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The things nobody wants to pay for

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Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#41

Post by jorvi »

bruce511 wrote: post #39
jorvi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect there does need to be a regular social renewal to resolve the tragedy of the commons problem. Wouldn’t the solution offered on LWN work great? Just excise a tax (well, I guess a licensing cost) for open source use to any corporation that is above x$ amounts of revenue. Make it a tiny percentage (0.1%?). 2022 revenue: - $400 billion, Apple - $200 billion, Microsoft - $120 billion, Meta - $80 billion, AWS $…

Wouldn't any OSS license that requires this, then by definition not be open source? Plus, when you're asking for a tax on say Apple, where they get to cough up multiple billions, then expect them to invest plenty in lobbying and lawyers. In other words this plan falls into the category of "sure, that sounds great, but there is simply no path for this to become reality."

> Wouldn't any OSS license that requires this, then by definition not be open source?

The difference between FOSS and OSS.

> In other words this plan falls into the category of "sure, that sounds great, but there is simply no path for this to become reality."

And yet despite the extreme market capture of Meta we now have things like ActivityPub and soon WhatsApp will have support for 3rd party messaging services.

Dare to dream. Things can improve.

Edit: I guess HN prefers to stay stuck in quagmire rather than dream of improvements. Sad state of affairs.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#42

Post by bryanrasmussen »

Dr_Birdbrain wrote: post #32
jorvi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect there does need to be a regular social renewal to resolve the tragedy of the commons problem. Wouldn’t the solution offered on LWN work great? Just excise a tax (well, I guess a licensing cost) for open source use to any corporation that is above x$ amounts of revenue. Make it a tiny percentage (0.1%?). 2022 revenue: - $400 billion, Apple - $200 billion, Microsoft - $120 billion, Meta - $80 billion, AWS $…

Or, give a tax deduction for contributions to open source. This is America, new taxes are nearly impossible to pass, tax cuts are much easier to pass.

I would already declare any OSS contributions as a business cost and deduct them from my taxes? What above that is the suggestion?

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#43

Post by genpfault »

narag wrote: post #18
candiddevmike wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clean, consistent, and "just work" on the desktop In my experience, most Linux desktop environments are leaps and bounds ahead of Windows here. What specifically do you want fixed?

Not the same person, but I've recently switched from Windows 10 to Debian stable with KDE, so I can share my experience. It doesn't really sucks. Instead, I'm happy I have no longer to put up with the growing number of Windows annoyances. The balance is definitely positive. That said, there are a number of issues that I've found. Some of them are solvable via configuration, some of them are not. I'll omit a couple of…

> Firefox, Thunderbird and other applications use completely different file dialogs with different conventions that I haven't found how to configure.

That would be GTK.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#44

Post by wharvle »

narag wrote: post #18
candiddevmike wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clean, consistent, and "just work" on the desktop In my experience, most Linux desktop environments are leaps and bounds ahead of Windows here. What specifically do you want fixed?

Not the same person, but I've recently switched from Windows 10 to Debian stable with KDE, so I can share my experience. It doesn't really sucks. Instead, I'm happy I have no longer to put up with the growing number of Windows annoyances. The balance is definitely positive. That said, there are a number of issues that I've found. Some of them are solvable via configuration, some of them are not. I'll omit a couple of…

> - Drag & drop works in a very weird fashion. When I drop something, a popup menu appears asking me if I want to copy, move or link the dragged item. There's no way to configure KDE to just move. I need to press shift before I start dragging and that conflicts with multiple selection... no way to move multiple files without the shitty menu.

Years and years of Windows and Linux taught me to avoid drag & drop, mostly, except for dragging files around in file managers (and even then, some of the Linux ones…). I learned that it would, too often to be relied upon, do something I didn’t want, cause a program crash (Linux is especially bad about this), put the program in some weird broken state that falls short of crashing, or simply not work.

It took years to un-learn this avoidance of that interaction, after switching to Mac.

Now when I occasionally poke my head into Linux-land again, I don’t have that instinctive avoidance of d&d, and so I try it a lot more. Bugs and bad behavior abound. Anyone wants to see Linux desktop be bad at some things, go hard on drag & drop for a couple days, you’ll see it.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#45

Post by ghaff »

jorvi wrote: post #40
mooreds wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just excise a tax (well, I guess a licensing cost) I think you are missing the actor there. Who is going to enact and enforce this tax? I can't think of any entity that could and would.

