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> 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 pai

by 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

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.