Ask Slashdot: How To Get Open Source Projects To Take Our Money? 301
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?
Hire a developer. (Score:5, Interesting)
Spend the 20k to hire a developer which you pay to contribute code to these projects.
Re:$20,000 hammer (Score:5, Interesting)
It also sounds very suspicious and skeevy. I wouldn't have taken the money either. If someone called me up out of the blue and offered me thousands of $ on my OSS project, asking for some vague (and possibly fraudulent) invoice in return, and telling me they were on a strict deadline and needed it fast--my first inclination would be to ask them if they're a Nigerian prince. I would assume either:
a) scam/fraud
b) money-laundering scheme
c) IRS sting
And then I would have said "Thanks, but no thanks" and hung up the phone.
Re:$20,000 hammer (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine if you receipt at the grocery store listed the total of all 20 things you bought, then divided them evenly between all 20 items so your milk is $2.94, your bread is $2.94, your lettuce is $2.94, your apples are $2.94, and so on, I'm sure that a lot of people wouldn't even look. A few might raise hell over the numbers.
That's pretty close to what really happens. Some decades back, when the first stories started to appear about the $1000 hammer or $5000 power cord or whatever, there were also occasional stories from people familiar with the accounting practices who explained the bogosity of the calculations. Of course, people just ignored this, and repeated the stories as evidence of administrative (usually government) idiocy.
The basis of it all generally turned out to be the fact that many organizations (especially government) explicitly list an "administrative fee" on their invoices when purchased through the usual purchasing department. This is typically a fixed percentage of the bottom-line price. People would simply divide this charge by the number of items, to get the per-item administrative fee, and add it to an item's price to get the item's "cost".
Thus, it's common to have separate power cords, due to the different plugs needed in different parts of the world, So you might have an order for a computer (10,000), plus a cord that fits your wall outlets ($10), for a total of $10,010. If the administrative fee is 10%, the total charged your department is $11,011. You critics will then list the charge for each item as $1,001 / 2, or $500.50, so your price for the computer is $10,500.50, and the price of the cord is $510.50.
That's a pretty expensive power cord, right?
Not that we should expect any such accountant's explanation to have any effect on the situation. That would take all the fun out of reporting on bureaucratic idiocies (that our political opponents support, of course).
And there might well be $500 power cords. They might include things like a transformer that adapts to a wide variety of line voltages, generate AC output of a different frequency than the input, or have a storage battery to get through short power fluctuations, etc. But that's a different explanation, with different ways of misleading your readers or listeners.
Re:$20,000 hammer (Score:4, Interesting)
Mod this up to 6! With a dozen scams appearing in people's inboxes every day, all with some sort of odd story about why things must be done in something other than the most natural way, this story about short deadlines (a classic element of a scam to keep the mark from thinking on it too long) and some bogus invoice for something (anything at all, really! Trust us it's fine!) sounds a lot like a scam.
It's sad that all the scams out there make things this way.
Re:$20,000 hammer (Score:4, Interesting)
Totally off topic. If you could find a 'Black Mamba' audiophile (idiot) power cord for $500 it would be a screaming bargain.
But they would sell less of them. People that pay $2K for a power cord want to pay more, so it's better.