Kelsey Hightower: If governments rely on FOSS, they should fund it

This has nothing to do with OSS developers being compensated, it's about risk management for the consumer.

If you build your business on something that might disappear because someone decides to suddenly stop working on it, it's rational to incentivise them (or others) to not do that.

This is something Boris Mann has been talking about for a while now. https://bmannconsulting.com/notes/open-source-licensing/

https://bmannconsulting.com/notes/open-source-beyond-licensi...

(I had mentioned to him I wanted the Canadian government to get involved in funding OSS, and that we needed a way for Canadians(and Canadian Corps) to use for free but everyone else would have to pay)

The problem with “non commercial” exceptions in FOSS licenses is that there’s no good definition of “non commercial”. Interpretations sometimes includes “anything that involves money / payments” even if that’s just distribution costs, someone’s salary, etc. And even if there’s no money, someone could be profiting indirectly.

I work for a non profit that creates FOSS and we were explicitly prevented from using something published as CC-BY-SA-NC (by the author) because our completely “free to access” “not for profit” project was being developed by employees working for money (paid for by a private foundation).

So what’s “non commercial”? Someone at home by themselves? What happens if they amass online followers and then monetize them somehow? They lose the license retroactively then? Was Linux non commercial when it began? (It should have been) Is it still non commercial? (Many would argue it isn’t).

> They can change the license any time they want.

That's a bit facile. For many projects, changing the license from open source to something that's not open source like you are suggesting will cause the project to die. Adoption will drop to indistinguishable from zero and it will lose any hope of achieving critical mass.

It’s a noble goal but as easily gamed as any other license. In this case there would be nothing stopping me from starting up a new entity and then contracting out that single service for $.01 or whatever. No revenue there, no license fee required. Just add another layer on the onion. It’s similar in difficulty as a wealth tax, just add more indirection.

A specific corporate tax would be a great way to do it, IMO. Companies that benefit should pay. How the money gets distributed, and to whom, is also a problem and I don't know how you make any of this cross national borders, especially given national security concerns.

You've got it backwards. If a FOSS dev needs money, he should stop being FOSS. Don't throw your jacket on a puddle and expect the girl to put out.

From the government's perspective, public highways (in particular the interstate highway system in the U.S.) serve a crucial national security and logistics function. I think this might be the more convincing argument to governments--e.g. you run code in your systems that you do not have control over, and you don't know who is making contributions to it. They could be (and probably are) agents of foreign powers trying to hack you.

But this raises other issues. Let's say you're the US Air Force and you want to sponsor SQLite. I assume because SQLite is everywhere the Air Force runs it in their airplanes, no idea if true. How do you make sure the interests of the developers are aligned with the interests of the Air Force? You probably don't want to accept contributions from foreign nationals, or at least nobody you can't hunt down and prosecute if they do something malicious. You probably also want to vet them with a thorough background check. So they basically have to be employees (or contractors).

If you let your enemies build your highways they'll be hiding antitank mines everywhere. Should we be letting them build our software too? I can't imagine the Air Force, for example, saying "yes". But I could imagine them being quite interested in gaining this kind of control over their infrastructural dependencies.

The EU Horizon grant (€27M or so) to NGI (which was how it went towards OSS) is being stopped from this year: https://fsfe.org/news/2024/news-20240911-01.en.html

Governments sometimes work around limitations by using private third parties that aren’t bound to them. e.g. if they had to pay to use httpd, they would just start paying a commercial hosting company that exists solely to provide http services to that government.