Stallman envisioned a software tax, but is a tithe the answer?
Even Richard Stallman acknowledged that “programmers have to eat too.” In his GNU Manifesto Stallman envisioned a software tax that would help pay the developers who worked on free software. Somewhere along the line that concept was ditched in favor of FOSS. However an entrepreneur from MIT has started the idea of a tithe on companies that use open source software to make a profit. Gabriel Weinberg, founder of the Duck, Duck, Go search engine posted on his blog a call for a FOSS Tithe movement. Weinberg envisions that companies who use open source software contribute 10% of their income back to the open source community.
Oh to be young and idealistic! There are several real world issues that I think just make this unrealistic:
- Which companies should contribute? I think Weinberg is talking about start ups who are leveraging open source to get their services and products out to market. But with something like 85% of enterprises using some open source software, do you think it practical that they contribute a % of their income to back to open source? Weinberg calls for 10%, can you imagine a public company making that kind of donation? I can’t. Putting aside public enterprises using open source, even VC funded start ups would have a tough time seeing their way clear to donate such a sum.
- How do you decide which companies are using and relying open source more than others. If one company is just using MySQL but little to no other open source, should they pay the same as a company that is using lots of different open source software?
- Where does the money go? Weinberg envisions giving it to the projects that your company is using or letting your customers decide. What would the open source projects do with it? Buy more servers? Pay for hosting? Pay developers? What a can of worms that would be. Do you pay developers by line of code accepted? By the difficulty of what they wrote? Who would decide that?
- Would a tithe tax actually decrease the use of open source? Faced with the prospect of having to donate a portion of income, might companies just elect to use non-open source software, pay the license fees and be done? It happens in religion. How many don’t go to regular services and participate in a religious community because they don’t want to donate any money to a tithe.
- Who is going to deal with the outcry from those who believe in the free as in beer aspect of open source. Should it be free for personal use and not free for corporate use? Should we have classes of users of FOSS? Should we even call it FOSS anymore?
Lets be realistic. I think Mr. Weinberg is talking about small start ups where donating a couple of thousand dollars or even a few tens of thousands would be a noble and significant amount for them. It is a far cry from a company that does millions or tens of millions of dollars a year donating 10% of its revenue. Most open source projects already have a prominent donate area on their project page. Companies are free to donate.
Frankly, I think most projects have the funds to do what they need, if not what they want, already. I don’t think flooding them with cash is a good idea. Putting a tithe in place for FOSS sort of takes the “F” out of the equation. Call it a tithe, a tax, a license fee or whatever you like, it is what it is. What it is, is no longer free.
So the idea of a tithe on open source should go up on the shelves right along side some of the other noble ideas that young people have had in the past. You know, like “give peace a chance”, we can win the wars on drugs and poverty and the internet will usher in a new paradigm for the stock market. In the meantime in honor of another noble idea by young people to make the world a better place enjoy Young Forever:
