Re: About social balances

[Filip Brcic]

Дана Thursday 10 November 2005 18:08, Jonathan S. Shapiro је написао(ла):
> On Mon, 2005-11-07 at 16:33 +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> > There are alternative models that may solve this
> > question adequately, from micropayment to national funds.  It is a
> > challenge to make those alternative models of compensation work.  But
> > it is not a principle impossibility.  In fact, in Germany, we have the
> > "Verwertungsgesellschaft GEMA" which is a national fund which
> > compensates authors of musical works for public performances of them.
> > So, we know for a fact that such things can work.
>
> Micropayment doesn't help, because the cost isn't the issue.
>
> Let's take a closer look at the Verwertungsgesellschaft GEMA idea. Here
> is what you appear to be endorsing:
>
> We will form a large organization. This organization will extort money
> from every member of the population for a purpose that most members do
> not care about and cannot gain any benefit from. However, it is
> unsettling to call this act extortion, so we will instead refer to it as
> "tax collection." Because the population will not wish to pay, we will
> give this organization the power to legislate and to imprison, and we
> will encourage it to execute this power with only such restraint as is
> dictated, reluctantly, by the occasional public outcry. But we will call
> it "government", so it is okay.

But if the "government" uses that open-source, it would not be unfair to 
collect taxes from the population. The benefit for the people would be about 
150-200 euro off the price of their computers (no ms win, no ms office, no 
corel, photoshop, ...). And the country-wide taxes for such purpose would not 
have to be high. For example: 10M people in Germany times 1 euro divided by 
10k programmers equals 1k euro for programmers per month. I guess that people 
could afford even 10 euro in taxes and wouldn't even notice that and I 
estimate that there are no more than 10k active open-source programmers in 
Germany. Or, am I wrong?

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