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Comment by ramboldio | Hacker News Reader

The EU should just pay anybody who makes Open Source contributions.

Problem solved.

Europeans get their own tech stack. Can compete again with US companies, as the all the cost for building infrastructure is externalized.

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I understand the intention behind such a proposal, history of unintended consequences of government intensives should stop any sensible person from implementing anything remotely like that.

Do you remember how one company promised people a free shirt for open source contributions, and how it resulted in an epic shitstorm of garbage patches? Just a few months ago. Now, imagine this, but with actual money instead of T-shirts.

it could take other forms though, for instance you could identify people who are already maintaining or creating significant foss projects and pay them while they keep working on them. probably it makes sense to limit this to the most productive/driven few. it should be really straightforward (though time-consuming) to see if someone is cheating, because all the work is there in public view in the form of git commits.

This is for public policy people to figure out. They do stuff like that all the time.

Of course it's not easy. But if it works, can be tremendously effective.

Maybe a starter would be to give some maintainers of already successful projects a salary, if they want. Impossible to game.

In fact, it is way easier to spot fraud in Open Source projects than in government subsidies literally in any other sector.

Actually you can receive (modest) grants for this, for example from NLnet. I've been writing open source software full-time for the last two years funded partly by this.

There are also other grants I believe, but I'm not really an expert on this. I just know there are actually possibilities.

They indeed do "stuff like that" all the time. That's exactly my point.

EU is already the biggest contributor to Open Source.

And I fully agree that FOSS should be paid collectively like civil infrastructure.

But we need to be careful with the freeloaders. Big companies coopted FOSS into unpaid labor: anything released with permissive licenses can be proprietarized by SaaS/Cloud companies. Almost always US based.

This would turn European financial contributions to FOSS into a gift for FAANGs.

This is why the European Union Public Licence is copyleft and compatible with GPL. But it's not enough.

That would be a great strategy and probably wouldn't cost much. Pay open source project authors to maintain popular projects. Right now, technologists in Europe are starved of capital. We have 0 surplus capital to take any risks or to innovate; we're too busy chasing the next paycheck to think about building infrastructure.

Even when we do build infrastructure, there is 0 government support; governments or tech companies don't make any effort to bring any attention to EU open source projects.

All other countries have protectionist structures but EU imports all its tech, even though there is more than enough in-house talent to build it - They'd rather give out contracts to US and Chinese companies and have their EU citizens working for these companies as employees instead of giving their citizens a chance to actually run the companies.

Right. Last I read, Hacktoberfest created a huge amount of spam for Open Source contributions, and all that was on the line there was a t-shirt. You seem to be suggesting that real money should be involved - do you think the outcome will be different than Hacktoberfest?

Yes? Like donating money to a well-established project is very different than sending a t-shirt to whoever creates a repo with 2 commits or what..

If people are willing to create a ton of spam for a t-shirt, I would imagine that a lot more spam would be created if contributions were rewarded with more money. Or at least, it's not immediately clear what mechanisms would exist that would prevent spam pay-for-contributions that also wouldn't work for t-shirt contributions.

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