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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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