Companies that make at least $1M a year should donate to OSS they are using in their software.

I’m (unfortunately) against such ideas. Forcing people would never give you anything good. The art of business is to give and take and not only take. Fine, in this case they only take (use open source projects), but they are allowed to do so. It’s like giving someone a free cake and then asking to pay for it. It’s unfair and anti-market practice.

Owners of companies are tired of regulations, taxes and other expectations - look that they are paying a good money for accounting, because they want to just focus on the business part. I understand that BigTech is problem here, but law is or at least should be equal to everyone.

Your idea have lots of holes. For one project using open source dependencies may be less than 1% of value and in other it may do most of work. Having same expectations on both types is extremely unfair. Finally what stops said company from creating an open source crap and donate itself?

Look that most taxes governments does not have from BigTech, but from a workers. Firstly I would focus on this problem and then think about other things.

I understand what you want to say, I really am, but this is bad solution for a serious problem. It would cause more problem than it solve and only would end up with hate from each side instead of doing a real and good business.

After last 5 years I’m also tired about all of that. If it would be legal I would even use 100% of taxes on open source projects, but no matter if I would have 0.5 of million or 50 million I don’t want to hear about more paper work or more money expectations and it’s completely not related to open source - just speaking generally.

Good argument. So what could be an alternative?