this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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We all need to demand that our governments start funds for open source software.
It's fucking ridiculous that you volunteer your time to build software that benefits millions and billions of people and the government is just like "nah not a charitable contribution to us so you can get fucked in every way".
And there are several individual EU countries that are moving to open source software, but so far they are not very keen on actually supporting their development. And sadly, EU is moving away from funding open source via Horizon program. https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/17/foss_funding_vanishes_from_eus/
Open Source tax for tech companies?
Guess that would be bad press.
When you draw a parallel to social charity both are largely volunteer based and underfunded. And both have direct and indirect gains for society.
Physical charity often serves basic needs. I'm not sure selecting qualifying quality open source projects is as easy. Need and gain assessments are a lot less clear.
If it's about public funding distribution, I would like to see some FOSS funding too, but not at the cost of or equal or more than social projects.
How many FOSS projects actually benefit "millions and billions of people"? That kind of impact feels like it's few and far between.
I think there is a much stronger argument for tech businesses being forced to finance and support FOSS. They are the ones directly benefiting from the free work.
Not a clue how to force that though, would probably need to be via some form of regulation. I can't think of any good way to do it without leaving gaping loopholes for abuse. :(
The EU passed laws that require companies (under conditions) to ensure base requirements in their supply chain.
I think a digital equivalent could be possible and similar. Requiring reasonable security and sustainability assessment.
It's not very obvious or simple to enforce, but would set requirements, and open up opportunities for fines and prosecution.
Why just tech companies? Why not every industry that relies on open source software?
Quite frankly I do not see the point of crafting legislation this tailored, just fund it from general government resources and then generally tax the rich more.
The link is just a lot more direct, and easier to audit.
A car mechanic buys some software from a company, internally it uses FOSS. Now they have to support the project? They might not even know it uses FOSS internally, I never read those licence things.
Doing it via taxation is probably the easiest option, but then it runs into the problem of country X paying for support, and country Y gets to freeload.
Linux or any of the different projects and components that support it and it's development, including all the dev tooling like git, languages, etc. etc. Basically any work on Firefox and web browsers, any work on Wikipedia or it's supporting infrastructure, work on stuff like Lemmy and the fediverse likely will in the long run, torrents and the like, open source game engines, IDEs, Blender, Home Assistant etc. etc. etc.
There are a lot of open source projects that have a lot of rippling ramifications, and there is inherent benefit in having more open source software developed independently. If Firefox was a better funded and more competent alternative to Chrome we wouldn't even have this whole Manifest v3 mess since Chrome would just lose all their users.
I don't think that's an issue of competency - which I understand as functionality/feature parity in this wording.
Chrome gained and became this popular likely entirely due to Marketing and big-corp ecosystem network effect through pushing it - through Google, Google Docs, and related Alphabet services.
I don't think Firefox was every really inferior. I've always preferred the dev tools and a few other things over Chrome. There was merely a time where performance was worse, but that likely only mattered in benchmarks - and marketing.
Chrome and all the various Chromium spinoffs got popular partially through anti-competitive tying, but not entirely. Safari, IE, and Edge were also anti-competitively tied and yet they did not see meteoric rises in the same way.
The reality is that a large part of the reason that Chrome got popular is because they wrote the best JavaScript engine, by orders of magnitude, right at the time that web apps were taking off. Google wrote a better JavaScript engine because they were a web app company, but it benefited every single page that used any Javascript.
While Firefox devs were still debating whether or not a web page should just be a static document, the web browser became the most successful ever cross platform development framework in history, vastly out stripping the likes of Java and Q++, and yet, it's 10 years later and Firefox still does not have proper PWA support.
I recently had to learn about that, targeting PWA. :(
When I read "you can install an extension for it" I thought that would be simple enough. But that extension then requires an additional Firefox installation which causes it's own share of problems. (Comparatively complicated setup process despite simple walkthrough wizard with installer integration, program shortcuts being added, Firefox onboarding being triggered in the PWA.)
I agree, there is a lot of fluff. However I think FOSS is more of a web, not every piece of software has a billion users, but the collection of projects as a whole prop each other up. You have a language by itself, but also all of its libs that make the language useful.
I agree. The split and collective nature makes it hard to assess and fundamentally support though - which is what I was referring to in one point.