From Data Science Community Newsletter [email protected]:
OPEN SOURCE, NEXT
Bruce Perens, one of the original leaders of the open source movement, is arguing that open source contributors should be paid. This general principle - that some open source contributors have contributed valuable code and should be remunerated accordingly - is not new. Many open source contributors do very good work that gets incorporated into commercial products from which they see nothing in return. Perens proposes to fix this inequality problem with “Post Open" (https://postopen.org). The basic idea is also similar to past proposals in the sense that academics and small companies would not be expected to pay, but larger companies would. Companies with more than $5m in annual revenue who use open source code would be expected to “pay a small percentage of that (it ramps up to 1% as they grow) to support the developers.”
To keep track of which code falls in scope, “a software infrastructure for apportionment must be built, including a way for developers to register their git ID and cryptographic identification.” Creators of documentation would also be paid. If a company contributed more code than what their annual payments to the Post Open would have been, they could make money.