We don’t need the government to throw money at “open source”. That’s silly. Youtube used to be a means to an end. I need to send my friend or a teacher a video but email has a 25mb attachment limit. Need to use youtube or image shack. These days you can just use a text message or whatever platform you’re using to communicate. So youtube has now become a platform for “content creators”. It’s a different beast. To compete with youtube you have to not only make the video stuff work but also break the network effect and figure out how to pay creators.
Further, plenty of VCs don’t give two shits whether your thing is open source or not, they just want ROI. In my experience it’s tech law (or lack thereof) that missed the infusion of “internet maker ethos”. The depth of the average startup legal advice is “here’s a privacy policy and EULA that maximally protect your company at the expense of users”. “Here’s an employment contract template that tries to fuck your employees.” “It’s safest not to share your source code and keep it a trade secret.” “Go have fun.” If you want to see more open source then you need to cultivate that ethos among the people in power running the companies. So often I see the prevailing sentiment even here to be anti-gpl. The gpl may be imperfect, but if you care at all about the proliferation of open-source in a western copyright regime, then pissing on the gpl as “the brainchild of crackpot Stallman” is not the way to get there.
If you want more open source then founders need to come to fundamentally understand that their source code is not what makes their business valuable, it’s the time and effort they put in to provide a service that others aren't providing or is better than the competition. Too many founders are living the delusion that at a software level their engineers are writing novel patentable or trade secret level code that gives them a true algorithmic leg up. 9 times out of ten their shit is just new and fresh and disruptive. I understand that in rare cases people are doing truly novel things with software, but that certainly isn’t the default case.
Further, plenty of VCs don’t give two shits whether your thing is open source or not, they just want ROI. In my experience it’s tech law (or lack thereof) that missed the infusion of “internet maker ethos”. The depth of the average startup legal advice is “here’s a privacy policy and EULA that maximally protect your company at the expense of users”. “Here’s an employment contract template that tries to fuck your employees.” “It’s safest not to share your source code and keep it a trade secret.” “Go have fun.” If you want to see more open source then you need to cultivate that ethos among the people in power running the companies. So often I see the prevailing sentiment even here to be anti-gpl. The gpl may be imperfect, but if you care at all about the proliferation of open-source in a western copyright regime, then pissing on the gpl as “the brainchild of crackpot Stallman” is not the way to get there.
If you want more open source then founders need to come to fundamentally understand that their source code is not what makes their business valuable, it’s the time and effort they put in to provide a service that others aren't providing or is better than the competition. Too many founders are living the delusion that at a software level their engineers are writing novel patentable or trade secret level code that gives them a true algorithmic leg up. 9 times out of ten their shit is just new and fresh and disruptive. I understand that in rare cases people are doing truly novel things with software, but that certainly isn’t the default case.