The Conference on the Future of Europe is a unique, Europe-wide, democratic exercise in which citizen-led discussions allow people from across Europe to share their ideas through a digital platform to address Europe’s challenges and help shape its future.
We took this opportunity to share two complementary ideas for financing and expanding the open source ecosystem in Europe. Our fırst proposal, “Universal income for open source maintainers,” focuses on establishing a dedicated fund for the EU’s open source ecosystem.
Our second submission below proposes creating a subsidy program to encourage companies to open source non-essential software solutions. Our proposal aims to optimize expensive engineering resources in the software and technology sector by minimizing overlapping solutions and facilitating cross-company collaboration.
Tax incentives for companies to switch to open source
Without an external incentive, most companies develop their software in their silos, even if it’s not about the core business. When we compare the number of proprietary and open source software developers globally, we roughly estimate that more than 95 percent of the software developed as proprietary software.
This over-protective approach results in companies making investments that potentially overlap and lead them to reinvent similar solutions. We could substantially reduce these overlaps and increase efficiency by explicitly investing in open source software and pooling resources.
The EU can set up an open source subsidy program to create strong incentives for companies to switch from proprietary to open source. If a company declares to build their software as open source, they can/should get a tax break for each dedicated developer/employee via this program.
How to accurately validate the information that companies will provide and the ideal size of the subsidy needs to be studied. The initial goal should be to encourage companies to open their non-essential software.
In the long term, we should minimize proprietary and maximize open source to increase collaboration between companies and foster innovation in the software ecosystem.