Incentive to reduce employed developers?

Posted Oct 9, 2024 7:28 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
Parent article: The Open Source Pledge: peer pressure to pay maintainers

The problem I see with this per developer calculation is that it sets an incentive to reduce the number of employed developers. No developer is better off if the company boosts their per developer donation and mentions it everywhere for marketing purposes but does so by reducing the number of developers they employ.

Incentive to reduce employed developers?

Posted Oct 9, 2024 8:07 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (2 responses)

The fully loaded cost of a software engineer is often at least a hundred times this figure, if not higher. Adding 1% is not going to suddenly create a new incentive to fire people where none existed before.

Incentive to reduce employed developers?

Posted Oct 9, 2024 8:54 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

Oh, I missed the bit where the donation figures where per year, not per month. That indeed makes it less likely to be an issue.

Incentive to reduce employed developers?

Posted Oct 9, 2024 11:53 UTC (Wed) by aragilar (subscriber, #122569) [Link]

$2000 USD (I'm presuming the value is static, as opposed being 2000 of the local currency or some kind of equivalent scaling based on the local costs) can be quite large depending on the location (as noted in https://lwn.net/Articles/993355/), and the original maths assumed Google-level salaries, so while I agree it doesn't seem likely to change much overall (given the targets seem to be profitable US-based companies), there is the small possibility of misaligned incentives.

Incentive to reduce employed developers?

Posted Oct 18, 2024 23:45 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Isn't that the whole point of Open Source? To reduce development costs by sharing them with other companies.