It seems like so much of the internet is reliant upon technology created by, and supported by, people who get little to no reward or recognition for their important contributions.
An idea (not a serious one, but a point for discussion): in civil society we have a government that collects taxes that are used to fund the vital infrastructure that allows the society to function. How about if all ISPs were to charge a very small levy to customers? This levy would go to an independent and neutral body to be used to pay for the salaries of those who are creating the internet infrastructure we all rely upon.
Obviously there would be many problems with trying to implement such a system across the entire world. Worth discussion though?
P.S. I have no doubt that this idea has probably already been thought of and discussed before. There is nothing new under the sun :-)
Sounds like the cassette and compact disk taxes that were implemented in some countries. Did they ever support the performers who really needed the money?
Not exactly the same. A more accurate analogy would be if the CD was invented by some volunteers instead of Sony, and everyone used them but the volunteers never got paid for their contribution
> How about if all ISPs were to charge a very small levy to customers?
At least in the US, we know we can't trust the ISPs to "do the right thing". Maybe things are different elsewhere but I cannot support this idea in the US. Sorry.
LARGE ISPs. The small ones are fighting tooth and nail to survive and bring the local people better internet. It has to be folly to be in it for the money at many local scales unfortunately. Thats why I get one choice of 2mb internet here. There are local guys working out of a pickup truck laying copper and fiber to local business. #notallisps
Politically at least, because in the US you'd hear screams of "Socialism" and all of the usual nonsense any time you try to marginally improve anyone's lives below the top 1%.
It's worth noting that while GPG's financial situation is better now, GPG is still looking for funds. Here[1] is a post from June about their current donation campaign.
It would be super if they were helped to achieve their EUR15K/month target, but after nearly three months, they're only a third of the way there (a situation that is made a little better by having a couple months worth of one-time donations).
From the article, we get "while the U.S. spends more than $50 billion per year on spying and intelligence, pennies go to Internet security".
It is wild to me that US intelligence is sincerely scared of their sources "going dark". I've never gotten over just how asymmetric the conflict is, and how much first-class privacy software gets written for little or no money.
That shows his own personal altruism. I'm afraid that in tech, like in any other domain, altruism in gifted people is something rare (just because altruism is rare plus being gifted is rare).
Now, everybody is doing his share, most of us are a bit altruist and a bit gifted in a way or in another. It's a question of scale.
I'd argue that P(altruism | largely gifted) > P(altruism), but that being said, I completely agree with your statement. It's still a minimal amount of people in general (and with some good economic reasons, too).
It's almost like the "I got mine, buzz off" attitude is prevalent in not just the cartoon caricatures of <insert opposing political team here> but is prevalent in society as a whole.
Even further, it's almost like that attitude is the Nash equilibrium of human life. (And if it is, then we cannot expect rational people to deviate from it without significant imposition of force upon them.)
GPG is used by some for email sure, but it isn't the only option. S/MIME has native support in pretty much all native mail clients, and is more pragmatic about how you trust an identity.
I bet that all the non-email uses of gpg are actually greater than the email uses. Its used as a component of many Linux distribution package managers, for example.
I always tell people to just put the content in files that they then encrypt with GPG. Then, send them over some transport (eg email, IM, postal service). Makes usage really simple where you only need to know a few commands. Those can be turned into a shell script or GUI client if someone wanted to put work into it.
In some ways it's easier for corporate, as the ca's have more incentive to make it useable.
I asked a ca about s/mime pricing - on its own they have a 50x3yr minimum purchase. They offered to waive the minimums if I combined with a regular server cert purchase.
A while back you could get a globally trusted free cert from Comodo. I'm not certain they're still doing it but you could see if the free route will work. (The keying material is generated inside the browser and never leaves your machine)
Wow, I missed that story the first time around. Just catching up on the details. That Comodo CEO Melih Abdulhayoğlu is such a dishonest, incompetent buffoon! I had no idea how terrible a company Comodo is, but now I do thanks to the CEO's own words and actions.
What if he doesn't want to run a company? He isn't a consultant, he's a programmer. Being good at programming doesn't make automatically good at running a company, which requires a totally different skillset
Not quite the same, but the time zone database was voluntarily maintained by some random guy for decades, until he got a lawsuit in 2011 and ICANN eventually took over.
Not overly so. After having an article written about him, one guy got the better part of one year's salary in charity. In exchange for 18 years of work maintaining a piece of software that kinda everybody uses.
Another reminder that selling goods and services in exchange for money still works better than giving things away and hoping somebody gives you a donation.
> After having an article written about him, one guy got the better part of one year's salary in charity. In exchange for 18 years of work maintaining a piece of software that kinda everybody uses.
$60,000 from Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative (one-time)
$137,000 in donations (one-time)
$50,000 a year from Facebook (recurring)
$50,000 a year from Stripe (recurring)
I think he got more than one year's salary in one-time funding alone, plus he's got a "salary" of $100,000/yr from Facebook and Stripe together.
Listen to those who have a clue. One can assume one doesn't have a clue about things one isn't a specialist in, so it isn't a big mystery. Unless one assumes one is smarter than everyone around them, even on topics they haven't bothered to study.
The most idealistic funding model that I can think of for this kind of work would be colleges (banned from 'tech transfer' and other money grabs) actually being used to advance academic research and 'core intellectual infrastructure'. Basic, public funded, 'research' and common components support.
Unfortunately, in the US at least and probably elsewhere, the shift has been away from this, since it creates 'competition' with corporations, who also are major funders of both universities and the politicians which create legislation and funding applying to them...
Kudos to Facebook and Stripe for stepping up. Either these individuals are funded or some company comes along and acquires them and they lose their independence.
We need to urgently find a sustainable way for individuals to support open source developers or accountability and relationship with end users will continue to diminish.
There must also be ways to gently encourage successful startups to contribute as now it seems they use a whole bunch of open source software and simply forget about it once successful, which is not a sutainable model.
Great to hear that he gets about $100k in "salary". (I guess taxes work differently when you get donations like that.)
At least he won't be starving now. But it would not be a bad thing if someone threw some more money at it, or someone assembled a small team to help out, or something.
Edit: saw in comment below there is a team on it. Good stuff.
Well to be honest few people ARE using it now. PK crypto has failed since its inception. It's never been widely adopted. PK has been too hard to implement and manage.
What do you mean by "PK crypto"? (OpenSSH makes extensive use of "public-key cryptography", as does, say, HTTPS, and both seem to be massive successes, so I think I am understanding you incorrectly.)
Yes, and normal communication is such that we preface what we're saying if it's set in another time. We don't when we're talking about the present time.
An idea (not a serious one, but a point for discussion): in civil society we have a government that collects taxes that are used to fund the vital infrastructure that allows the society to function. How about if all ISPs were to charge a very small levy to customers? This levy would go to an independent and neutral body to be used to pay for the salaries of those who are creating the internet infrastructure we all rely upon.
Obviously there would be many problems with trying to implement such a system across the entire world. Worth discussion though?
P.S. I have no doubt that this idea has probably already been thought of and discussed before. There is nothing new under the sun :-)
[edit: fixed fat finger typo.]