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/.
Impressive persuasion! I can’t imagine that ever working at any company I’ve worked at.
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.
It also comes out of a difference financial bucket, from a tax perspective.
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.
Damn that’s pretty based my guy.
Thank you for your service. o7
You are an awesome user! Nice job!
Is neovim separate from vim development?
Yes it’s a fork
Yeah I looked it up, there seemed to be some hubbub regarding their divergence. But I’m not invested enough to care much
Many years ago the Unicode Consortium has a fundraiser where you sponsored and emoji. Someone at my company sponsored one and posted to the internal mailing list. Short story short a couple dozen of us sponsored stuff and the company paid us back and wrote a cute blog post. Cheap marketing. Felt good.
I probably shouldn’t post this in a neovim sub, but the zed editor with vim mode is really, really nice.
It’s extreamly fast and has lots of lsps just working out of the box. However, you don’t have very good plugin support yet, but it’s coming. There are mostly themes and lsps as plugins right now.
Most neovim users love their plugins though, and you won’t get that with zed, yet.
I really like it but I’m really missing the git plug-in features I use in vs code. Other than that I’d probably fully switch
