The European Union must keep funding free software | Hacker News Reader

The European Union must keep funding free software

ow2.org

46 pointsZacnyLos7 comments

The European Union, in my unqualified opinion, must fund free software with billions, and make all its governments run on it, the same way the countries that today make up the EU have spent, in the past, the equivalent of today’s billions to base their societies on state-owned water, gas, and electricity networks and providers.

Nop, this is the wrong approach. Create a system that separates a default sum from the paycheck of every individual in the EU (and US could adopt this strategy too). A small sum, like 5 euros, whatever. So you visit sites and at the end of the month you get a summary from your browser showing you which sites you frequented and which of those sites have the headers showing it's up for funding. So you wouldn't send money to google, but would send money to individual creators.

End of the month the browser shows you how it shared that 5 bucks among the sites you visited based on visits, time spent reading, whatever metrics. You can maybe also assing a part of this sum to sites you have a preference of. Let's say you love Momma's baking corner, and allocate 10% more to that site.

This is your payment for the services of the people who create web pages on the Internet. You have no control over that 5 euros, you can only spend it on sites you visited. There you go, everyone pays at least a small sum for what is consumed.

Same approach can be applied to Open Source projects. Since for example Github just doesn't want to implement a proper payment system for the projects they host and exploit.

Problem solved. Companies can have even bigger war chests for this purpose...

As an added plus site owners-creators can show what open source projects they use to run their sites, so those can be also funded with this approach.

This is exactly the idea Brave was built on. They even had pretty great "get the ball rolling" methods like by default collecting funds even for not-yet-signed up creators, and then redistributing those funds to the other creators after 3 months if the creator didn't sign up.

But people hated it because if you only spend 10 seconds looking it sounds like yet another cryptocurrency scam. ("attention token? what BS)

I never used it, but the approach seemed like a great idea to me.

I never used Brave, and this must be enforced by the government, not some corpo entity, otherwise it won't work. The corpo entity - browser vendor - must be forced to implement it.

Mass surveillance of every site everyone in the EU visits?

I am not in favour of that.

But mass exploitation of naive people who provide their hard work for others who readily exploit them, and never give back anything is A-OK. People are really like the proverbial ostriches.

Plus, if they want the info about who visits what, they can already aggregate and do whatever they want with that. Everyone knows Pornhub is one of the most visited sites, and?

Mass surveillance of every site everyone in the EU visits?

I am not in favour of that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com