- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
TLDR: Companies should be required to pay developers for any open source software they use.
He imagines a simple yearly compliance process that gets companies all the rights they need to use Post-Open software. And they’d fund developers who would be encouraged to write software that’s usable by the common person, as opposed to technical experts.
It’s an interesting concept, but I don’t really see any feasible means to get this to kick off.
What are your thoughts on it?
Companies should be required to pay if they take the software, modify or fork it, and then sell it to others. That’s the only case in which I think anyone should be paying for libre software.
For example, the linux kernel is used by android. Google modifies the kernel source and sells it to phone manufacturers. Linus Torvalds (and the rest of all kernel devs) deserve a stipend for the use of their work to generate profit. Also, the modifications should be legally required to be open sourced if they don’t pay.
The overwhelming majority of the kernel development is heavily company financed. Are you saying that despite that, the very developer should get the stipend?
Lets make one thing clear, exponentially increasing wealth/power the higher you are in society is a pretty heavy general rule of thumb to beat, whicever way you try moving the seats.
Making such a system for devs will make a pretty wealthy class of people even more privileged with de facto rules that wont apply for the rest of society more in need of money and freedom, meaning actually owning the share of income from their work even over the pay the receive from the company.
Making this a general rule for everyone will more like reshuffle thungs but the exponentiality will in some form persist. If you inevitably fuck it up the implementation phase, it wont get better any bit. You will have the same miserable pay except you own your work. So what.
The ability to modify the code is a central tenet of free software. The GPL takes care of making those modifications available to others. That effectively is the payment the original devs get.
If companies are required to pay, then the software is not libre. I understand your intent, but this isn’t a solution (even if it was, it would just mean that it would just be a tax for small companies, Meta and Alphabet aren’t worrying about a tax), building a stronger community is.
Commercial software is not mutually exclusive with libre software, and things like copyleft exist to prevent companies from using libre software to create proprietary software.