[ModernMech]

Certainly there is! Raise taxes on big tech profits and use those revenues to fund open source. We shouldn't depend on love and happiness to build the technologies that are foundational to our largest companies, while they get rich.

[_mlbt]

These companies are not doing anything amoral here. If the developers of these open source projects expect to be paid for their work by any means other than voluntary donations they should use different licenses.

[ModernMech]

I'm saying this is a dumb way to fund critical tech infrastructure. And since the tech industry has proven they can't self regulate themselves into a sensible funding model, then we should use our representative democracy and create legislation that sees it done.

[markus_zhang]

But this is not realistic. Big companies pocket more politicians than all HN commenters ever know.