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Comment by devoply | Hacker News Reader

Yeah the market for open source is shit. You have tons of corporations deriving billions in total profit off the back of open source that contribute maybe a million back and feel that they have done some great great deed... like say Google. You could easily make the Gimp much much better with a few million in funding. The beauty of capitalism is exactly that it locks out this sort of behavior because of the way that corporations and consumers behave with their money... and how people relegated at to the lowly level of employee is forced to behave by the rules of working for that corporation and the small amount of money it pays for work which may deliver up to 10x its value, value captured by the shareholders.

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And I think copyleft licenses offer a solution here: if you are worried that corporations (or rival corporations) might monetize your product (or derive any profit from it indirectly), licensing it under a copyleft license would make their lives very, very hard. It's near impossible, for instance, to keep an AGPLv3-licensed product within a walled-garden, hence good luck while trying to build a *AAS on that.

The issue is not to deprive corporations of profit. Profit is good. The issue is how they behave with the profit once they get it. They lock it up in the hands of the very few rather than distributing it far and wide so good stuff can get done all over the world. The concentration of capital or the good is the problem. The more it is concentrated, the more good that gets done is on the terms of the corporations rather than a scrappy hacker or an individualist or anyone else. That shuts down freedom to do, which is bad. That limits choice and freedom, to live how you want because you are providing a good. Rather than live on the terms dictated by those who hoard the capital. Which happens all over the world the way the current system is architected.

Who is profit good for?

For everyone. Who is profit not good for? Someone has chosen to pay the company for the good, that's their decision to do so. The company has provided the good. The consumer is better off because of it. And he or she has paid for the good. So yeah it's good for everyone.

> Who is profit not good for?

The wage slaves.

Why?

Profit is good for wage slaves. People may not agree that the wage slaves get their due share of that profit, but without profit, the wage slaves would be in a sorry state indeed. Their employer needs to be prosperous so they can be comfortable accommodating the employee's needs.

AFAIK this was the original intent of the GPL as well, but due to the common interpretation that "link" and "distribute" refer exclusively to their meanings within the context of traditional binary building and distribution (that is, they do not apply when a program is "distributed" such that its back-end is accessed through a web-based front-end), the AGPL was necessary.

IANAL

I wonder if anyone has ever thought of a law that would allow for large corporations to repatriate some of their overseas dollars tax-free, or defer corporate taxes they'd otherwise have to pay, provided they went toward altruistic purposes, where one of those altruistic purposes could be contribution to broadly used open source libraries.

Obviously a lot more of the details would need to be worked out to try and minimize how much companies try and game that to simply fund their own research tax-free, but I wonder if the type of behavior you're looking for could be economically incentivized given the right corporate tax legal reforms.

Wouldn't this already be effective as long as the project was under the umbrella of an appropriate 501(c)3? Not necessarily the repatriation bit. I'm not a tax expert by any means so I am legitimately asking.

From a quick search, it looks like the IRS does sometimes allow businesses to make deductible contributions to a 501(c)3, but that it first attempts to determine if the business expects to receive a "substantial return benefit". [0]

The IRS seems to already have specific rules around "qualified sponsorship payments". [1]

[0] https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/tools-resources/corporat...

[1] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p598/ch03.html#en_US_201701...

One easy way around this is to do what all the NYC foundations do. That is, give to other people's charities, and they in turn will give to yours. That is only small potatoes compared to donating to a political campaign and taking the money you don't spend on the campaign off the table tax free. A lot more things make sense through that lens. I could imagine a situation where Google who doesn't benefit from every OSS project, gives to project that Facebook benefits from, and Facebook to one's that Google does ad infinitem.

The problem is a lot of those "altruistic purposes" tend not to be so altruistic, when you look into why they do them. Take for example, when Google recently chose to donate a bunch of hardware to schools instead of giving their employees an annual gift.

Google gifted schools Chromebooks, which seems like an incredible act of charity. Except for the fact that you have to pay a subscription to Google to use them. Which means they really just managed to get a tax write-off while picking up more customers.

How do you ensure a company is doing something in the best interests of society or the charity or organization they are donating to, rather than in the best interests of themselves?

> Google gifted schools Chromebooks, which seems like an incredible act of charity. Except for the fact that you have to pay a subscription to Google to use them.

Do you happen to have a reference for this? G suite for education is free as far as I know and I wasn't able to find anything else that you might be referring to.

Google doesn't need to charge to make a profit. Don't forget their primary business is advertising, so by getting more people to use their services, they gain. Also, by extending their reach to inside the schools, they effectively set up a way to "educate" kids to use their services.

Check out this page for a start on Chrome device licenses: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/2717664?hl=en

You can see an educational portal listing the cost of the management license at $30 here, which isn't really a complete picture, but demonstrates that we aren't talking about something they give schools for free: https://edu.google.com/products/devices/

Note that this is kinda of well-hidden, but that last link cites the "total cost of ownership" of a $149 Chromebook over three years as $588, which should give you an idea the difference between the hardware they give away, and the eventual cost of everything you need to deploy the suckers.

