At my workplace a common theme is that folks that use a piece of software heavily as part of their job use the big professional tools both because it is worth paying more for a better tool considering how much value they get out of it, and because it aids in collaborating for everyone to use the same tools.
People who only use a tool occasionally are the ones using Paint.net, Krita, Inkspace, Audacity, etc. Part of that is to save money, but a much bigger part is that it's too much hassle to go through procurement when it isn't absolutely necessary. More hours would be spent paying for the tool then would be spent using it.
That makes it a hard sell to get corporate donations. From the corporate perspective, the tool is completely off their radar because their employees are using it to intentionally bypass corporate bureaucracy.
Absolutely. But sometimes the best in class tool is open source (see: ffmpeg), resulting in a win-win-win for the accounting department, for the developer freed from bureaucracy, and for open source as a whole. It would be nice to live in a world where this was the case more often.
> From the corporate perspective, the tool is completely off their radar because their employees are using it to intentionally bypass corporate bureaucracy.
If something is priced cheaply enough to be paid for out of pocket by an "individual contributor," but for a work purpose, that's a big deal.
The bigger takeaway is that all seemingly B2B software is still B2C in disguise.
On the other hand, the kind, smart people making Krita aren't in it to run a sales pipeline. Like even if the diehard, nonparticipating libertarian rationalists are right, if it's true that every person on Earth would happily be a billionaire, most people think sales isn't fun or meaningful.
If you want to make the world more meaningful in your own way, I appreciate that the limit of fundraising to that goal is donations.
People who only use a tool occasionally are the ones using Paint.net, Krita, Inkspace, Audacity, etc. Part of that is to save money, but a much bigger part is that it's too much hassle to go through procurement when it isn't absolutely necessary. More hours would be spent paying for the tool then would be spent using it.
That makes it a hard sell to get corporate donations. From the corporate perspective, the tool is completely off their radar because their employees are using it to intentionally bypass corporate bureaucracy.