
How I Stumbled Upon the Internet’s Biggest Blind Spot - CrankyBear
https://medium.com/@nayafia/how-i-stumbled-upon-the-internet-s-biggest-blind-spot-b9aa23618c58#.uvyxws96a
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ChuckMcM
I don't know if it is the "biggest" blind spot, but it is a useful insight.
The original open source manifesto (from RMS no less) was adamant that people
should be _paid_ for creating software, but once created it should be _free_.
The idea being that the action of creating (or improving) the product had the
value. But there has yet to be a break out mechanism for funding work on FOSS.
Sure there are various attempts, Patreon or Flattr or something along those
lines. But they are irregular and you cannot count on them.

Historically, infrastructure was funded by taxes on the users. You use the
road, you pay road tax, and the road tax is used to pay people to keep the
roads maintained. But there isn't a FOSS tax which is then redistributed to
the folks doing the work. There isn't even a mechanism to make that possible.
So using FOSS gives you tremendous advantage (work is done that you don't have
to do) but working on FOSS gives you no advantage (you don't get paid for it
and everyone else gets it for "free" when you are done.)

Perhaps the party is about to end, we shall see.

~~~
yuhong
Yea, the freedom to copy and distribute is my favorite one to think about it
exactly for this reason (and also because it creates the most practical
problems too). I am thinking that there should be non-profit foundations
maintaining OSes like Windows funded by hardware vendors etc. I don't think
this was ever considered for CP/M for example back in 1975, right?

