Re: <nettime> Interview with Richard Stallman in New Left Review (September-October 2018)

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

Agreed. But Redhat is a company of more than 10'000 employees, one of
the largest contributors to the linux kernel (which powers the machine
I'm using to type this). So, it has probably paid more free software
programmers and contributed to free software projects than most other
companies. Also, it had its IPO in 1999!

But, of course, whatever Redhat paid and contributed, it pales in
comparison with size of the ecology from which it could take in order to
make all its products and services. So it would be nice to think about
mechanism that acknowledge this and make sure that the entire ecology
profits from something like this.

In the art context, there is something like "Droit de suite" which
should ensure that the original creators get a share as the value of
their creation grows over time. But that is difficult to apply to
massively distributed projects such as major software projects.

Perhaps a more standard solution for how to pay for civilization in
which volunteer work can exist would be easier: simply get corporations
and the rich to pay taxes for the provision of basic social services
(education, health, housing). That would solve a few other problems as
well....

Felix




On 28.10.18 22:02, Florian Cramer wrote:
> Today, IBM announced that it will buy up Red Hat for $30 billion. That
> value was mostly created by the labor of volunteer, un- or underpaid
> developers of the Free/Libre/Open Source software that makes up Red
> Hat's products. These people will not see a dime of IBM’s money. There
> need to be discussions of economic flaws and exploitation in the FLOSS
> development/distribution model.
> 
> -F
> 
> 
> -- 
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> bio:  http://floriancramer.nl
> 
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