[pierotofy]

A great voluntary step in the right direction. But we know companies like EventBot are rare outliers. Congress could pass a law mandating all large companies that utilize FOSS to pay a tax deductible % of their net revenues to projects of their choice, for which they have no active maintainers. Even something as small as 0.1% would have a huge impact. I've been thinking about this for a while, would love to talk with others to organize such an initiative. FOSS is just like public infrastructure. Maintenance costs need to be shared. Innovation will accelerate immensely when this happens. Go ahead and downvote now.

[davnicwil]

If you force anyone to pay for it, it's no longer FOSS.

This isn't just a technicality, either, it will literally become something different with a whole different set of incentives involved for everyone in the ecosystem.

I am making no comment on whether this would be a positive or negative thing. Rather saying that you have to be careful about messing with established, organic systems with top down planning and tweaks through regulations, no matter how smart or well-intentioned you think you're being.

One observation is that when there's money involved, some things which otherwise are extremely simple become extremely complicated. Like, for example: ownership, collaboration, contributions, credit, etc - the implications of these all change drastically when there is money on the table and it changes the entire dynamic of everything in the system top to bottom. What comes out of those changes may not be what you want or expect.

[schoen]

I'm pretty sure that one of Richard Stallman's ideas for free software funding in the 1980s was government grants, paid for with taxes—except I don't think he suggested that the taxes would be collected only from users of particular software, but rather from everybody.

(This does happen on a small scale because some government grants do go to academic researchers who are developing FOSS, and because U.S. government agencies can't hold copyright in their original work, so there are some codebases that have been released. But it's not like a large-scale software development government agency or grantmaking entity.)

[beatgammit]

That's a different thing entirely though. If you force companies to donate to a project, they'll want to have some ownership of it. If you do it indirectly through taxes, you're forcing everyone to fund it so it becomes a democratic process.

I personally don't agree with either approach, but I think Stallman's idea would have a much better result than forcing companies to donate.

[pierotofy]

I agree with you on being cautious. I don't think it's a simple matter and yes there could be negative, unintended side effects. I think it would at least worthy of consideration and study, as lots of FOSS has many of the characteristics of public infrastructure and suffers from the free rider problem. Make the legislation narrow in scope as to limit potential downsides, evaluate results after a few years, go back if results were not as intended, or change it based on results.

Make the tax voluntary, give incentives to companies for paying it and keep the definition of FOSS.

[samatman]

I downvoted you, even though you make some very good points.

But fundamentally, you are wrong. Grandparent’s proposal doesn’t violate the Four Freedoms and would still be open source software.

In point of fact, DARPA funds the development of FOSS and isn’t the only organization which transfers taxpayer money to developers for FOSS.

Regardless of the other shortcomings of the proposal, making the software ‘no longer FOSS’ is not among them.

[nerdponx]

If you force anyone to pay for it, it's no longer FOSS.

If you force anyone who owns a copy of the software to pay for the source code, it's no longer FOSS. You absolutely can charge for said software.

[pierotofy]

I think the point was not about whether you can or cannot charge for it, but on forcing somebody to pay for it (you can charge for FOSS, but nobody is obliged to pay you for it if they get a copy).