Helping Me – Helping You

A chat in Slovenia

A month ago, I was in Slovenia for the Dynamics Minds conference and met some old good friends from too far away, who actually traveled to this event. Thank you all for that!
It was definitely a good conference—one of the top three I’ve ever been to! But what stuck in my mind was something said by Three Bald MVPs – nz365guy, The Enabler, and Steve – plus Vlad, with hair, sitting on the terrace, with a beer or two. They asked me:

Why can’t companies support your tools??

I had no good answer.

Considerable feedback

I have received, and my friends know, that there is considerable feedback from users worldwide who request a way to use their corporate credit card to contribute to these tools due to the many hours saved on billable work and the higher quality of their deliveries.
With this in mind, you can now support my tools and get a proper invoice/receipt that includes your company’s name and purchase order details. You will get a PDF that you can use as part of your corporate expenses claim process. Read below for more details!

Using tools

Do you use any of my tools? Your colleagues? Why do you do that?
I think your answer would be:

To save time.
To debug.
To verify and improve the quality of our deliveries.

Am I right?

Counting hours

How much more time would you need without all these open-source tools? Can you count it? How much more expensive would your systems cost?

My guess would say it’s “a lot”.

Well, we can’t count it—we don’t actually need to count it. But I know you, you know me—the tools save us. Correct?

Why do I do tools?

It is not easy to explain why, just as hard it is for me to understand it. I guess it’s mainly because I need these tools, but now and then, I need more features and new bug fixes. Why do I need it? It’s very much possible to only use those features and tools delivered by Microsoft… Right? But that’s a big nono for me, since:

I’m lazy, and I’m proud of it.

I’m also relaxing (sort of…) when I’m developing – when I don’t have to. It’s just for fun, to push me further, to improve my knowledge, and to gain experience.

I also do it because users in the community need improvements and are annoyed by bugs. By the way, that’s not a small thing.

For you

If I create these because I need them, why do I publish them officially and make them publicly available for everyone? It’s hard to know why… Is it because I’d like to share? Sharing is Caring, you know? I guess so.

I sleep calmer and better now that I know thousands and thousands of professional people use these to save hours, days, and months. I am very pleased about that.

Okay, sometimes it annoys me that these big companies (no names, but you know…) save a ton of hours every month. Do I just share tools with them – for free – so they can simply make more bucks? Yeah, that can annoy me now and then.

But still; I do this mainly for myself. Period.

Now possible

Due to our chat in Slovenia, you can now officially pay forward and support my tools with a fraction of your gains.

It shouldn’t be complicated—just go to Companies Can Support Open-Source Tools Too and fill in the form with as much info as you want to give me (at least the required fields). Then, select what you think my tools are worth for you, your colleagues, or your company, and enter your credit card (or any other option for paying forward).

You will receive a very clear receipt, which Stripe will send to you so that you can send it to your boss for an expense claim.

Hush-hush?

Can I even say this?
Does this make sense?
Or am I just greedy?
I don’t know.
Do you?

Think for a second about what it is worth to my colleagues, competitors, the whole community… even internally at Microsoft. Think about it.

I know there is a bit of hush-hush—especially when living in Sweden—about “getting paid.”
This post is less about getting paid and a lot more about the possibility of giving back a fraction of what it is worth.