I posted about this on Reddit a year ago, and I figured write about it again:
Like most companies, the one I work for will happilly pay for any employee’s license to a proprietary IDE without batting an eye. Therefore, I argued that I should be able to spend that budget on a donation to an open source tool that I use daily instead. After a lot of back and forth I finally got them to donate an amount that would correspond to what they would pay for a yearly subscription to a proprietary tool to Neovim.
Do you use Neovim at work? If so, I urge you to do the same thing! That way the core team can continue to deliver awesome new features to the editor we all love. Here’s a link to where you can donate.
I now got my work to pay a $400 yearly “Neovim subscription” for the second time.
To those wondering how I did it, I basically just argued that since employees at my work have an allocated budget for buying proprietary tools, it makes sense if we could spend an equivalent amount on a FOSS alternative. That way the money spent would benefit us all, and since we use the tool to make money we have a responsibility to give back to the FOSS project.
There was a bit of a back-and forth for technical reasons because (at least in Sweden where I live), payments and donations are handled and regulated differently, but they finally made it work.
If you also use Neovim for work, I encourage you to do the same thing! That way the core team can continue to deliver awesome new features to the editor we all love. Here’s a link to where you can donate. There’s also the official merch store if you would like to support the project that way: https://store.neovim.io/.
Fantastic, I did the same thing at work. Donating a little to the FOSS projects we used is a pittance compared to overall development costs.
Sadly many projects don’t take donations or aren’t able to provide a proper receipt for a donation.
It’s easiest to convince corporate payment, if it’s called professional or enterprise subscription or something like that.
It also comes out of a difference financial bucket, from a tax perspective.