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Open source devs consider making hogs pay for every Git pull (www.theregister.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/opensource@programming.dev
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Opinion: Careless big-time users are treating FOSS repos like content delivery networks

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[–] 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I guess a question is who would set the prices. If sites could set them themselves, then some would set it at zero to have an advantage, and resort to the same surveillance-based funding model they rely on currently.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)

    One option would be to enforce a price floor that would be set to whatever the server operator could prove is the cost of serving a single request. (per byte, also fixed costs when there's no traffic mess this up). This would absolve website owners of the need to find any other funraising methods if they want to break even, and thus remove the incentive for installing spying ads. It would still keep in tact the incentive to make servers as cost effective as possible.

    I'm not sure if such a means-tested price floor mechanism has ever been used in the past, so idk how well this would work.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    Looks like a self-enforcing tax rate (comparable to price floor) has at least been proposed:

    [...] have proposed having owners self-assess the value of their property under penalty of having to sell at this self-assessed value.111 This has the simultaneous effect of forcing truthful valuations for taxation and of forcing turnover of underutilized or monopolized assets to broader publics.

    From https://plurality.net/read/5-7/

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