Comment by mschuster91

IMHO, at least the foundations of what makes the Internet tick - the Linux kernel, but also stuff like SSL libraries, format parsers, virtualization tooling and the standard libraries and tools that come installed by default on Linux systems - should be funded by taxpayers. The EU budget for farm subsidies is about 40 billion euros a year - cut 1% off of it, so 400 million euros, and invest it into the core of open source software, and we'd get an untold amount of progress in return.