> a world where everyone attempted to produce more than they consume
Personally, the reason why I don't contribute but consume from many projects is that I produce
other stuff. All those projects are
input, they are incidental and in the end replaceable. How would I do that anyway? I may use a dozen projects regularly enough. Any one of them already is complicated enough.
What I do is try to write easily reproducible bug reports. However, if I were to even attempt to contribute any code I would have to make a major effort. There are few problems on a foreign code base that can be solved in an hour or a few hours.
This is why I ended up using Intellij instead of an open source editor: I once submitted an issue on Github and the response was basically "where is your pull request". I understand the developer(s), but sorry, I am just not able to do that. Imagine that a sizable number of OS projects only deal with your reports if you are an actual contributor. Sounds like a good idea? But how would any person even manage to be a contributor to even half the projects that I am using? Anyway, back to the IDE, I pay Jetbrains and give them great bug reports and they fix most issues.
I think it is completely normal, just from a statistics and system modeling perspective, that only a tiny number of developers contribute to a project, and that those mostly are people for whom that particular project is a core issue. It is just not feasible any other way.
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Here is a crazy idea (only half serious, meant mostly to bring a new direction into the debate - so no need to point out potential problems, it is not a suggestion made to be implemented).
Imagine we had a worldwide organization that you pay a certain amount to. Several levels, flat fee but with levels.
The organization watches what "free stuff" you use. Software, code, anything that's bits and bytes, could easily be extended to 3D printer models photos movies etc.
Then they distribute the money they got from the (semi)flat tax to the makers of the various things.
The different payment levels indicate a) amount of use, someone using only a little bit of free stuff vs. someone who uses tons of it, b) level of sophistication, so use of the left-pad npm package and similar stuff is a different level than someone using Blender, for example.
Actually, such organizations do exist. In Germany there is one that collects fees from copy shops and distributes it to right holders of printed works ("VG WORT"), and there is another one collecting fees for music and film ("Gema"). Lots of problems, of course, just saying that the idea itself is not all that outlandish and attempts at partial implementation for specific countries and sectors already exist.
Again, just to show another option compared to no solution and continuing what we do, lots of problems of course, like how do you prevent someone from inflating their usage count, privacy, etc.
How about a limited implementation of something like this? We need some way for contributors of "free stuff" to be able to live a life. I think it is bad to a) accept and b) rely on such people making a living somewhere else. It is too random.
I am not a "socialist". It is entirely "capitalistic" to expect that there should be a reward system for actually useful contributions (as measured by usage). I just think our 19th century system is very badly suited to handle the new digital world, from copyrights to open source.
The problem of individual payments also is that the per-payment cost is too high - and I also mean the psychological cost. Imagine you had to buy a car screw by screw instead of as a whole package, being asked for every single tiny piece "how much are you willing to pay or contribute?"
It could also be a potential solution for this problem also on the frontpage right now, because those people could go from the official job market where they are noz wanted into the system I describe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724104
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I also want to make a connection to the Universal Basic Income discussion. I am skeptical of the "pure" idea, I think we are still far away from allowing universal leisure and I don't believe that most people will voluntarily do something useful. But how about the above idea can be connected? If you do something useful that's all that's needed, but you have much more freedom to decide what that is. Mostly, "distributing free stuff" now works as a business idea!