I was 25 when I released the first Mandrake Linux, in the summer of 1998. The idea itself cost nothing: a PC, an internet connection, a few months of nights. Everything that came after cost money we did not have, and we spent the following two years finding it. I was lucky. I know people of my generation who had better ideas than mine and never got to try them, for the most banal reason in the world: nobody around them had anything to lend.
This post is about a radical answer to that. I am not pretending it could pass tomorrow. I am putting it on the table because the debate it opens is one Europe has avoided for a century, and because the numbers behind it are far bigger than anyone admits.
Continue reading “An inheritance for everyone, paid for by inheritance”