> My feeling is we're still in the Uber era subsidy period
I often wonder whether this doesn't continue indefinitely.
Uber was able to do this because it was just them and Lyft playing second fiddle, with a huge barrier to entry once the network effects had kicked in.
It just seems like the model space has way too many competitors, + OSS/Local options for them to ever be able to jack up their prices. At least once the datacenter bottleneck has been cleared.
The good thing is that while getting started sucks, if you're consistent with it you can train your mind to seek out and crave long term goal progress and completion in the same way you can train your body.
The parent of this thread is someone in marketing suggesting ways this could come out of the marketing budget, very similar to the workaround of invoicing suggested in your linked comment. Both are ways to make donating to OSS a business expense rather than a charitable donation.
However as a data engineer I strongly doubt that many (any) of the dozens of open source projects I use on a weekly basis were created for idealistic reasons.
They were almost all tools (or collections of tools) that were created to fill a business need, or to make a developer's life easier, and then open sourced for one reason or another.
I don't see any conflict with corporate sponsorship of these projects.
Never had any issues.