Before writing a full blog post, I want to gather some reactions.
What if we made it legally obligated that if an employee can show (putting aside the validation mechanism here, lot of options with different tradeoffs) they contribute to open source a bit (and i really mean a low amount. Even an obscure package count, even a few PR to fix real bug) on their non work time.
Then the employer have to give them one more (paid) free day a week. 80% job for the salary of 100% one.
@Di4na the interesting question is: who is "we" here? Should it be government or some kind of professional association? If government, then other professionals would want something similar for themselves
@thisalex this already exist for a lot of them. Feel free to offer that if it does not in your case. I go for narrow because i go for what i can get and support politically
@Di4na I understand this case as I’m open-source contributor myself. But I know that governments prefer to work in general terms and it’s much more difficult to implement special case just for one area. Trying to be practical. Sorry. Good luck!
@thisalex this has not been my experience with government. Policy makers tend to prefer super targeted bills, because then noone outside of the domain hear about it. It really simplifies the policy making work.
The larger it gets, the harder it gets to do anything.
@Di4na one of the most important resource is uninterrupted available free time an human can have. I’ll be even more explicit, that free time needs to be under conditions where that human is at the aesthetic stage according to Maslow’s pyramid. Which is even more rare. Otherwise it’ll create a lot of noise from people chasing the wrong incentives when contributing to open source. The problem is that uninterrupted available free time is what employers want the most from their employees.
The idea behind is that even that would massively multiply time spent by maintainers on foss, support space for learning, and benefit everyone.
Yes sure, it will be gamed. But would it still be worth it?
Limited risk for everyone, support a hobbyist schedule/wants and all. And a very distributed solution that would adapt relatively naturally to fill even the nichest parts.
And for everyone that will want to bring UBI: yes i get you but it does solve a slightly different problem. Not against it, but i think it would still have impact even in UBI world.
Also to everyone wanting to bring horter work week at all. I also agree with you. I picked the centrist "dealing with what i have in the moment" position for now, but I would take yours too.
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