In my experience it's hard to justify companies doing things that don't have a clear reason. The reason doesn't even have to be a benefit, after all companies are made up of people many of whom want to do these things.
What I'm surprised with in this list is that with 4x the donations the change could be summarised as "more of the same". Don't get me wrong, another fellow would increase project bandwidth by 50%, an executive director might be transformational in management/logistics, but these are both just better versions of what the Django Foundation already does.
If I were the project, I'd be pitching specifics:
- A new fund targeting getting more of $group into Django development
- An executive director with a remit to run this specific new event
- Another Django fellow focusing on $project
Then, when a champion in a company is trying to justify a donation, it's no longer "can we give some money for no particular reason", it's now "if we send X, Y will happen". Maybe a company wants to market themselves as helping diversity efforts and they can do this better if they're donating money to the first or second example, maybe they're interested in a particular project, but I still believe there doesn't always need to be an ROI, just that having a reason helps individuals in companies justify it.
This is how academia, the arts, and other charities seem to work (as an external observer). Large donations are tied to specific projects, funds with particular mandates, prizes with a goal, etc.
Most of my career is thanks to Django, and I haven't really given back much. Sure, you can have some money.
I think out of the major web frameworks, Laravel might be the most financially successful? They raised millions of dollars recently.
Taylor's strategy of having auxiliary SaaS / PaaS offerings to the framework seems to work.
>Taylor's strategy of having auxiliary SaaS / PaaS offerings to the framework seems to work.
Sure, but it would require a business person to make it work and most of Django people seem more like straight developers who don't want to get into building "Django hosting cloud"
I'm not sure Django hosting cloud would be successful since most of Django sites I've seen are either legacy and hosting has been arranged or backend business sites that need inside the network. Greenfield public sites seem much fewer and far between.
> They raised millions of dollars recently.
Bit of an understatement: $57 million.
But of course, the majority of HN is still stuck in the “PHP is a stupid dying language” loop from 2012.
Favorite feature request if there was more money:
Fairly shocking how little is given to Django given how much value is taken from it. I'd have assumed a much higher number.