I think the open source model is fundamentally flawed and enables the big corporations to profit at the cost of the little people. The large corporations benefi

I think the open source model is fundamentally flawed and enables the big corporations to profit at the cost of the little people. The large corporations benefit disproportionately from open source as opposed to the maintainers. I thing what would be useful would be a programmer's "guild". * There is a yearly due - say $100/year * When you write software, you assign a license to anyone in the programmer's guild to be able to use that software. The requirement is that you have to contribute back changes. * Only people in the programmer's guild can use that code. * Anyone can join the programmer's guild, as long as they pay. * A guild member can allocate up to half their year due to support a guild open source project or projects. * You use the annual dues, to support widely used infrastructure that a lot of programmers are using. A big example would be NNTP This has number of very nice benefits. First of all, it ensures a massive pool of money to support worthwhile open source projects, that everybody is using (think NNTP, or projects like that). With that pool of money, we could add benefits for guild members such as employment contract legal review, immigration assistance, etc. If you increased the annual dues, you would be able to do more, but at the cost of excluding more people.