zlacker

This might be by design. Almost anyone writing software professionally at a level beyond junior is getting paid enough that $1 isn't a significant expense, whether in India or elsewhere. Some projects will be willing to throw collaboration and inclusivity out the window if it means cutting their PR spam by 90% and only reducing their pool of available professional contributors by 5%.

>>strken+(OP)
Indian here. You are correct. Expecting any employed Indian software developer to not be able to spare 1$ is stupid. Like how exactly poor do you think we are?!

>>Bayko+W3
I think the point was that if an aspirational minimum wage worker on a borrowed computer wants to put up a PR then it would cost them less than ten minutes of wages to afford $1USD in the US, while the same worker in India would need to put up about half a day's wages.

This is very noble in theory, but in practice you're not going to get many high-quality PRs from someone who's never been paid to write software and has no financial support.

>>Bayko+W3
It's not that outrageous. Apparently, 90% of India is living on less than $10 per day (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-living-with-less-th...)

>>Plasmo+C9
I suspect most of these people are not software engineers with a computer?

>>strken+(OP)
I've contributed almost full time to free software as a student. When I became a professional software developer, suddenly I lost the time to do it.

>>strken+(OP)
Students don't have a lot of money to burn here. They're borrowing money to study. You'll miss out on them. However, you're unlikely to notice. I mean, there is no control group in such experiment.

>>Bayko+W3
You misunderstood the point. The point isn't that you are poor. The point is that the burden of the money lies on average heavier on you than someone from USA. This creates an uneven playing field.

I like to compare it with donations. If you get a USD donated, that is the same USD regardless of who gave it. Right? Right?!? Either way you don't know how heavy the burden is on the person who donated. You probably don't care. But it matters to the person who donated.

>>Bayko+W3
>Like how exactly poor do you think we are?!

I get laid off and suddenly I'm poor and am weighing optins. And I'm American.

>>strken+z9
so we continue to make the rich richer and the broke students struggle more to get valuable experience. Very easy to point in 10-20 years under the coming "engineer crisis" why 'suddenly' can't support the systems we built.