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The Xz Backdoor Highlights the Vulnerability of Open Source Software—and Its Strengths
(www.404media.co)
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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There should be a mandate for companies and profiteers of a library or application to donate x amount of revenue upstream.
For example 1% of your revenue should always go upstream, the next one sends 1% upstream, etc. You can do more of course but imo you should have to do 1%.
I know this is a lot of money in googles example but honestly, its better than just using agpl and keeping them out in the first place. Make them pay their fair share.
I agree with this wholeheartedly,
but if you feel about this methodology strongly you're going to get hit with nay-sayers that use the same argument anti-VAT people use, as it's ostensibly the same mechanism: that the developers farthest downstream would have to take the full amount of the percents piled up in their pricing scheme.
Thanks but thats not what I meant. I was talking about a combined 1%. Like, if you used my work, you would need to donate at least (!) 1% of your total revenue to open source projects, ideally evenly distributed. That means the library further upstream would get a tiny amount but not nothing and if everyone did this, the library would have a million or more revenue streams (because libraries are widely used).
This wouldn't work for a few reasons, but the most glaring is that it would incentive re inventing the wheel.
Which is exactly my idea. The AGPL is A LOT worse in this regard since it prevents them from going closed source in the first place iirc. I think many small businesses would gladly use the software and pay 1% of their revenue.
This kind of argument imo is circular because if I build your house for free, you will not build it yourself, plain and simple. If I provide a service, I ought to get paid for it, plain and simple. And if you make money off of my work, you are part of the problem if you dont donate anyway. So making it mandatory imo is absolutely no issue.
Reinventing the wheel is exactly why we should use open source libraries.
Expanding on other unintended outcome here: Different projects have different values. This takes no account for something like Spring vs Apache Commons IO. Or Rails vs nokogiri.
Libraries will be incentivized into breaking apart to maximize revenue.
This isn't really unlike the unintended consequences of health insurance and how it leads to overpriced services with lots of indecipherable codes for service.
It's about how the system rewards (pays) for the service. I'm all for supporting open source, but the proposals in this thread are disturbingly anti open source.
I have no idea what you are referring to. Feel free to provide a source.
The consequences of our actions are for the most part completely oblivious until we try it, apart from starting wars and such. But even then its hard to say. So I respect your opinion but I disagree completely. Library maintainers have no reason to maintain libraries because they dont get paid or anything for it, which changes drastically once enough projects use my idea of a license.
The health insurance you are referring to most likely is the american scam version where private companies can suck you dry as they want. Universal healthcare (what happens in some european countries) is what makes going to the doctor dirt cheap or completely cost free. The most disgusting pharma invenstions (like 1000x'ing a cancer medication that used to be dirt cheap iirc) are all american inventions.
Thats the kicker. The system doesnt. They free load. Again, I respect your opinion. My idea is very much open source. It just enforces fairness. Thats all.