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   Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Mar-2024 10:54:09 JST Glyph

   Today's Redis news is an unfortunate reminder that while open source itself is a public benefit to society, within our economic system if you are the _provider_ of a public benefit to society, that's an inefficiency in your business that there will be constant pressure to eliminate. The more capital investment the provider accepts from others, the more pressure there will be on management to remove that inefficiency.

   • 洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) repeated this.
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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Mar-2024 10:54:42 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     There's a call to action here. Personal actions, like subbing to your favorite OSS dev / mastodon shitposter's Patreon (REMEMBER TO LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE) are nice, and you should absolutely do them, but as an economic sector we need to think bigger. Ask any economist—regardless of ideology—and they'll have a similar prescription: Externalities are market failures. negative externalities are addressed by taxes, but positive externalities are addressed by subsidies. We need subsidies for OSS.

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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Mar-2024 10:56:48 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     The ACM, the IEEE, and other professional organizations have really dropped the ball on this because it shouldn't be up to some random individual with no policy experience to suggest this. This is the sort of thing that industry groups are supposed to help inform policymakers about.

     Groups like those should be asking questions like "How big would the tax writeoff have to be to prevent Redis from moving from open-source to source-available?" and "How do we get governments to sign off on that?"

     洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) repeated this.
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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Mar-2024 10:56:48 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     Even on the level of individual developers, who clearly _want_ to be doing this work and are willing to suffer a fair bit to get it done under the current system. It's so common it's a joke: https://xkcd.com/2347/ . And sure, it's "thankless", we should be *nicer* to that random Nebraskan, but a few thanks aren't a systemic fix. But imagine if OSS maintainers could get a huge tax deduction, or a direct industry subsidy, for their maintenance work?