Comment by shimman
17 hours 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.
I 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.
Several 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.
The EU does fund a lot of open source software.
So does the US. In fact they did for this software.
But 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.
No thanks, we don't need yet another specialty tax paid out to a dubious selection of individuals.