I posted about this on Reddit a year ago, and I figured write about it again:
Like most companies, the one I work for will happilly pay for any employee’s license to a proprietary IDE without batting an eye. Therefore, I argued that I should be able to spend that budget on a donation to an open source tool that I use daily instead. After a lot of back and forth I finally got them to donate an amount that would correspond to what they would pay for a yearly subscription to a proprietary tool to Neovim.
Do you use Neovim at work? If so, I urge you to do the same thing! That way the core team can continue to deliver awesome new features to the editor we all love. Here’s a link to where you can donate.
I now got my work to pay a $400 yearly “Neovim subscription” for the second time.
To those wondering how I did it, I basically just argued that since employees at my work have an allocated budget for buying proprietary tools, it makes sense if we could spend an equivalent amount on a FOSS alternative. That way the money spent would benefit us all, and since we use the tool to make money we have a responsibility to give back to the FOSS project.
There was a bit of a back-and forth for technical reasons because (at least in Sweden where I live), payments and donations are handled and regulated differently, but they finally made it work.
If you also use Neovim for work, I encourage you to do the same thing! That way the core team can continue to deliver awesome new features to the editor we all love. Here’s a link to where you can donate. There’s also the official merch store if you would like to support the project that way: https://store.neovim.io/.
How I imagine this conversation went: “Look, I realize you don’t want to pay for something that’s free, but you have to understand that it’s virtually impossible to exit this program.”
If you exit the program, then you aren’t coding, and we’re paying you to code. :w on, coder.