# Sustain Together - October Summary

**URL:** <https://discourse.sustainoss.org/t/sustain-together-october-summary/1125>\
**Category:** 📣 Sustainer Talk\
**Tags:** sustain-weekly\
**Created:** [November 4, 2022, 1:50pm UTC](https://discourse.sustainoss.org/t/sustain-together-october-summary/1125 "2022-11-04T13:50:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 6

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**Author:** ![coni2k](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex032/user_avatar/discourse.sustainoss.org/coni2k/32/1336_2.png) [@coni2k](https://discourse.sustainoss.org/u/coni2k)\
**Post date:** [November 19, 2022, 11:27am UTC](https://discourse.sustainoss.org/t/sustain-together-october-summary/1125/6 "2022-11-19T11:27:51Z")

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Thanks for these summaries! 🙏

> Casual chat this week where we revisited some big ideas around the Tragedy of the Commons & taxing for open source.

Let me clarify the “taxation” part since it’s a little broad term, and it’s been a while since I mentioned the [“open source tax”](https://discourse.sustainoss.org/t/experimental-ideas-part-3-benefits/172/3) here.

The question is how to finance the open source ecosystem if we recognize it as a new type of public good.

The idea is to introduce a dedicated tax to proprietary software sales on top of “value added tax” (or “sales tax” in the US). So, each time a consumer purchases licensed software, they also pay this extra tax on top of the sales price. Then, ideally through a transparent public fund, the collected taxes should be distributed back to the open source ecosystem to generate steady revenue.

For 1% open source tax, the invoice should look like this:

> <https://twitter.com/coni2k/status/1380514595509526531>

This approach makes it a two-way relationship with the actual market, where the open-source ecosystem constantly contributes. There’s nothing optional, voluntary, or random. If the market performs well, the open source ecosystem grows and vice versa.

I want to study the numbers on how much revenue open source tax could generate globally and per country, but to give us an idea, one figure I found after a quick search:

> The global business software and services market size was valued at USD 429.59 billion in 2021

> **[Business Software And Services Market Size Report, 2030](https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/business-software-services-market)**
>
> The global business software and services market size was valued at USD 474.61 billion in 2022 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.9% from 2023 to 2030

The purpose of introducing such a tax is to solve the investment coordination issue (a.k.a tragedy of the commons), something the individual consumers cannot achieve. And our long-term plan should be to expand the open source ecosystem as much as possible (maximize freedom and innovation), hence why we need to pull such a big gun.

In other words, we should aim to build an environment where it’s normal for any regular (software) company to contribute to the open source ecosystem/digital public goods and generate revenue from it.

There are many details to cover about this scenario, but I wanted to explain the basic structure.

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