5 ms·
> I suspect there does need to be a regular social renewal to resolve the tragedy of the commons problem. Wouldn’t the solution offered on LWN work great? Jus
by jorvi 3y ago
> I suspect there does need to be a regular social renewal to resolve the tragedy of the commons problem.
Wouldn’t the solution offered on LWN work great?
Just excise a tax (well, I guess a licensing cost) for open source use to any corporation that is above x$ amounts of revenue. Make it a tiny percentage (0.1%?).
2022 revenue:
- $400 billion, Apple
- $200 billion, Microsoft
- $120 billion, Meta
- $80 billion, AWS
$800 billion * 0.01 = €800 million of “sovereign OSS fund” funding.
And that’s just the big ones. Bing tells me the 2022 combined revenue of all NASDAQ listed companies is ~$6900 billion. That’s $6.9 billion in OSS funding you’d skim off!
What’s more, with how much that would improve open source projects, those companies would see enough productivity improvement that despite the 0.1% in skimmed revenue, they’d see a net benefit.
- ninkendo 3y agoWho will receive the funding from this tax? What criteria would you use to distribute funding? Windfall for the NPM leftpad module I guess.
- jorvi 3y agoI’m sure you could set up a non-profit organization with smart people that are passionate (but not dogmatic) about open source, that could selectively fund projects or even just GitHub sponsoring / bug bounties.
- marcosdumay 3y agoSo, you just solved general governance? No, you absolutely can't set such an organization and expect it to work. You are marginally better giving the task to some government body, but expect failure either way.
- jorvi 3y agoYea right man, based on a single comment let me just bash out a 500-page governance manifest + structure real quick. I don’t know what you were expecting.
- Dr_Birdbrain 3y agoOr, give a tax deduction for contributions to open source. This is America, new taxes are nearly impossible to pass, tax cuts are much easier to pass.
- bryanrasmussen 3y agoI would already declare any OSS contributions as a business cost and deduct them from my taxes? What above that is the suggestion?
- _ph_ 3y agoI think this is a great idea and it just feels right. If you tax something, you have the challenge on how to distribute the money in a proper manner if it isn't repurposed to something else in the first place. But having tax deductions solves the problem. There is an incentive to support open source, but the companies can decide themselves where the effort goes.
- mooreds 3y ago> Just excise a tax (well, I guess a licensing cost) I think you are missing the actor there. Who is going to enact and enforce this tax? I can't think of any entity that could and would.
- jorvi 3y agoHence my mention of setting it up more like a licensing thing, where the code remains free for personal and small commercial use, but you have to pay once you hit X$ amount of revenue. Are there companies that are gonna try to dodge it? Sure. Same happens with companies that refuse to open source modified GPL code. But the majority plays ball. Same with this funding, we wouldn’t be looking for perfection but for an improvement on the current situation.
- ghaff 3y agoThen it is not open source because it places limits on use.
- bruce511 3y agoWouldn't any OSS license that requires this, then by definition not be open source? Plus, when you're asking for a tax on say Apple, where they get to cough up multiple billions, then expect them to invest plenty in lobbying and lawyers. In other words this plan falls into the category of "sure, that sounds great, but there is simply no path for this to become reality."
- jorvi 3y ago> Wouldn't any OSS license that requires this, then by definition not be open source? The difference between FOSS and OSS. > In other words this plan falls into the category of "sure, that sounds great, but there is simply no path for this to become reality." And yet despite the extreme market capture of Meta we now have things like ActivityPub and soon WhatsApp will have support for 3rd party messaging services. Dare to dream. Things can improve. Edit: I guess HN prefers to stay stuck in quagmire rather than dream of improvements. Sad state of affairs.
- CorrectHorseBat 3y ago>The difference between FOSS and OSS. It doesn't fit either of the definitions
- red_admiral 3y agoThe difference between free as in freedom, and free as in beer.
- EvanAnderson 3y agoThe Open Source Initiative's Open Source Definition[0] doesn't permit discrimination against fields of endeavor. A license that discriminates between personal and business use is neither Open Source nor Free. The dichotomy between Free and Open Source software centers around political ideas around protecting user freedom. [0] https://opensource.org/osd/ https://opensource.org/osd/ Edit: re: your "hopes and dreams" edit - I think it's safe to say reasonable people have no problem with proprietary source-available licenses (like the BSL, for example). Just don't call those types of licenses "open source". They aren't. Those who attempt to free-ride on the goodwill Free and Open Source has amassed by using improper terminology to describe proprietary source-available licenses are what create frustration.
- nox101 3y agoApple makes open source Swift, LLVM, Clang, WebKit, darwin. They already spend millions on open source. Google makes open source Android, Chromium, Go, Dart, Flutter, Lit, ANGLE, Dawn. They also spend millions on open source. Microsoft makes C#, F#, VSCode, Electron, Powershell, and further Microsoft is providing free hosting for probably 95% of all open source projects (github) as well as free CIs (github actions) and free JS/TS library distribution (npm). They're spending millions on open source too. I don't know what Meta provides except React and LLaMa but that's still millions Taxing requires administration so what you'd really be doing is giving a bunch of non-developers money in the form of salaries. The rest they'd give for their friend's projects, or whoever bribed them with kickbacks etc...
- madsbuch 3y ago> Apple makes open source Swift, LLVM, Clang, WebKit, darwin. They already spend millions on open source. Perfect, they would on the same terms as everyone else be able to apply for funding from the OS-fund to support this development – given they comply with license restrictions, etc.
- bilbo0s 3y agoYeah. The scheme that was posited could potentially land us in a really perverse place. We'd be paying Apple way more than they put in because they don't use much but they pour out projects that others use. My suspicion is that this probably works for some of the big companies, but for places like Apple, we don't want to get into this situation at all. This would just be a new revenue stream for Apple for doing something that they would have done for free anyway.
- sokoloff 3y ago> This would just be a new revenue stream for Apple for doing something that they would have done for free anyway. If Apple is a net creator of useful open-source software, I don't see this as much of a problem. If it results in a more viable/better open-source ecosystem overall, I'm more than happy to see all the large contributors to that benefit. (I'm ideologically for open-source software; I'm not ideologically anti-Apple/anti-company.)
- erehweb 3y ago0.1% of revenue is $80 million for AWS, using those numbers. At that rate, it seems like they'd do better by building their own proprietary software.
- WalterBright 3y agoAs always, we're just one tax increase away from utopia!