[drewfish]

As someone who works at a large company, $10k is in no way "a drop in the bucket". Sales teams might have a budget to wine-and-dine clients, but as a developer I have pretty much zero budget and every expense has to be justified.

This is probably true of any publicly traded company (as mine is) which has a legal obligation to shareholders to be careful that all expenses are worth it.

My understanding is that licensezero is essentially doing what you propose, but also addresses practicalities such as how/where to send payments, tools (for licensees) to aid auditing, flexibility in pricing (and changing the pricing as time goes by).

[coldtea]

>As someone who works at a large company, $10k is in no way "a drop in the bucket". Sales teams might have a budget to wine-and-dine clients, but as a developer I have pretty much zero budget and every expense has to be justified.

My idea was mostly meant for stuff in the category of Nginx, OpenLDAP, Postgres, Mongo, Elm, and co -- stuff that's used as the backbone of projects or services.

So, not just what some random developer in a big company might ask for their personal use. So, not something that some developer would need to justify for their use, but something that has to be accounted for when planning for a new project ("We'll make it in the Foo framework, which costs $10K/year for a company of our size").

If that was adopted, in the end, it would be a budget item like anything else. If they can pay $$$ to IBM and Oracle, not to mention the untold millions made by widget makers, chart libs, and the like, then they can pay a measly 10K to a project they rely on.