https://www.smh.com.au/national/australia-risks-brain-drain-...
https://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2020/seL4-develop...
re: CSIRO and WiFi, there is some controversy around that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRO#802.11_patent
Money has to come into open source from somewhere and in the end it has to be via taxes or commercial interests.
Maybe BitCoin will save us? Haha. No.
Making money from open source is somewhere between the Hollywood aspiring actress and the fool's gold level of wishful thinking.
For instance, let's say that I have this very clever idea that would improve on the good old-fashioned shovel. I could try to monetize this idea, but probably wouldn't have much success. Now, if I could figure out how to apply the idea to a grader or bulldozer or boring machine, I might have more success.
My best chance might be if I happen to already own an equipment manufacturer. But to create a new manufacturing company just to produce my new-fangled backhoe is a daunting task. And it turns out my one idea isn't enough. My backhoe needs hydraulics, power, tires, and a bunch of other stuff.
Most people wouldn't expect to be able to quit their day job to focus on a new shovel idea. But they somehow think that people should line up to fund a new web framework. Or a novel NoSQL approach.
It's hard to monetize any idea. This is not limited to OSS.
And, really, people can still have a business selling cookies. But open source is unique in providing projects with many users, including commercial entities, that still leave the author in abject poverty.
I dunno what the alternative is, other than political activism, pushing parties to support progressive tax policies, and educating our peers and family members. It's not only research on the line here.
I think there are a lot of things we can do:
1. Promote free software, peer-to-peer networking, cryptocurrencies, and privacy software like Tor. Don't forget, governments burn libraries. Free hardware like RISC-V will become extremely important once we have matter compilers.
2. Lobby against patent, copyright, trade secret, noncompete enforceability, and other legislation that make the contents of employees' minds the property of their employers and legally impose censorship. We don't need to eliminate these entirely, but the more we can reduce their scope, the better off we are. California's pioneering legislation in this area was probably a significant factor in the 1980s move of the computer world's center of gravity from Boston to Silicon Valley; China's nonenforcement was probably a significant factor in its 2000s move from California to China.
3. Remind people that the freedom to tinker is a human-rights issue, a government transparency and accountability issue, a consumer-protection issue. We need all the allies we can get.
4. Reduce people's dependency on employers and employment for what they need to survive, through programs like public libraries, public healthcare, retirement, public education, universal basic income, churches, widespread solar panel deployment, squatters' rights and easier adverse possession, homesteading, soup kitchens, the Rainbow Gathering, ashrams, food banks, police reform, volunteer mental health counseling, decent public housing like Britain's 1960s council housing, BeWelcome, Hospitality Club, and open borders. Our current society already produces so much that scarcity of basic goods need not imperil anybody's survival. (There are of course cases on the margin like funding Gilead's development of new drugs, and perhaps synthesizing some drugs that are especially difficult, but that's no reason for people to die on the streets of homelessness-induced hypothermia.)
5. Organize programs like GSoC, Patreon, and Kickstarter that can raise funds to the people working on public goods such as free software. Alex Tabarrok's "dominant assurance contracts" might provide an incentive structure for this that improves on Kickstarter's incentive structure.
6. Organize into collectives such as monasteries, Google, or universities — organizations like these, imperfect though they are, have often been very effective at protecting their members from the societal pressures of the "life-and-death contest of startups and the private sector", not to mention law enforcement, with constructs such as academic freedom, tenure, "Googliness", and 20% time. Today's Google, like today's universities, are unfortunately not as strong as it once was — hierarchical command relationships make them vulnerable to political takeovers. But a university is fundamentally a faculty senate organized around a library, and Google was at one time fundamentally a group of hackers organized around a search engine. Such things can be destroyed, but they can also be created. They can survive by receiving donations, as some monasteries do; by providing services to outside entities, as universities often have; or by earning rent from an endowment, as state land-grant universities and other monasteries do.
The housing issue is particularly bad because, in many places, legally housing a person costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, more than an average employee can earn in many years. I wrote a bit in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23264786 about the underlying economics of the situation.
Could you share what you see here?
You need to be free as a person for free software to be meaningful. Imagine gnu operate in china and run Software in campus (eg https://www.gnu.org/education/teaching-my-mit-classes-with-o...). Imagine ...
https://snowdrift.coop/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
Is there a significant number of people that can live of this? When I look at monthly income of larger projects on OpenCollective or developers on Patreon, they are doing very well if they make several hundreds of dollars per month. Not something anyone can live off in a western country.
Research into developing jet engines is a pretty stable income stream in the US that has persisted for decades. Taxes can fund what you want, you just need to create the political will for governments to value it and fund it.
This is why I favor creating systems that, with user-provided specs, automate proofs, analyses, and testing. The specs should be easy for non-math types to understand. Any failure is fixed or becomes a runtime check with logging. We might get more adoption of something like that than the masses contributing to an Isabelle/HOL or whatever project.
That said, I recall concluding CSIRO were unfairly treated in the patent pool issue, despite the title of the linked article.