The value of an open source dividend, by James Love | Managing Intellectual Property
▻http://www.managingip.com/Blog/3390962/The-value-of-an-open-source-dividend.html
John Sulston (…) research that is open to everyone is at least nine times more valuable to society than research that is closed. (...)
In 2007, during work by MSF on a new innovation inducement prize for low-cost point-of-care diagnostics for tuberculosis, concerns about the negative impact of inducement prizes on secrecy were addressed by a proposal for an open source dividend (OSD). The initial proposal was for a percentage of inducement prize money to be allocated to persons who openly shared knowledge, data, materials and technology that was considered significant and useful in the development of the winning diagnostic test. (...)
The concept of the OSD has more general application than innovation inducement prizes. One could implement the OSD as part of more traditional business models for drug or software development. For example, if even 1% of patented drug sales in the United States were set aside into a fund for the OSD, there would be about $2.5 billion each year in rewards (...)
The new OSD market incentives to share knowledge could easily be extended to software development, with even small fees on the sale of licensing of proprietary software, or devices that used software, such as computers or mobile computer devices.