Open Source Maintenance Fee is ok, but the wording of 'sponsor' is not.

[super-brian]

Question

My company wants to use wix toolset as an open source, but to use the wix nugets, the fee is required, which is ok. But because the fee is to become a 'sponsor', the company cannot pay right away - to become a sponsor requires a whole different and complex process. Can you use a different expression than 'sponsor'? My company is NOT interested in becoming a sponsor to use this software, just becoming a customer is good enough, just like any other software and hardware manufacturers. Yes, becoming a customer or paying a fee for open source code is also weird, but at least legally it is way simpler and easier - if the contract says 'open source, so no service or responsiblity for using this software' then that's ok. we just need to use it as it is, since we pay not a whole lot anyway. (only $60 or more) If you can make another 'paying page' that uses 'customer' than 'sponsor' it would be much appreciated! (And please let me know)

Open Source Maintenance Fee

• I (or an organization I'm a member of) pay the Open Source Maintenance Fee by sponsoring the wixtoolset project because I support the maintainers.

[robmen]

The Open Source Maintenance Fee piggybacks on GitHub Sponsors' billing infrastructure for many reasons. GitHub has not (yet) made it possible to change the wording on the "Sponsor" button to something like "Pay", but they do make it clear that Sponsors is just a mechanism to pay the fee in their documentation.

I don't know what legal terms "sponsors" triggers for your company. If you have specific questions, you can take them to the Open Source Maintenance Fee Discussion forum and I'm pretty sure they'll get resolved.

Finally, just because something is "new" doesn't mean it's "weird". 😉

[marchewek]

While I agree that "weird" is usually the synonym of a different term (be it "unprecedented", "rare" or "I don't have a better word for it"), I also agree with the OP that paying the fee is close to impossible. At the very least in Europe (but probably not limited to), where we need an invoice, so a cost can be properly booked. From the accounting perspective it is indeed "weird" to neither have an invoice nor a formal donation contract - and since it's "uncommon", or more precisely "it's THE first time they have ever heard of such a case", it's unlikely that there will be any process for it in any larger organization. And there is a risk, that seems to be overlooked, that such processes will never come to be - it all boils down to what is allowed by the tax law. I myself am trying to find a way to procure the cost for over two months already, in different organization's sites across the world, to no luck. Please do take the feedback into account and make it easier for organizations to contribute. I know there already exists some alternative ways (firegiant license or github sponsors' invoicing), but they also require a lot more money (and that in turn would fall into budgeting processes).

[robmen]

You can pay by invoice. GitHub has a form dedicated to paying via invoice. They take feedback on that form and have revised it a couple of times already.

I am interested in what exactly the problem is with the GitHub process that makes it problematic. The issues raised to me in the past have been resolved.

[tonyqus]

I also encounter a similar case. One big consulting company in Germany wanna pay OSMF fee but they don't support "donate" because they don't have sponsorship procedure internally. The developer is very kind and he took some efforts to research the internal process and figure out one way to pay via bank instead of Github sponsor.

I guess this can be a major obstacle for most companies because they don't have donate procedure but pay license procedure. It cannot say you don't wanna pay OSMF fee but they don't know what to do.