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Seriously, just put a VAT on digital services to fund a system that pays out grants to individuals to help maintain open source software. It should be obvious b
by shimman 9mo ago
Seriously, just put a VAT on digital services to fund a system that pays out grants to individuals to help maintain open source software. It should be obvious by now that corporations will rat fuck the commons for monetary gain and there is a serious need for democratic initiatives to put technology back into the hands of the people.
- TonyStr 9mo agoI would like to live in this utopia where free software is funded by the state. This seems impossible to get implemented in our world though.
- kortilla 9mo agoBut how would that work? There isn’t unlimited money so who decides what software to support with state money and which developers? I don’t have trust in a bureaucracy to decide which developers should get paid to work on sudo. Just look at a the sudo-rs debacle and that’s without money involved.
- shimman 9mo agoYou have a failure of imagination if this is what you think, luckily in politics we don't have to listen to people like you and instead those with an actual vision of a better future.
- Antibabelic 9mo agoThe EU does fund a lot of open source software.
- kasey_junk 9mo agoSo does the US. In fact they did for this software.
- kergonath 9mo agoSeveral states fund open science, and a couple of them actually do fund open source projects. Germany has its sovereign tech agency for this; France has publicly-funded research agencies that work on a lot of open source stuff, and there are others. There are EU initiatives as well. It’s not perfect, but it is already something that is being done.
- account42 9mo agoNo thanks, we don't need yet another specialty tax paid out to a dubious selection of individuals.