Comment by mschuster91

> They should be funded by the companies using them. Do you believe any of the fortune top100 would be greatly impacted by funding libxml2? They probably all rely on it, one way or the other.

I agree in theory but it's impractical to achieve due to the coordination effort involved, hence using taxes as a proxy.

> The foundation of the internet is something that gets bigger and bigger every year. I understand the sentiment and the reasoning of declaring software a "public good", but it won't scale.

For a long time, a lot of foundational development was funded by the government. Of course it can scale - the problem is most people don't believe in capable government any more after 30-40 years of neoliberal tax cuts and utter incompetence (California HSR comes to my mind). We used to be able to do great things funded purely by the government, usually via military funding: laser, radar, microwaves and generally a lot of RF technology, even the Internet itself originated out of the military ARPANET. Or the federal highways. And that was just what the Americans did.