the money? Have you got a funny donation story? Better still, do you have a way this can be streamlined when we have our next underspend? The goal was not to have a funny (sad) story, but to support the projects that support our business." For those of you with open source projects for which would you would like to take donations but sometimes cannot, what complications get in the way?
All of the answers here seem to be coming from people who have never worked (or don't understand) how the commercial world works and are saying "scam" "fraud" and accusing you of all sorts of nonsense. They are full of it, ignore them.
I get it - your department has a budget for software. Your budget is annual, and at the end of the year, you realized you hadn't spent your entire budget. Someone goes, "hey, let's support open source - we use it!". You then try to find open source to support, and pick four projects, and have zero success getting people to take the money. You have to get them to take it quickly, because if you don't spend the money by the end of your accounting year, it is gone. This is totally normal.
I think the issue is, (a) the people who work on open source sometimes don't understand how businesses work and (b) they are (like everyone should be) tuned into the fact that there are scams out there and things that sound too good to be true sometimes are. But at the end of the day, all you want is a receipt from them saying "we took your money", because otherwise your company will think you created a shell company and paid yourself. You don't care if it is a donation - you don't want the tax credit - you just need a receipt to satisfy your corporate anti-fraud processes. There is no fraud in paying someone for having done something in the past, i.e. having written open source software.
My suggestions, having never done this - you need actual human contacts set up in advance who believe your story. They need to understand how businesses work (it sounds stupid to people outside of large companies that budgets go away if you don't spend them, but unfortunately the world does work that way regardless of whether it sounds stupid). Maybe posting to a mailing list / support forum, instead of trying to email individuals, would get your more traction. You literally just need one prominent developer on the project to take the money - it doesn't have to be the "project", which may not even exist as a traditional legal entity. They will have to pay taxes on the money as income, which isn't a scam, but it also isn't your problem if you are paying them, it's theirs (legally).