4 ms·

The EU should just pay anybody who makes Open Source contributions. Problem solved. Europeans get their own tech stack. Can compete again with US companies, a

The EU should just pay anybody who makes Open Source contributions. Problem solved. Europeans get their own tech stack. Can compete again with US companies, as the all the cost for building infrastructure is externalized.

golergka 5y ago
I understand the intention behind such a proposal, history of unintended consequences of government intensives should stop any sensible person from implementing anything remotely like that. Do you remember how one company promised people a free shirt for open source contributions, and how it resulted in an epic shitstorm of garbage patches? Just a few months ago. Now, imagine this, but with actual money instead of T-shirts.
- erwald 5y ago
  it could take other forms though, for instance you could identify people who are already maintaining or creating significant foss projects and pay them while they keep working on them. probably it makes sense to limit this to the most productive/driven few. it should be really straightforward (though time-consuming) to see if someone is cheating, because all the work is there in public view in the form of git commits.
- ramboldio 5y ago
  This is for public policy people to figure out. They do stuff like that all the time. Of course it's not easy. But if it works, can be tremendously effective. Maybe a starter would be to give some maintainers of already successful projects a salary, if they want. Impossible to game.
  - ramboldio 5y ago
    In fact, it is way easier to spot fraud in Open Source projects than in government subsidies literally in any other sector.
  - arp242 5y ago
    Actually you can receive (modest) grants for this, for example from NLnet. I've been writing open source software full-time for the last two years funded partly by this. There are also other grants I believe, but I'm not really an expert on this. I just know there are actually possibilities.
  - golergka 5y ago
    They indeed do "stuff like that" all the time. That's exactly my point.
jkingsbery 5y ago
Right. Last I read, Hacktoberfest created a huge amount of spam for Open Source contributions, and all that was on the line there was a t-shirt. You seem to be suggesting that real money should be involved - do you think the outcome will be different than Hacktoberfest?
- kaba0 5y ago
  Yes? Like donating money to a well-established project is very different than sending a t-shirt to whoever creates a repo with 2 commits or what..
  - jkingsbery 5y ago
    If people are willing to create a ton of spam for a t-shirt, I would imagine that a lot more spam would be created if contributions were rewarded with more money. Or at least, it's not immediately clear what mechanisms would exist that would prevent spam pay-for-contributions that also wouldn't work for t-shirt contributions.
goodpoint 5y ago
EU is already the biggest contributor to Open Source. And I fully agree that FOSS should be paid collectively like civil infrastructure. But we need to be careful with the freeloaders. Big companies coopted FOSS into unpaid labor: anything released with permissive licenses can be proprietarized by SaaS/Cloud companies. Almost always US based. This would turn European financial contributions to FOSS into a gift for FAANGs. This is why the European Union Public Licence is copyleft and compatible with GPL. But it's not enough.
cryptica 5y ago
That would be a great strategy and probably wouldn't cost much. Pay open source project authors to maintain popular projects. Right now, technologists in Europe are starved of capital. We have 0 surplus capital to take any risks or to innovate; we're too busy chasing the next paycheck to think about building infrastructure. Even when we do build infrastructure, there is 0 government support; governments or tech companies don't make any effort to bring any attention to EU open source projects. All other countries have protectionist structures but EU imports all its tech, even though there is more than enough in-house talent to build it - They'd rather give out contracts to US and Chinese companies and have their EU citizens working for these companies as employees instead of giving their citizens a chance to actually run the companies.

golergka 5y ago

I understand the intention behind such a proposal, history of unintended consequences of government intensives should stop any sensible person from implementing anything remotely like that. Do you remember how one company promised people a free shirt for open source contributions, and how it resulted in an epic shitstorm of garbage patches? Just a few months ago. Now, imagine this, but with actual money instead of T-shirts.

erwald 5y ago
it could take other forms though, for instance you could identify people who are already maintaining or creating significant foss projects and pay them while they keep working on them. probably it makes sense to limit this to the most productive/driven few. it should be really straightforward (though time-consuming) to see if someone is cheating, because all the work is there in public view in the form of git commits.
ramboldio 5y ago
This is for public policy people to figure out. They do stuff like that all the time. Of course it's not easy. But if it works, can be tremendously effective. Maybe a starter would be to give some maintainers of already successful projects a salary, if they want. Impossible to game.
- ramboldio 5y ago
  In fact, it is way easier to spot fraud in Open Source projects than in government subsidies literally in any other sector.
- arp242 5y ago
  Actually you can receive (modest) grants for this, for example from NLnet. I've been writing open source software full-time for the last two years funded partly by this. There are also other grants I believe, but I'm not really an expert on this. I just know there are actually possibilities.
- golergka 5y ago
  They indeed do "stuff like that" all the time. That's exactly my point.

jkingsbery 5y ago

Right. Last I read, Hacktoberfest created a huge amount of spam for Open Source contributions, and all that was on the line there was a t-shirt. You seem to be suggesting that real money should be involved - do you think the outcome will be different than Hacktoberfest?

kaba0 5y ago
Yes? Like donating money to a well-established project is very different than sending a t-shirt to whoever creates a repo with 2 commits or what..
- jkingsbery 5y ago
  If people are willing to create a ton of spam for a t-shirt, I would imagine that a lot more spam would be created if contributions were rewarded with more money. Or at least, it's not immediately clear what mechanisms would exist that would prevent spam pay-for-contributions that also wouldn't work for t-shirt contributions.

goodpoint 5y ago

EU is already the biggest contributor to Open Source. And I fully agree that FOSS should be paid collectively like civil infrastructure. But we need to be careful with the freeloaders. Big companies coopted FOSS into unpaid labor: anything released with permissive licenses can be proprietarized by SaaS/Cloud companies. Almost always US based. This would turn European financial contributions to FOSS into a gift for FAANGs. This is why the European Union Public Licence is copyleft and compatible with GPL. But it's not enough.

cryptica 5y ago

That would be a great strategy and probably wouldn't cost much. Pay open source project authors to maintain popular projects. Right now, technologists in Europe are starved of capital. We have 0 surplus capital to take any risks or to innovate; we're too busy chasing the next paycheck to think about building infrastructure. Even when we do build infrastructure, there is 0 government support; governments or tech companies don't make any effort to bring any attention to EU open source projects. All other countries have protectionist structures but EU imports all its tech, even though there is more than enough in-house talent to build it - They'd rather give out contracts to US and Chinese companies and have their EU citizens working for these companies as employees instead of giving their citizens a chance to actually run the companies.