[anp]

I have said a lot of times that I feel like people keep trying to reinvent a state and taxes to pay for shared infrastructure with open source maintenance. I don’t know how to use the state to solve the problem without severely degrading the quality of what gets built though.

[colechristensen]

I don't want the state to do it. I would prefer a future where the state becomes less necessary because folks just do stuff themselves. The state already gives tax incentives for donations to nonprofits, so it's not inventing something new. Open source software where people contribute their work to share with nothing expected in return is an early signal of something I'm hoping will become a major feature of a post-scarcity economy. People "working" for the benefit of everyone on their own without expectation of returns (and receiving the benefits of others who do the same). It's not clear that it will be possible for the whole economy to work this way, but there are plenty of things where people want to do work to share because they choose to and it just eliminates a whole bunch of unnecessary work when "for hire" things can be replaced by "for free".