Alt text; An image showing a meme about open source software. The top part shows an elephant standing on a beach with text reading “The entire world’s IT infrastructure” superimposed on the elephant. Below this is a large, colorful beach ball being supported by tiny ants, with text reading “Unpaid open source devs.” The meme illustrates how the global IT ecosystem heavily relies on open source software that is often maintained by unpaid volunteer developers who carry a disproportionate burden despite their small numbers.
Where is big tech in this picture? They are the ones making the billions from it.
Governments should be funding the most popular open source software that the world relies on. And big tech should not be allowed to just take it and make billions from it. That was never the intention. It was open source because profit was not the end goal.
That’s not how a capitalist system works. In capitalism, one can only do things for personal gain. Anything else will be lost effort. Even if a company gives out free stuff, that’s ultimately for their own gain
Germany is currently paying out a little through the “sovereign tech fund”
https://www.sovereign.tech/tech
The frustrating thing working in a big company is wanting to pay for something that costs 0.0000001% of the company’s annual revenue, but not being able to because big companies are always divided up in hundreds of small teams with their own budgets, and your boss is already over-budget for the quarter because the team’s cloud bill was 20% higher than predicted.
This is, of course, working exactly as designed.