[OfSanguineFire]

I wonder how much universal basic income, or at least a stronger economy, could spur FOSS development. I feel like the 2008 crisis and the rise of the precariat put a permanent dent in the phenomenon of non-professional devs maintaining free-software projects as a hobby.

[brightlancer]

A universal basic income, that is an income which is _universal_ and _fixed_ in its amount, will only create inflation: everyone gets equal additional money, everyone gets additional purchasing power, everyone creates more demand, prices go up.

A stronger economy is always better, but politicians usually manage to screw that one up, also.

But I don't think all of that is a major issue here. Microsoft and IBM are taking open-source projects and closing them up. Google is offering FLOSS projects to get users, then poisoning the well. I don't know what's happened to Mozilla, but it's destroying itself.

Lots of individuals are still writing FLOSS projects, but hobbies get picked up and dropped often -- for something to last, you usually need an organization (even if it's just 3 people) and it can easily become a _job_, even if it's a non-paying job. Even if their finances are fine and they still have spare time, most folks don't want a second job with a second source of deadlines and stress etc. And if a for-profit giant sees their project and offers them a LOT of money to stop working on it, most folks will say yes -- even if they were making decent money already.

[notpushkin]

> A universal basic income, that is an income which is _universal_ and _fixed_ in its amount, will only create inflation: everyone gets equal additional money, everyone gets additional purchasing power, everyone creates more demand, prices go up.

Not really, it will also redistribute wealth.

Let's say I have $1000 and you have $100. If we get additional $100 each, your purchasing power would now be 2/11 of mine instead of 1/10, even with prices adjusted for inflation.

I'm not advocating for UBI though – stronger economy is the more sustainable solution here.

[KetoManx64]

And then you as a business owner charge $10 more for the items you sell at your store in order to offdet the fact that the government is forcefully taking momey from you to distribute it.

Do you really see it going another way? Taking money from people through force just distributes it back to the people that get the handouts.. eg. Inflation.

[notpushkin]

Yeah, that's why I'm against it, too. Bad incentives all the way.