> "You can't do free volunteer work for unrelated party A and then turn around to unrelated party B and demand that they pay you for that."

The parties are absolutely not "unrelated". You are missing that, at least in Germany, the state is effectively a majority shareholder in every single company. For an average German SW dev salary of €80k, the state gets: €16k in social contributions (calculated on top of the salary) + about 32k in corporate tax, income tax, social security (again, on the worker side), sales tax, etc = 48k in total. So, in total, the German state gets about 50-60% of all money earned. It's not like in the US where taxes are lower.

Now, I "live on the dole" (because nobody wants to hire me for some reason) and create infrastructure that German companies use. I receive about €800/month (subsistence + health insurance), which is €9,600 per year. That is the cost to the state to keep me alive while I maintain infrastructure used by German companies.

Looking at the ROI for the German State, if only one single developer at a German startup saves a few weeks of work using my code, or if a startup can launch faster because of my open source work, the state makes that money back instantly. That is, assuming only a single company uses my code, while in fact, many do so silently.

And on top of that economic unfairness, the current system classifies Open Source work as "unemployment/leisure," whereas economically, it is unpaid R&D that fuels the very companies funding the state. There are strong differences in how "tech infrastructure" gets built in Germany vs the US:

- In the US, corporate taxes are much lower. Monopolies (Google, Meta, etc.) amass massive capital reserves. They effectively privatize public R&D (Go, React, PyTorch). They can afford to hire devs to work on OSS full-time because the state leaves them the money to do so.

- In Germany, the state takes ~50% of the money out of the ecosystem (between high income tax, social security, and corporate tax). Small and medium businesses (the "Mittelstand") do not have the surplus capital to fund "public good" R&D like Google does.

Since the German state extracts the capital that would otherwise fund this innovation, I can argue that the state has indeed an obligation to reinvest it into the ecosystem. Currently, they don't and they just waste the money on complete nonsense, wars, etc. and then tell OSS maintainers to also "get a real job and do OSS in your spare time".

Petition to formally recognize open source work as civic service in Germany