Well I've only got 10min to put this one into text, so this will
just be a vague outline of an idea.
I'm interested in the concept of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), but
one problem is that a lot of people get up to no good when you give
them money for nothing, because they're not smart or educated enough
to figure out something productive to do. On the other hand there
are skilled programmers (etc.) who work on open-source project but
have limited time due to needing an income from other work.
Few people donate to projects, and as the whole point of Open-Source
is that projects can integrate work from other people, donated money
can easily be unfairly concentrated with more visible projects. This
is especially the case if most of the funding for free open-source
software comes from business donations (which I guess might be the
case, but 10min means no time for research), where they are looking
for specific solutions and can easily miss the bigger picture.
So my proposal is a not-for-profit international organisation that
(1min!) awards a standard rate to programmers working on qualifying
FOSS projects (qualifying based solely not on number of users, but
activity of development and numbers of derivative or integrating
projects). The aim is to expand the diversification of FOSS
available and reduce the influence of commercial sources of
Open-Source software (eg. Red Hat) by putting non-commercial
programmers on an more equal footing.
Businesses and individuals would be encouraged to donate to this
organisation rather than to specific projects.
16min, so way out of time now, build on that idea if you can.
Probably not the first time it's been thought of anyway...
- The Free Thinker, 2020.
PS. Before uploading this (four days later) I realised that this
organisation wouldn't be entirely dissimilar to the Free Software
Foundation. However to be universal, there shouldn't be any
influence over the design of the software itself. The FSF's GNU
project encourages its own little universe of like-minded software
development, whereas I'd like to support diversification of
Open-Source software. Any software, stupid an idea as it may be,
should be judged solely by having a certain minimum number of users.
Active developers of qualifying software should then all be funded
equally from the single pool of donated money.
