In the context of my earlier essays about volunteering and social framing, the question recently arose of who should get paid when an open source project receives donations. The short answer is “people who make it happen but wouldn't get paid otherwise” but the thinking behind that is more complex than you might expect.

An interesting repeated motif in the anti-trust conference I attended yesterday in Brussels was the assertion that there is no big tech in Europe like there is in America and that Europe is sandwiched between big country (China) and big tech. The question I kept wanting to ask is “why is there nothing you recognise as 'big tech' in Europe?”