Comment by matheusmoreira
2 years ago
> corporate sponsorship/patronage
Those are the only things that make any sort of sense. The alternative solutions require a reality distortion field to even begin to work. Copyright? It's logically reducible to attempting to sell numbers. It just isn't going to work in a universe where globally networked computers exist. Intellectual work is infinitely abundant once created.
We gotta figure out new business models. What's valuable isn't the end product, it's the labor that creates it. We need ways to get paid either before or during the creative act, not after it. Sponsorship and patronage accomplish this and are perfectly ethical. I see artists accepting commissions and requests for a price, that's another business model that satisfies the requirements I mentioned. GNU once proposed a vision where all software was free and people would hire programmers to work on the features they were interested in.
The point is maybe that corporations are proven to be poor stewards of who deserves sponsorship/patronage, so while sponsorships/patronage are the things that make the most sense as sustainable under our current economic models and corporate ones are currently the only ones that seem reliably sustainable yet there aren't enough of them and a lot of important labor is getting underfunded/unfunded, maybe that deficiency points to our economic models themselves as the problem.
Sure, we don't have a better economic model on hand. That's most of what I was pointing out. I don't know what the answer is, but root cause analysis suggests we may have some flaws in our root economic models that as a society it would be great to fix and raise a lot of boats, not just open source developers but artists and craftsmen and writes of all sorts that are also under-appreciated in the current economic models.
I believe the only answer to human misery is no economic model at all. Post scarcity. Economies only exist if scarcity exists, thus we need to eliminate scarcity. The goal is to automate all work and achieve an unending abundance of food, energy and goods.