Right, I was intentionally reframing the question. As a company we wanted to arrive at a budget through a global view and then allocate from there. Rather than look at 100+ projects individually and build up from "How much value did we get from this one? Or that one? And that one?" ... we wanted to reason about a fair amount overall. Is that bad?
What's a good (practical, repeatable, reasonable) way to determine fairness?
> If, by magic, these OSS components you use disappeared: How much would it cost to build them?
Hmm... I'm not sure that's a reasonable metric. If Microsoft disappeared it would no doubt cost millions to rebuild SQL Server. That doesn't meant that it would be reasonable for them to charge a 1 million dollar license fee to use it. The cost is amortized across their entire customer base. Similarly I don't think it's reasonable to expect Sentry to pay the NGINX developers 1 million just because it'd cost them that to redevelop in house. One would instead hope ALL dontations summed to something reasonable.
MSSQL isn't foss; you pay what it's worth to you as part of the licensing. That's one of the issues at play here, paying for software licenses versus using foss components to build your own saas, and then donating something to the foss maintainers.
A simpler way to say this: What's the average compensation for a developer, and how many hours do you think it would take for one of your developers to build some small foss component? I bet it's more than the $500 donation.
I'm still now following this logic. In this scenario, I can either use Microsoft Office for $200, or I can use Libre Office, where a $500 donation is insufficient because I can't pay a programmer <$500 to contribute to it?
This feels like a great incentive not to use Open Source.
What's a good (practical, repeatable, reasonable) way to determine fairness?