How much should this non-profit ask for? My first guess was 1%, companies should give 1% of revenue. But some companies don’t have revenue, so let’s also say 1% of VC investments. And also ask all of us developers — whose careers are built on open source — should chip in 1% of salary too.

Doing back of the envelope math here, if some startup makes $1m, then they’d be donating $10k per year. Given companies making $1m often have $500k in annual salaries, 10k seems very affordable. As an engineer making $200k, would I donate $2k a year to open source? Again, that passes the gut check. If I’m building a a company that receives $3m in seed funding, would I pay 30k (once, upon receiving the investment) to fund the ecosystem on which my company is based? Sure — that’s about the cost of the lawyer’s fees.

All of this is predicated on a simple fact: all of us are making a significant amount of money on top of open source. More importantly, companies _require_ open source for their existence. As such, it is not just good citizenry, paying it forward and all that, but it is an investment in protecting your company against existential risk. If no-one is maintaining the projects on which your company relies, you will one day find yourself screwed.

It is pretty easy to part companies from their money, especially to handle existential business risk. But to make it happen, you have to do sales, not write code.

OSS doesn’t have a funding problem, it has a sales problem.

[1] I’m not throwing shade on anyone in particular, I’m just frustrated that developers hate sales and are comically bad at getting money together as a result. The RedisLabs Common Clause debacle is what triggered this post, but I don’t have any feelings on that.

[2] The 3rd way is for your parents to be rich, but honestly you’d probably be building a blockchain company instead.

[3] I believe RubyCentral is doing a model very like what I’m talking about.

[4] Because everything we do in tech is cynical marketing anyway, here’s where I ask you to check out my startup: https://darklang.com