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Other industries have collections agencies, i.e. the PRS in the UK https://www.prsformusic.com/what-we-do/prs-and-mcps https://www.prsformusic.com/what-we-do/pr

by buro9 5y ago

Other industries have collections agencies, i.e. the PRS in the UK https://www.prsformusic.com/what-we-do/prs-and-mcps https://www.prsformusic.com/what-we-do/prs-and-mcps What the PRS does is collect royalties when the works of their members (music) is broadcast on TV or radio, performed in public (even via a shop tannoy system), stream or downloaded. Companies wishing to use the music must sign an agreement with the PRS to give them an annual fee, and the PRS distributes it as fairly as can be based on some sparse data (i.e. sampled radio play, reported shop mixes, etc). Most played artists get the most, but everyone gets a little. What if the IT industry did similar? We have SBOM ( https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/what-is-an-sbom/ https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/what-is-an-sbom/ ) as a standard amongst companies averse to making software licensing mistakes, and just to have a record of what software at what version is running within an infrastructure. It should be more trivial for this industry to have a collection agency that fairly allocates payments to the software and dependencies actually in use... than it is for the PRS to do what they're doing. Yes the PRS has legacy, but all legacy starts somewhere. If you're running code I've written and still maintain, SBOM will tell you so... and a collection agency can come up with some payment structure (free to organisations below this much revenue, not-free to organisations above so much revenue, etc). Don't invent something new. Steal the idea and structure from those who made it work.

wmf 5y ago
Companies like Tidelift are exploring similar models for software.
WJW 5y ago
I'm not sure you want to use the music industry as the pattern from which to take inspiration for rewarding FOSS programmers. Most musicians don't make more than a couple bucks per month, if they make anything at all. Aspiring musicians waiting tables is a stereotype for a reason. Also how would you even start to decide how much postgres gets vs colors.js? One is a huge project with highly specialized code, the other inserts terminal coloring characters into a string.
- buro9 5y ago
  > Most musicians don't make more than a couple bucks per month Most musicians aren't represented in the sampled plays of radio. Those that are, are getting paid nicely. We don't have to rely on that, given that most risk averse large customers are already asking for SBOM manifests showing all software licence information, version numbers, etc. We have better data available to us.
  - WJW 5y ago
    The SBOM provides only a small amount of data and would not be sufficient to determine how to distribute payments. Knowing a company uses both PostgreSQL and leftpad would not be sufficient to determine how much each piece of software "deserves" out of the big pot of money. There are also many other problems that SBOMs would not solve: - How to handle forks? Would forks of a project be counted as their own project or as new projects entitled to funding of their own? - How to handle projects with many contributors? Would (say) antirez get all the money for Redis or would everyone who has ever submitted anything be entitled to a share? Both options seem ripe for abuse and this doesn't even go into the relative difficulty of (say) README changes and handwritten assembly patches for BLAS code. - Imagine a big open source project like React. It is obviously "owned" by Facebook and it stands to reason they would get a large portion of any monies allotted to React. Would a large portion of small companies paying royalties to Facebook be a desired outcome of this system? You can repeat this with MySQL/Oracle and golang/Google as just a couple of simple examples where you would have small companies paying taxes to big companies just to use the open source software. - Could the owner of an open source repo sell their rights to someone/something else? If so, how could you prevent a company systematically buying up all the rights to open source and charging a tax to all other companies that want to use "their" software? There are just so many holes in the idea of forcing people to pay for open source that I can't see this getting anywhere. The lack of payment for FOSS has been the biggest driver for adoption over paid software, if you take that advantage away it just becomes paid software without maintenance guarantees.

by buro9 5y ago

wmf 5y ago

Companies like Tidelift are exploring similar models for software.

WJW 5y ago

I'm not sure you want to use the music industry as the pattern from which to take inspiration for rewarding FOSS programmers. Most musicians don't make more than a couple bucks per month, if they make anything at all. Aspiring musicians waiting tables is a stereotype for a reason. Also how would you even start to decide how much postgres gets vs colors.js? One is a huge project with highly specialized code, the other inserts terminal coloring characters into a string.

buro9 5y ago
> Most musicians don't make more than a couple bucks per month Most musicians aren't represented in the sampled plays of radio. Those that are, are getting paid nicely. We don't have to rely on that, given that most risk averse large customers are already asking for SBOM manifests showing all software licence information, version numbers, etc. We have better data available to us.
- WJW 5y ago
  The SBOM provides only a small amount of data and would not be sufficient to determine how to distribute payments. Knowing a company uses both PostgreSQL and leftpad would not be sufficient to determine how much each piece of software "deserves" out of the big pot of money. There are also many other problems that SBOMs would not solve: - How to handle forks? Would forks of a project be counted as their own project or as new projects entitled to funding of their own? - How to handle projects with many contributors? Would (say) antirez get all the money for Redis or would everyone who has ever submitted anything be entitled to a share? Both options seem ripe for abuse and this doesn't even go into the relative difficulty of (say) README changes and handwritten assembly patches for BLAS code. - Imagine a big open source project like React. It is obviously "owned" by Facebook and it stands to reason they would get a large portion of any monies allotted to React. Would a large portion of small companies paying royalties to Facebook be a desired outcome of this system? You can repeat this with MySQL/Oracle and golang/Google as just a couple of simple examples where you would have small companies paying taxes to big companies just to use the open source software. - Could the owner of an open source repo sell their rights to someone/something else? If so, how could you prevent a company systematically buying up all the rights to open source and charging a tax to all other companies that want to use "their" software? There are just so many holes in the idea of forcing people to pay for open source that I can't see this getting anywhere. The lack of payment for FOSS has been the biggest driver for adoption over paid software, if you take that advantage away it just becomes paid software without maintenance guarantees.