Music to my ears. Tax money should go to open source projects.
And all tax funded tech should be open source.
Yes!
Who’s tax money?
Any first world nation.
How the hell are NATO and other large orgs not funding Matrix? Blows my mind.
A particularly amazing real-life example of this came from a certain Ministry of Defence last week, whose procurement department (on being asked to help fund core Matrix development, given their operational dependency on Matrix) said: “You have to understand, we’re responsible for taxpayer money here. We can’t just make a donation to your open source project.” Apparently if we had built the same tech as a proprietary product, paying for it would apparently have been an infinitely better use of taxpayer money.
I… don’t know what to say.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
I can already picture it
“you don’t want to open a government backdoor? No more tax money for you”
“your foss project needs to be verified by the government to be selectable for founding, you don’t want to? Well, no tax money for you”
“For your foss project to be created we need to verify it now that by law all foss projects receive tax money, you don’t want? Delete everything”
And this is how you will own nothing and will be “happy”. You can’t escape the surveillance by using foss, go live in the woods before it’s to late, and don’t forget to carry your tin foil hat, be safe.
That’s fair.
So a public subsidy for big tech to get free code?
Big tech is already getting free code. This would simply fund the devs for the critical infrastructure. also if we force tax payer code to be GPL code it would force big tech code to also be GPLed. Which would significantly improve the current scenario.
If the public are paying for it, then it becomes a subsidy.
And good luck getting the US government to require the code to be GPLed. That’s even less likely to happen than a public subsidy for OSS at all.
They typically do the opposite and require “commercialization” to ensure the benefit of the publicly-funded technology is captured by their donors.
This is how it basically works in biotech, for example. Government grants to study the medicine and then when the scientists actually find something important it becomes a “public-private partnership” often without even a royalty for the public let alone making it a public good.
That’s not how government funding works in a modern democracy, unfortunately. It would amount to a cash transfer to big tech to make the public pay their R&D costs.
