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The Billion Dollar Kernel
jesgar writes "The Linux kernel would cost more than one billion EUR (about 1.4 billion USD) to develop in the European Union. This is the estimate made by researchers from the University of Oviedo (PPT), whereby the value annually added to this product was about 100 million EUR between 2005 and 2007 and 225 million EUR in 2008. The estimated 2008 result is comparable to 4% and 12% of Microsoft's and Google's R&D expenses on whole company products. Cost model 'Intermediate COCOMO81' is used according to parametric estimations by David Wheeler. An average annual base salary for a developer of 31,040 EUR was estimated from the EUROSTAT. Previously, similar works had been done by several authors estimating Red Hat, Debian, and Fedora distributions. The cost estimation is not of itself important, but it is an important means to an end: that commons-based innovation must receive a higher level of official recognition that would set it as an alternative to decision-makers. Ideally, legal and regulatory frameworks must allow companies participating on commons-based R&D to generate intangible assets for their contribution to successful projects. Otherwise, expenses must have an equitable tax treatment as a donation to social welfare."
What you call your 'American perspective', I call brainwashing
31,000 euro for a _kernel_ developer?? Probably closer to 3 times that. I know it's an average, but do you really think the maintainer of a memory system, or the scsi stack, etc are worth less than 6 figures?
Vitriol aside, "Social Welfare" can mean anything, like a organization (say, a Church) in a community providing a non-trivial benefit to said community, while operating as a nonprofit. To put it tactfully, you need your "American Perspective" checked. It improves the welfare of the society (albeit in a somewhat hard to measure way). Saying that society as a whole (outside the open source community) has not benefited from Open Source (to which it pays no material compensation for) is ludicrous, therefore donations to open source should be treated just as any other donation to a nonprofit group.
Wait a minute...Am I allowed to write off my FOSS development as a charitable donation on my taxes?
My friend the electrician informs me that when a church gives him a receipt for installing an outlet or whatever, he gets to deduct his labor on his taxes as a gift to the church. Its not such a bad deal for him, if he has nothing better to do at that time, assuming that the church gets the parts donated from a store or the church pays for the parts. Technically I guess he's increasing his liability insurance premium by the value of his gift, and he has to drive his truck to the church, so its not all gravy, just mostly.
Get a church to "hire you" to maintain their website, then ...
Am I allowed to charge the $50 an hour I think I'm worth?
You would be OK. To prevent being accused of fraud, your church either needs to do competitive bidding, have some kind of long term business relationship, or pay standard union rates. Which works pretty well for my union electrician friend, not so well for you. Chalk that up as reason number 0x1010110110101011101 that programmers should unionize as a skilled trade...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
That's assuming that a replacement would be 12m lines of code. I recently rewrote a few classes for an open source project that I contribute to and replaced 5,000 lines of code with 500 (which did more, ran faster, and fixed some bugs along the way). Just because the current implementation is 12m lines, doesn't mean that the correct implementation is 12m lines. From the Linux kernel code that I've read, I suspect that there is a lot of redundant and duplicated code in the kernel. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you could implement it with a cleaner design in closer to 1m lines of code.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The basis for copyright is that the public wishes to increase the amount of work in the public domain. Copyright is a deal between creators and public whereby the public believes that there will be more works generated (and end up public domain) by giving a temporary monopoly to creators. The key in the deal, however, is not to reward the creator, but to generate works for the public domain.*
I would suggest, therefore, that giving (tax) incentives for open source software is in line with this policy. People who contribute to open source are giving up their monopoly rights and their work is available immediately for remixing into new works**. Since time is money I would suggest that anyone who is willing to give up their monopoly period should be rewarded.
This isn't a unique concept: Corporations get all kinds of special and additional tax deductions for various activities such as R&D. We do this with the same line of reasoning: we want more R&D, so we provide an incentive so we can reap the rewards.
Lastly, it should be pointed out that the level of incentive (how rich is this program) should be inversely proportional to the duration of copyright. In other words if copyright lasts longer I've given up more by immediately making it available for remixing and should therefore get a greater incentive. If copyright is short than I haven't given up much and should require less incentive.
* perpetual copyright extension has killed this, but that is another topic.
** Yes, it's not public domain, but they no longer have a monopoly on the distribution of the work.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
I don't see the point in letting them receive tax deductions for their contributions.
It's as much or more about showing F/OSS some respect, not just money.
Do you think F/OSS is good? A worthwhile endeavor? A benefit to society? And, so, we could use more? I presume yes to all that. Then how do we get more? Strengthen intellectual property laws even more? Change nothing?
The likes of IBM help develop F/OSS because it is profitable to do so. It helps them sell hardware. But F/OSS is under constant attack from monopolists who fear it as a threat to their way of business and the system of IP law they profess belief in. We've had a decades long holy war going on over this, and the general public has barely noticed. That F/OSS has nevertheless advanced in spite of all that the Microsofts of the world have done to kill it, that the monopolist camp has resorted to dirty tricks by the hundreds and still failed, and that they've been caught over and over violating their own professed principles and exposed as hypocrites and fools, shows which side is stronger. As for IBM, I'm thinking the bitter split they had with MS, and the failure of OS/2 helped them see the light. Most others have not. A tax break would do much more than merely ease funding problems. It would not be yet another giveaway to the undeserving with massive lobbying campaigns, nor hopefully seen as such, it would be some justice for valuable work that many agree is not sufficiently appreciated. How rich are Torvalds and Stallman, really? They might not even be upper class. Compare that with Gates' status as the richest person ever. Hardly fair. Maybe Sun would still be independent. It would be greater official recognition that might serve to disarm the attackers and turn the heat down on this wasteful and expensive holy war. Some might even change sides. Imagine if MS were to change sides.
The US has tried to push people into homeownership, on the idea that this turns people into stakeholders, that it makes for a more prosperous, stable society. They've done this by specifically allowing mortgage payments to be deducted from taxable income. So why not make open source work deductible? Rental payments aren't deductible because society wants to encourage home ownership. The ugly side of the American Dream is that if a homeowner is respected, those who have "failed" to own a home are disrespected. I've seen and experienced the low grade discrimination renters get just for being renters, the notion that if you can't swing a home, you should at least strive to spend as much money as possible on the rent so as not to be "low rent". In the eyes of too many, that's the status of F/OSS now: "low rent". This is also why America is so hostile to pedestrians. Only criminals and losers walk-- those whose time is not valuable or valued. Car ownership is the current Esq. "You get what you pay for" implies that F/OSS is junk. Many studies have shown that people value things more if they pay more, irrespective of the actual utility and value. People are always using mental shortcuts, and equating cost with value is extremely popular, and reasonably reliable. Paying more for F/OSS would get their attention.
There are other helpful moves. Another convincing one is patronage, in the sense of being a customer and user. Use more F/OSS in government.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Gentoo at least is a registered 501(3)c charity.
Not a sentence!
In the US, you can only write-off money donated to charity, not labor.
So if you give the LUG $500, you can write it off. If you spend a couple days making their website, you can't.
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