One of the problems with large companies using these free libraries and tools is that the people who are choosing to use these free resources are just developers themselves -- they usually have little power to allocate the much deserved resources to the shoulders that they're standing on.
Because of this, there is a huge untapped opportunity to allocate resources better to pay open source contributors for their hard work.
It would be useful if there was a github (or whatever) license type that required payment above a certain threshold. A student might get free use, but a commercial endeavor might pay a little or a lot depending on the value they're getting.
Then, any libraries that you use with that license type would draw on the monthly deposit for your license level (more of your budget would go toward the libraries that you get more value from). For example, if your company pays $100/month, 50% of that may go to one library that provides a lot of value, while 1% might go to a library that provides less. Proper allocation would require the user to guage this, and it might be a little unfair but it's more fair than the 0% they're getting now.
Any resource you're using would have to get at least 1% of your allocation. If you're only using two libraries and you don't allocate value manually, each library would automatically get 50% of your monthly budget.
Repos could also choose to allocate a percentage of their draw to go toward bounties to resolve bugs, make improvements, etc. To help pay and incentivize others to contribute.
At some point it becomes operationally risky for a company to freeload when they get to a certain size so you see things like enterprise support or hiring dedicated engineers to support the software.
I think you will find examples of this at lots of large tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon). Linux kernel is a good example here and key features like cgroups were started at Google
Because of this, there is a huge untapped opportunity to allocate resources better to pay open source contributors for their hard work.
It would be useful if there was a github (or whatever) license type that required payment above a certain threshold. A student might get free use, but a commercial endeavor might pay a little or a lot depending on the value they're getting.
Then, any libraries that you use with that license type would draw on the monthly deposit for your license level (more of your budget would go toward the libraries that you get more value from). For example, if your company pays $100/month, 50% of that may go to one library that provides a lot of value, while 1% might go to a library that provides less. Proper allocation would require the user to guage this, and it might be a little unfair but it's more fair than the 0% they're getting now.
Any resource you're using would have to get at least 1% of your allocation. If you're only using two libraries and you don't allocate value manually, each library would automatically get 50% of your monthly budget.
Repos could also choose to allocate a percentage of their draw to go toward bounties to resolve bugs, make improvements, etc. To help pay and incentivize others to contribute.
Is there anything like this out there?