Do Companies Take Software, And Not Give?

SirDaShadow writes "The Inquirer has an excellent article that describes how companies take from the Open Source Community and how few are giving back. At the end of the article, it says it might be tax deductible. This made me think...wouldn't it be great for the OS community if we could provide a law to facilitate tax cuts to companies who give to OS, or at least make it mandatory to for-profit organizations to give a certain minimum amount and take it out of their taxes?" This piece ignores the obvious and large contributions that some companies have made in money, programmer time, code release and even just lending their name and credibility to projects like KDE and GNOME, but it does have some truth -- see for instance the Busybox Hall of Shame.

Comments

go with the flow

[Doc Ruby]

Publishing is assymetrical. The efficiency of sharing info comes largely by its consumers outnumbering its producers. The network effect, where returns on investment increase when a platform's deployment footprint increases, makes the rapid spread of software deliver more to its users, especially its provider at the source. A little good software goes a long way.

This is not to say that publishing software is a one way street. Opening the source is a great move towards interactivating the communication along the publishing pathways. At the very least, sourcecode servers provide an infrastructure where feedback from consumers can input meaningfully to the revision process, including patches, and especially structured test results. Many one-to-many relations, bidirectional, gives OSS development the definitive advantage in efficiency and robustness.

Re:Terrible Idea

[geekoid]

" We have to win by the same rules everyone else plays by."

Then we should manipulate congress to get our way?