Drivers passing through San Francisco have a new roadside distraction to consider: billboards calling out businesses that don't cough up for the open

San Francisco billboards call out tech firms for not paying for open source

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2024-10-25 17:30:06

Drivers passing through San Francisco have a new roadside distraction to consider: billboards calling out businesses that don't cough up for the open source code that they use.

The signs are the work of the Open Source Pledge – a group that launched earlier this month. It asks businesses that make use of open source code to pledge $2,000 per developer to support projects that develop the code. So far, 25 companies have signed up – but project co-founder Chad Whitacre wants bigger firms to pay their dues, too.

Whitacre, whose day job is head of open source at app-monitoring biz Sentry, told The Register his employer has for three years operated a scheme to pay developers who maintain and upgrade open source code.

"We do dollars per developer, the thinking being it's the developers and software engineers on the staff at a company who benefit the most from open source, who become more productive because of open source," he said.

"I had one conversation with a representative from a larger firm and he's like: 'Chad, you're asking me to spend ten million on maintainers.'”