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We need something like carbon credits for open source. As in, if you contribute to open source you earn credits. If you make lots of use of open source but don'

We need something like carbon credits for open source. As in, if you contribute to open source you earn credits. If you make lots of use of open source but don't contribute back you need to buy open source credits. How we would value open source is a tricky question. Would AWS owe a gazillion credits for all the hours of linux and apache they've burnt? Probably doesn't make sense. Maybe a logarithmic scale. But the real value of open source isn't dollars but people time (which, if you've had a pile of dollars and tried to spend it to employ people to do something, you will know is not the same thing). How many people hours is there in producing something like FUSE, and how many hours saved by end users? Maybe that determines the utility. Until we have a value and a currency for open source there won't be an open source economy.

fierarul 7y ago
FWIW nobody donates their BitCoins. And very rarely their USD. So it's not for the lack of currencies or ways of showing support. People just don't value these projects until they get abandoned.
- driverdan 7y ago
  I used to only donate in BTC. It reduced fees and promoted the use of BTC as a currency. Unfortunately that's not longer the case. Fees have increased significantly and complexity has increased, reducing the number of non-profits that accept it.
  - fierarul 7y ago
    Imho BTC stopped being / trying to be a currency long ago. Now it's hoarded as digital gold. Which explains why it's not spent / donated as much.
ohithereyou 7y ago
To me, this is the root of the difference between Free (libre) software as defined by the FSF and open source software as popularized by the OSI. The primary case for open source is business and money - money is more efficiently spent on supporting open source, and all of the businesses that spend money on open source get to benefit from contributions from others. In this model an open source economy is desirable because that's how you prevent one greater fool from funding all of the open source software that everyone else uses without paying. The primary case for Free (libre) software is the social utility/social value of the software. Their case is primarily moral and ethical first. They're not against making money on Free (libre) software, but that's not their end goal. Their end goals are political and focused on end users, not businesses. I'm not trying to say one is inherently better than the other, just trying to highlight the differences.
- angry_octet 7y ago
  I agree to some degree, but I don't think an open source economy is fundamentally opposite Libre/FSF style objectives, in that they are not opposed to people getting paid for their efforts, but that binary only distribution and restrictive licencing are bad in a variety of ways. If we consider a company like Oracle, which seems antithetical to open source principles on many levels, it would be possible to treat them as an open source debtor. Transactions between Oracle and open source economy participants would incur a tax, making their products less competitive with others, until they started contributing or bought open source offset credits. This provides the dual benefits of funding open source and penalising non-sharing. Things that really cost companies nothing, like publishing their Android patches, become valuable, and keeping them private becomes a cost.

fierarul 7y ago

FWIW nobody donates their BitCoins. And very rarely their USD. So it's not for the lack of currencies or ways of showing support. People just don't value these projects until they get abandoned.

driverdan 7y ago
I used to only donate in BTC. It reduced fees and promoted the use of BTC as a currency. Unfortunately that's not longer the case. Fees have increased significantly and complexity has increased, reducing the number of non-profits that accept it.
- fierarul 7y ago
  Imho BTC stopped being / trying to be a currency long ago. Now it's hoarded as digital gold. Which explains why it's not spent / donated as much.

ohithereyou 7y ago

To me, this is the root of the difference between Free (libre) software as defined by the FSF and open source software as popularized by the OSI. The primary case for open source is business and money - money is more efficiently spent on supporting open source, and all of the businesses that spend money on open source get to benefit from contributions from others. In this model an open source economy is desirable because that's how you prevent one greater fool from funding all of the open source software that everyone else uses without paying. The primary case for Free (libre) software is the social utility/social value of the software. Their case is primarily moral and ethical first. They're not against making money on Free (libre) software, but that's not their end goal. Their end goals are political and focused on end users, not businesses. I'm not trying to say one is inherently better than the other, just trying to highlight the differences.

angry_octet 7y ago
I agree to some degree, but I don't think an open source economy is fundamentally opposite Libre/FSF style objectives, in that they are not opposed to people getting paid for their efforts, but that binary only distribution and restrictive licencing are bad in a variety of ways. If we consider a company like Oracle, which seems antithetical to open source principles on many levels, it would be possible to treat them as an open source debtor. Transactions between Oracle and open source economy participants would incur a tax, making their products less competitive with others, until they started contributing or bought open source offset credits. This provides the dual benefits of funding open source and penalising non-sharing. Things that really cost companies nothing, like publishing their Android patches, become valuable, and keeping them private becomes a cost.