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/.

5 points

Impressive persuasion! I can’t imagine that ever working at any company I’ve worked at.

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26 points

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.”

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7 points

If you exit the program, then you aren’t coding, and we’re paying you to code. :w on, coder.

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66 points

Fantastic, I did the same thing at work. Donating a little to the FOSS projects we used is a pittance compared to overall development costs.

Sadly many projects don’t take donations or aren’t able to provide a proper receipt for a donation.

It’s easiest to convince corporate payment, if it’s called professional or enterprise subscription or something like that.

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11 points

It also comes out of a difference financial bucket, from a tax perspective.

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24 points

Damn that’s pretty based my guy.

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14 points

You are an awesome user! Nice job!

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