[qwertox]

Just quoting this snippet from the landing page:

"No license costs, no restrictive licenses. Being open source, PLC4X is free of charge. Start experimenting without worrying about license costs or shady license agreements. The Apache 2.0 is one of the worlds most trusted and adopted open source licenses out there."

Big companies need to grow up and start contributing with serious amounts. I wonder how this could get regulated with a law, for example that any company with more than x in revenue must pay y percent to an open software foundation. Maybe one needs to be created, one which monitors the space and ranks the projects on some metric like pull requests or issues closed. Then the rank is a ratio of the amount they get.

[collaborative]

Some solutions:

1. "Regulate". Create an official body that charges a flat fee for any use of any OSS and then pays a % to developers based on some obscure metric. This would likely lead to corruption within the newly created body

2. "Ads". Display ads on every platform that distributes software. Then, pay part of the revenue to each software based on # of downloads/etc (this is similar to how Youtube pays content creators). This would require cooperation from distributors (Github, NPM, etc). In my opinion, it would be good for both devs and platforms, as devs would prefer platforms that pay fairly over platforms that make them give stuff up for free. But it will never happen because it would hurt capital and the platforms are controlled by capital

3. "Become unionized". Collectively remove content from traditional platforms and move it to a cooperative platform that charges $ and fairly distributes it

I think #3 is the most realistic one. There is a "museum of the working class" (forget the name now) in Manchester where they have the banners of the first industrial revolution secret guilds and societies. The new tradesmen were being abused by capital so they organised under secret oaths such as "never help a tradesman that doesn't belong to the society" or "never undercut a fellow's price". Capital will always try to make workers work for less, the only way to stop this is to get organised

[MrBuddyCasino]

Taxes. You invented taxes.

[qwertox]

At least in Germany taxes aren't bound to a specific purpose, they're not allowed to be. They get thrown into a big pot and then distributed as needed. Then you'd have these OSS developers (whoever represents them) fighting against other recipients.

It would be better to have the FAANGs of the world being forced to pay into a bucket which gets distributed specifically to OSS projects.

[LadyCailin]

Government grants for open source software would probably be a good thing though, now that this is mentioned. Just like the arts get public funding due to public good, open source software would make sense as well. Even better than most of these things, because by definition, open source is free for the public, whereas grants for arts and even things like research are often locked behind a paywall of sorts.

[MrBuddyCasino]

The EU already does this. I'm sympathetic, but once you have witnessed how their research grants program works, or what the results are when bureaucrats fund "art", you might not be as excited. These things have a way of becoming something different than what was originally envisioned.

[ghoward]

Somewhat agreed.

I started a poll [1] asking if devs could get their employers to pay. Almost nobody answered. I'm not sure it would be possible to get companies to pay without regulation, as you say.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29893520