My advocacy for OSS funding in these works centers on the same idea: considering that OSS is a public good, capturing its economic value and providing stable, proportional funding for the ecosystem, can only be achieved by introducing a new, dedicated consumption tax (#OpenSourceTax) (and not by fixed budgets and definitely not by asking individual companies to make random contributions).
4/6
How do we fund open source? by Bill Doerrfeld 💯
"Considering the ubiquity of open source, regulating its support through public funding appears to be the strongest long-term vision. However, such government-led initiatives are at an early stage. Until public initiatives mature, the ecosystem will need a combination of corporate sponsorship, foundational stewardship, and increased public awareness to ensure its survival."
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3557846/how-do-we-fund-open-source.html
The final remarks on "the open source ecosystem has been consolidating" are also critical to note (29:20).
Last, thank you for the shout-out, @richlitt!
6/6
As a next step, I suggest introducing an #OpenSourceTax: increasing the VAT of proprietary software by 1% to generate revenue for these public funds.
The other solutions in the article that I'm highly in favor of:
- Collect SBOMs to build a centralized software database and understand OSS usage (under "Information Gathering").
- Offer tax credits to individuals and companies who surpass a certain threshold of open-source contributions (under "Resource donor").
4/5
Open Source Infrastructure must be a publicly funded service by Matthew Hodgson 💯
"Free and open source software has literally become shared digital public infrastructure. And much like shared physical public infrastructure - bridges, roads, sea defences, etc - FOSS maintenance should be funded by governments on behalf of the taxpayer."
1/2
https://matrix.org/blog/2024/04/open-source-publicly-funded-service/
What We Owe One Another: The Political Economy of Open Source by @pwramsey 💯
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfunxBysmg&t=190s&ab_channel=ProjectGeospatial
- Distribute the funds to the ecosystem regularly based on each company's contribution through metrics like usage, size, criticality, etc., of their OSS solutions (existing grant mechanisms won't work/scale),
- Since these funds should be proportionate to the industry and require significant resources, after a certain threshold, introduce dedicated taxes (#OpenSourceTax) to generate revenue.
4/9
I had the pleasure of being a guest on the SustainOSS podcast to talk about financing the open source ecosystem through #AgilePublicFunds and a dedicated #OpenSourceTax
Teşekkürler, @[email protected] & @richlitt! 🙏
1/4
Serkan talks about the need to allocate funds to support and publish critical open source software, and about a tax proposal to do just that.
- How should the #OpenSourceTax be implemented?
The idea is to introduce a dedicated tax to proprietary software sales on top of value-added tax (VAT) (or sales tax in the US); each time a consumer purchases licensed software, they also pay this extra tax on the sales price.
4/8
#FOSSBack: Di Luong, @tarakiyee, @shiro & @ramyraoof
– Funding FOSS
Most interesting session of FOSS Backstage over funding open source software with panelists from three public funds. And quite interestingly, there were two other tax-related questions next to my #OpenSourceTax question.
1/8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LhvSq9yq_A&ab_channel=PlainSchwarz
Serkan Holat
