Free and open source software provide a ton of value to businesses and consumers. It's right that tax dollars is used to fund what effectively is a public good so that we can all benefit from it even more.
I can see a government requiring itself to provide some funding to open-source projects that it actually makes a lot of use of. But not just open-source in general; no one needs to get funding for some pet project that only that one person cares about and isn't very good anyway: putting some crappy chatGPT-generated code on GitHub should not qualify you for government funding.
There's always a cause and a church. There is an instrument for this: your donations can be tax deductible if you give to a 501c3 that exists for the public benefit. But that's not enough for you guys. Having seen the success of private equity dialysis clinics to redirect Medicare funding, you have decided that you want a piece of this government revenue pie. Enough of this greed.
Don't both, people like them hold society back. I suggest you go out and talk to your physical neighbors about taxing big tech, it has a huge amount of support. The only question is do you want a democratic administration to use said tax revenues to benefit the public or a republican administration to benefit a few private actors.
It's going to happen and I know what side I'd rather be on.
I agree with taxing big tech, but more specifically the agglomeration effect of their networks, force interoperability whenever possible, and dismantling other non-reproducible privilege if possible but taxed if not. Otherwise, ample regulation may be needed to reduce identified harm.
This is different from taxing big tech's income and capital gains, which I would leave basically intact, but my taxation philosophy would have significant downward effect on overpriced market capitalization of tech giants and would redirect economic rent that otherwise would be accumulated by big tech to the government in order to be reinvested into infrastructure for public benefits.
Primarily, I want the redirected economic rent from tech monopolies to be used to support software related initiative, whether that's supporting open source software infrastructure, support for training and starting businesses, and so forth.
