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>We need better ways to fund Open Source projects. Yeah well, at least in the EU, we could start funding the awesome OSS projects that already exist around her
by ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>We need better ways to fund Open Source projects.
Yeah well, at least in the EU, we could start funding the awesome OSS projects that already exist around here, like KDE, OpenSUSE, and many more, with some of those billions of taxpayer money the EU has promised for "innovation", instead of shoving them in the pockets of publicly traded 100-year-old corporations like Siemens, VW, Daimler, T-Systems, Dassault-Systemes, etc.
But of course, that would only work if those funds were actually for innovation and not a hidden form of wealth transfer and corporate charity.
- jareklupinski 5y agothis; govt and taxing might quickly get at least some money into the right hands maybe some push by OSS activists to expose how much current govt software relies on their projects?
- fabianhjr 5y agoHeartbleed barely made a dent in funding.
- jareklupinski 5y agoscaring people into paying only really works for criminals maybe we should place some ad-tech veterans in the EFF :)
- WJW 5y agoUnless you can back this up with a threat of "we won't continue maintenance unless you pay up", this strategy is unlikely to make much of an impression. The OSS community has demonstrated to be quite willing to work for free, so why would you suddenly start paying them? Big organizations only change course when something is already broken and it is hindering the organization. In places where everything is just humming along, nothing changes. (This often applies to careers as well btw)
- jareklupinski 5y ago> so why would you suddenly start paying them? I believe governments should be different from corporations, and their goal should be to empower the people that drive the greater good in society, vs exploiting those same people's time for capital it's a very thin line :)
- burrows 5y agoYou’ve just replaced the word “empower” with “exploit”. Do you have some technical definition for the word “exploit”?
- jareklupinski 5y agoto define it i would focus on the contrast: the return of an exploit goes directly to the exploiter, the return of an empowerment is spread among the group of supporters who funded the empowerment exploitation is a one-to-one mapping, while empowerment is one-to-many? seems to feel like "the difference between a religion and a cult...."
- burrows 5y ago> the return of an empowerment is spread among the group of supporters who funded the empowerment But, workers by definition don’t fund companies.
- int_19h 5y agoExploitation of labor is taking all the wealth generated by someone's work, and giving only a portion of it back, while pocketing the rest.
- burrows 5y agoYou’ve substituted “exploit” with “generate”. What is the technical definition of “generate”?
- tremon 5y agoI feel this misses a larger point: a large chunk of valuable OSS work isn't about innovation, but about maintenance: keeping the same things working in a developing ecosystem. As long as we keep framing all software development as "innovation", there will never be enough money for the infrastructure underpinning the real innovative work, and that both makes it appear that innovation is much more expensive than it really is, and that software development is somehow maintenance-free.
- sigg3 5y agoSo true. The NTP project is symptomatic imo. So important and totally ignored until recently.
- hutzlibu 5y agoYeah, the boring, but important work. Money would help there.
- nextos 5y agoFunding bodies should consider spending money on boring maintenance and reimplementation of critical infrastructure in languages safer than C (e.g. Rust, but there are other interesting alternatives). We would avoid many future fiascos.
- ipaddr 5y agoReimplementation in rust sounds like you are trying to take much needs critical infrastrcture money and spend it on a fun project with small real world benefits. Boring things like documentation and security patches would go further.
- Jweb_Guru 5y agoGoogle disagrees. They might know something you don't.
- lelanthran 5y ago
- Vinnl 5y agoThe EU is funding lots of new projects struggling to get off the ground though; you'll encounter lots of them on the Fediverse: https://mastodon.xyz/@ngizero https://mastodon.xyz/@ngizero
- xyzzyz 5y agoFrom my experience with these projects and people running them, most are just grift designed to extract money from EU programs.
- ChuckNorris89 5y agoDon't know why you're being downvoted for stating the truth. In Brussels (and all over EU), many companies are founded just to leach off EU funds or to advise you how to do it, for a fee of course. They're basically red-tape companies, and it's big business in Brussels. Look around on LinkedIn and you'll see a bunch of serial entrepreneurs with fancy titles and pompous resumes, who found a new company every couple of years, each tailored to a new innovative way of sucking that EU grant money and producing zero real world results, other than a fancy looking website about the vision of the company, and writing lots documentation. And, honestly, I don't blame them, I blame the EU politicians for being monstrous idiots.
