Heartbleed barely made a dent in funding.

scaring people into paying only really works for criminals

maybe we should place some ad-tech veterans in the EFF :)

Unless you can back this up with a threat of "we won't continue maintenance unless you pay up", this strategy is unlikely to make much of an impression. The OSS community has demonstrated to be quite willing to work for free, so why would you suddenly start paying them?

Big organizations only change course when something is already broken and it is hindering the organization. In places where everything is just humming along, nothing changes. (This often applies to careers as well btw)

Software is much like mathematics. Who is paying mathematicians? Both government and industry.

A lot of mathematics research has no immediate applications but still is valuable. Software is more practical, governments should pay for creation and maintenance of "infra-structure software", which no single corporation is willing to pay for. Why aren't they? Because the end-results benefit everybody.

So I think the discussion about "better models to finance open-source" is misguided. Government(s) should pay for it, as much as it has a positive return on investment in terms of better infra-structure.

That is a matter of politics, not "better models". Will the government invest in infra-structure? That is a political question and largely depends on who you vote into power.

Software is unlike mathematics in that mathematicians won't work for free.

I can see the point of that you must be good to do math professionally, good enough that someone will be paying your salary.

But I assume most mathematicians don't do it for the money but for the fame, the pay is so meagre

Most rock-musicians are not millionaires.

> so why would you suddenly start paying them?

I believe governments should be different from corporations, and their goal should be to empower the people that drive the greater good in society, vs exploiting those same people's time for capital

it's a very thin line :)

You’ve just replaced the word “empower” with “exploit”.

Do you have some technical definition for the word “exploit”?

Exploitation of labor is taking all the wealth generated by someone's work, and giving only a portion of it back, while pocketing the rest.

You’ve substituted “exploit” with “generate”. What is the technical definition of “generate”?

Perform labor that makes something more valuable than it has been previously.

Okay, then how are you determining the increase in value?

to define it i would focus on the contrast: the return of an exploit goes directly to the exploiter, the return of an empowerment is spread among the group of supporters who funded the empowerment

exploitation is a one-to-one mapping, while empowerment is one-to-many?

seems to feel like "the difference between a religion and a cult...."

> the return of an empowerment is spread among the group of supporters who funded the empowerment

But, workers by definition don’t fund companies.