[abousara]

Each country have its own taxes to sustain fundamentals, same thing must apply in software industry. Software engineers might be paid +100k$ while developing over open source languages/frameworks or libraries. That's is not fair, it is like riding a starving horse.

A French point of view (after all, France invented VAT...) would suggest to introduce a taxe on software engineers salaries (1% ?) and redistribute this fund on most used languages/frameworks/libraries and use a part to sustain a new projects.

[adrianN]

How about instead of taxing the workers we tax the companies that profit from open source efforts.

[abousara]

Let me explain better, no software engineer (SE) would be paid above 30k$ if he always starts from scratch (walking). He is paid its economic value for being fast. And he is fast because he rides a horse (building over open source language/framework/library).

So while a part of SE are maintaining stables, other part of SE don't want to pay for horse. I think this last part of SE are killing their own jobs.

[adrianN]

The software engineer is paid because they produce value for they employer. It's upon the employer, not the employee to pay for the technological infrastructure.

[abousara]

That's right. But when your employer will ask to shift infrastructure because old one is no more maintained, and to be as productive as before, you'll be very slow at development and get fired. If the employee is paying for the infrastructure, this is because SE are not solidary to open source projects.

[dagw]

How would you measure how much of the profits a company makes come from open source efforts?

[adrianN]

You don't, you just use a fixed percentage of whatever business tax they pay to fund open source development.

[dagw]

How are you going to separate out companies that profit from open source software, from those that don't? Would the fixed percentage be same for a company that is built 100% on open source software as it would for one where a handful of people in one department occasionally use VS Code to write some python scripts?

If you want to fund open source using tax money, then fund open source using tax money. Trying to implement a special Open Source Tax and apply it only to those that "profit from" open source seems both counterproductive and virtually impossible.

[adrianN]

I think everybody profits from open source, since a large part of the Internet runs on open source, so there is no big need to discriminate.

[dagw]

So why make a special separate tax that has to be calculated and administered? Just use the tax money you already collect to fund open source projects.

[Scea91]

I find it stupid to offer something for free and then cry when someone does not pay you for it.

[abousara]

Developers who take free time to create projects are not crying for money, they are crying for not having enough time to do more!

Not everybody is made to only work for money.

[heavenlyblue]

How do you decide which projects receive more funding than others?