"They could shut down three product lines with an email"
If you (Amazon, in this case) can put it that way, it seems like throwing them 10 or 20 thousand a year would simply be a good insurance policy! Any benefits you might get in goodwill and influence are a bonus.
How do you think Jeff got a 500 million dollars yacht? Not by writing checks.
But on a more serious note, it is crazy that between Google and Amazon they can not fund them with 50k each per year, so that they can pay people to work on this.
Specially Google, with Youtube, they can very easily pay them more. 100k~200k easily.
I'm just imagining them having 4 or 5 250K a year security workers pumping out endless bug reports for one guy in Norway who works on ffmpeg at night and weekends for free because he loves open source and demanding him meet their program deadlines lol
Double funny considering new-grads who may polish up some UI features or rewrite components for the 10th time will get paid 200-400K TC at these same companies. Evidently these companies value something other than straight labor.
If I had built up 500 million in a savings account to buy a yacht, giving 50k of that to FFmpeg devs would put off my ability to buy a yacht by nearly a whole day.
Boltzmann brain-wise it clearly doesn't make sense to wait that long.
> How do you think Jeff got a 500 million dollars yacht? Not by writing checks.
A rising tide lifts all yachts. If he had written the check, my instinct tells me, he would have enough for two yachts. Goodwill is an actual line item on 10Q's and 10K's. I don't know why companies think it's worth ignoring.
If you (Amazon, in this case) can put it that way, it seems like throwing them 10 or 20 thousand a year would simply be a good insurance policy! Any benefits you might get in goodwill and influence are a bonus.