Schools is definitely big money for Google, it's just well-disguised as an altruistic endeavor.

> You can see an educational portal listing the cost of the management license at $30 here, which isn't really a complete picture, but demonstrates that we aren't talking about something they give schools for free

You need to show that those licenses were not included in the gift. And let's just assume that they're not that stupid.

> Note that this is kinda of well-hidden, but that last link cites the "total cost of ownership" of a $149 Chromebook over three years as $588, which should give you an idea the difference between the hardware they give away, and the eventual cost of everything you need to deploy the suckers.

For a budget windows laptop or tablet the hardware cost would be higher and the support cost unlikely to be lesser.

> Schools is definitely big money for Google

Schools are a tiny segment for Google that would not hurt them in the slightest to lose. The margins on low-end hardware are not exactly the stuff dreams are made of, and they really are making peanuts on ChromeOS. We can and should contrast this to Microsoft, who has been playing the "loss leader" pricing game in educational circles for far longer with far more success.

Also worth mentioning how iPads work in an educational setting. So many schools were so ecstatic to get iPads for students and embrace the future that they didn't stop to consider just how quickly an Apple iOS device can start to feel slow from OS updates designed for newer and more capable devices. The difference is pretty stark compared to a regularly imaged workstation which can last 5+ years.

For an educational environment I would be hard pressed to name a more appropriate device than a chromebook. From a hardware perspective the Chromebooks are cheap, practically disposable. ChromeOS is open source, but also secure and easy to manage. And there is no subscription or license cost for the 'G Suite for Education'. Even if that were true, the schools would be under no obligation to accept the gift, so it's hard to see that this is some sort of problem with the state of the law.

Generally speaking, it's pretty difficult to tell if charities are actually being charitable, and there is no way to ensure it -- we can't mark each dollar's fall. But we do have laws that cover those sort of 'hidden catch' scenario; you can't trick people into a financial obligation. Is there some other loophole that you can identify?

ChromeOS is not open source. We need to stop spreading the misleading claims that Chrome or ChromeOS, as distributed widely is open source, because it is not. They are not particularly secure given how poorly policed the Web Store is (malware which can exfiltrate your browsing data is rampant).

And of course, as my source demonstrated, there is definitely a license cost to use Chromebooks in a managed environment, and it is not free for educators.

As the situation is _right now_, the law is probably fine, but I'd be against the parent's suggestion of allowing a loophole for them to get to repatriate cash tax-free for this sort of usage, because it's likely just going to work out in their favor, and not in ours or the public interest.

I see the myth of the poor developer being robbed of the value it delivers is alive and well around this community.

Here's the thing, in corporate devs are as essential as people toghtening nuts in a factory.

The value one produces there is multiplyed by the internal know how, customer base, marketing reach and tight focus management, none of which it's brough by the developer.

That value is stripped from developer work just to be pocketed by management and sales is a myth, besides, if it werent there'd be plenty developers going solo and the median salary would be in the millions.

Edit: and lo and behold, instant downvote. No wonders the tech community is so blind and guillible when it comes to the value argument, from the extraction myth to the stock options gambling.

I don't disagree with this, but it isn't universally true.

Some developers are just writing code to satisfy a spec and really could be replaced by any other developer; others are uniquely valuable and significantly increase their employers value, without necessarily being recognised for it.

Good software acts as a multiplier, so it's not equivalent to tightening bolts. It's more equivalent to finding optimisations that reduce the number of bolts which need to be tightened. A relatively small amount of software can drastically increase the value of a company/process

Tru but the few of us that really push the envelope are few, are pulling serious $$$ already and hardly move the mean.

Internal knowledge is not held by the company it is held by individuals within the company. At best what you are arguing for is that there are enough people that for a given salary you can use to replace your existing people and can pick up what they are doing quickly enough that they are replaceable. That is not the same as your disrespectful assertion that your average dev is the same as a person who tightens bolts. Even the most simple development tasks require a significant amount of knowledge and at least a few years of experience that only a small number of the population can actually perform.

It's true that an individual can't do the same things a company can do. That's not some profound assertion. It's however impossible to go from that and assert that is because they are incapable of doing those things even if they had the funding to do so. That is to say that the marketing issue is more or less an issue of funding or money. That is what keeps that individual devs from capturing more value that is instead captured by companies or by managers, marketers, etc. As well as hiring additional people to form an actual company that performs the functions of a company. However a significant number of founders are developers, many of them including Paul Gahram and Mark Zuckerberg average developers that went to found multi-million to billion dollar companies because of funding. Now after the fact maybe you can argue that there was something special about them, but that's a post-facto assertion. They were average devs and if they had not gotten the funding would be relegated to your nut bolt tighteners not having been able to express their "true" potential.

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