Hence my mention of setting it up more like a licensing thing, where the code remains free for personal and small commercial use, but you have to pay once you hit X$ amount of revenue. Are there companies that are gonna try to dodge it? Sure. Same happens with companies that refuse to open source modified GPL code. But the majority plays ball. Same with this funding, we wouldn’t be looking for perfection but for an i…

Then it is not open source because it places limits on use.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#46

Post by nox101 »

jorvi wrote: post #30
roenxi wrote: post #4

Markets approximate an algorithm where you line up everyone who can do a job by willingness to do it, then pick the cheapest if someone is willing to pay that much. In the case of open source, that algorithm usually identifies volunteers. Sometimes it identifies businesses. Sometimes people come up with clever ways of funding projects (Red Hat the enterprise was genius from this perspective, they organised a solution…

> I suspect there does need to be a regular social renewal to resolve the tragedy of the commons problem. Wouldn’t the solution offered on LWN work great? Just excise a tax (well, I guess a licensing cost) for open source use to any corporation that is above x$ amounts of revenue. Make it a tiny percentage (0.1%?). 2022 revenue: - $400 billion, Apple - $200 billion, Microsoft - $120 billion, Meta - $80 billion, AWS $…

Apple makes open source Swift, LLVM, Clang, WebKit, darwin. They already spend millions on open source.

Google makes open source Android, Chromium, Go, Dart, Flutter, Lit, ANGLE, Dawn. They also spend millions on open source.

Microsoft makes C#, F#, VSCode, Electron, Powershell, and further Microsoft is providing free hosting for probably 95% of all open source projects (github) as well as free CIs (github actions) and free JS/TS library distribution (npm). They're spending millions on open source too.

I don't know what Meta provides except React and LLaMa but that's still millions

Taxing requires administration so what you'd really be doing is giving a bunch of non-developers money in the form of salaries. The rest they'd give for their friend's projects, or whoever bribed them with kickbacks etc...

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#47

Post by BiteCode_dev »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #35

Open source is the biggest voluntary transfer of wealth from the working class to the business/investor class ever. Software in the modern economy is the "means of production" and software developers have given it away free to the business/investor class. The investor class, happily funds software startup gambles that people pour their lives into knowing that most will fail but they will still statistically make bank…

My career solely exist because of foss. My salary level is only that high because of foss. I don't feel like I've been in a bad position.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#48

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #47
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #35

Open source is the biggest voluntary transfer of wealth from the working class to the business/investor class ever. Software in the modern economy is the "means of production" and software developers have given it away free to the business/investor class. The investor class, happily funds software startup gambles that people pour their lives into knowing that most will fail but they will still statistically make bank…

My career solely exist because of foss. My salary level is only that high because of foss. I don't feel like I've been in a bad position.

> My career solely exist because of foss.

You are likely an excellent software engineer. Why would a company not have hired you to work on non-foss software?

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#49

Post by marcosdumay »

jorvi wrote: post #38
ninkendo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who will receive the funding from this tax? What criteria would you use to distribute funding? Windfall for the NPM leftpad module I guess.

I’m sure you could set up a non-profit organization with smart people that are passionate (but not dogmatic) about open source, that could selectively fund projects or even just GitHub sponsoring / bug bounties.

So, you just solved general governance?

No, you absolutely can't set such an organization and expect it to work. You are marginally better giving the task to some government body, but expect failure either way.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#50

Post by erehweb »

jorvi wrote: post #30
roenxi wrote: post #4

Markets approximate an algorithm where you line up everyone who can do a job by willingness to do it, then pick the cheapest if someone is willing to pay that much. In the case of open source, that algorithm usually identifies volunteers. Sometimes it identifies businesses. Sometimes people come up with clever ways of funding projects (Red Hat the enterprise was genius from this perspective, they organised a solution…

> I suspect there does need to be a regular social renewal to resolve the tragedy of the commons problem. Wouldn’t the solution offered on LWN work great? Just excise a tax (well, I guess a licensing cost) for open source use to any corporation that is above x$ amounts of revenue. Make it a tiny percentage (0.1%?). 2022 revenue: - $400 billion, Apple - $200 billion, Microsoft - $120 billion, Meta - $80 billion, AWS $…

0.1% of revenue is $80 million for AWS, using those numbers. At that rate, it seems like they'd do better by building their own proprietary software.
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