- jboynyc 5y agoThat may be true about the ERC, but the NGI Zero scheme works very differently. Take a look at the grantees and you'll see.
- ognarb 5y agoDisclaimer: I'm working full time at Nextcloud on pure open source software and on my free time, I (co-)maintain many KDE apps, one of them currently sponsored by Nlnet. Nlnet is a very nice initiative but let's be realistic the funding provided by them can support one or two developers working part time but not a team of developers working on a product full time. What we need is more small companies that sell services to governments. But this implies sales teams, support contracts, and a lot of organization. It's not something that every one want to do and as the skills to start.
- adrianN 5y agoOne of my bigger wishes is that any software paid for with tax money needs to be FOSS. Of course you can't do the switch easily for with all the legacy systems running everywhere, but there must be some path from paying SAP and Microsoft Gigabucks in perpetuity to building an ecosystem of free software that everybody can use.
- asiachick 5y agoI don't know if SAP contributes but Microsoft pays for C#, VSCode, and other open source projects. And further they support open source by providing github, github's free site hosting, and github's free CI.
- pessimizer 5y agoThe suggestion wasn't that the government should only buy from companies that have done or are doing some open source, the suggestion was that the government only finance FOSS. Also, nobody told them to buy Github. It wasn't a charitable acquisition.
- int_19h 5y agoMicrosoft also pays salary for several people who are core Python contributors, and sponsor PSF and PyCon. (I'm sure there are similar arrangements for other projects - that's just the stuff I'm familiar with.) However, Python is an example of a large and prominent OSS product. Generally speaking, stuff like that doesn't struggle to find sponsors. But there are all those countless small OSS projects that get used by for-profit companies without any financial support for their maintenance. There needs to be some arrangement to accommodate those, as well.
- einpoklum 5y ago> I don't know if SAP contributes but Microsoft pays for C# That barely counts, as C# is very Windows-centric AFAIK.
- majormajor 5y agoI don't think funding should be the sole determiner here. We don't expect any company which raises VC money to give 100% ownership of their code to the VCs. Labor needs to be rewarded, not just investment capital.
- johnmaguire 5y agoI've long been impressed by https://simplesamlphp.org/ https://simplesamlphp.org/ which is led by UNINETT, a state-owned company responsible for Norway's National Research and Education Network. It's a serious competitor to Shibboleth in the SAML space.
- adamdusty 5y agoAre you trying to say that Siemens MES on silverlight isn't innovative?
- nivenkos 5y agoThe EU should just invest in FOSS protectionism - money for FOSS if you work in the EU. Ban Microsoft and Oracle from public procurement, and invest the money in Europe. We have no Tech industry and pitiful wages because we've bowed down to this US colonisation for decades via neoliberal policies.
- npteljes 5y agoI can't agree more. I find it nonsense that EU governments and offices depend on an non-EU entity so much. FOSS alternatives could be forked, improved and maintained from EU money, public entities could use that by default, and they could also be taught in schools as the de-facto office standard, instead of the currently entrenched Microsoft stuff. This way EU would pay developers, advisors, teachers from Europe to create, maintain and teach software that actually supports independence from foreign powers and instead cultivates its own software culture.
- Zababa 5y agoI've been wishing for the UE to take care of the Mozilla Corporation for quite some time. This would reduce the influence of Google, and also force the Mozilla Foundation to stop using their money to sabotage Firefox and paying huge salaries to higher ups. I wish the EU would take tech seriously. Have people in the TC39, have people on the Rust board, have people working on Linux, things like that.
- account42 5y agoNah what we need is for the EU to make a hostile fork of Firefox so that the US in turn will fund Mozilla Corp. OSS cold war baby.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- silexia 5y agoThe problem with government solutions is that they are so easily corrupted. For example, here in Washington State, USA a law recently passed mandating long term care insurance. Sounds nice right? The reality is that this will be funded by an income tax that will then pay $116,000 per year person in a long term care facility. I have a friend who's dad owns a big chain of these, and they are profitable beyond any of our wildest imaginings. What started out with the legislature's nice intentions is really just a massive pork benefit for old and corrupt businesses.