[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.