Adjusted for each company's market capitalization, this is the equivalent of Google ($1.9T market cap) directly injecting ~$290,000,000 into the hands of open source maintainers.
I think instead of getting fixated on the dollar value and its impact, it's more meaningful to think about the message this sends. $2k/engineer is a more meaningful metric.
It is merely an exercise to place in context the scale of the contribution relative to Sentry's size as a company.
FWIW, Google has $136B cash in hand[1], and that figure has historically grown $10-20B year-over-year, so it does not have to raise capital to make OSS donations. The figure I cited – $290,000,000 – might sound like an insane number, but it is a rounding error on their balance sheet.
(Also, to be clear this was not a shot at Google, their history of OSS contribution, or anything like that – I just chose some random mega cap company.)
I'm genuinely curious what they donate, maybe it's already that much? More? Less? No idea. Also, at their scale cost of FTEs dedicated to upstream open source becomes a significant consideration. How many kernel hackers do they employ?
Every engineer worth retaining is realistically responsible for at least $2000 more in real corporate income or institutional savings than was anticipated in any single year. The bigger the organization the more I would think they leverage the same engineering successes to higher dollar amounts than that.
Many of course get bonuses well in excess of this baseline when even larger contributions are recognized.
I would like to see someone prosperous & generous donate to the Syslinux Project so they can update to a point where they have a Microsoft-signed SecureBoot universal multiboot solution for UEFI so it will be as useful as it was under BIOS booting. Ideally, if a signed "shim" is involved it would be universal so it would boot any form of Linux using either GRUB or Syslinux, once the official update is released and adopted by the distros.
Google probably injects way more than that to fund open source projects: it is called working at Google. $290M is a measly, 600 avg employees or so (let's just assume ~500k for an average gSWE in Bay Area). These cash donations may be nice for indie projects but they are really too small to move the needle at scale. Real-world open source is by-and-large built and funded by corporate employees.
I think instead of getting fixated on the dollar value and its impact, it's more meaningful to think about the message this sends. $2k/engineer is a more meaningful metric.
Disclosure: I am a Sentry employee.