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Free Software as a Public Good

Posted by Cliff on from the this-would-be-nice dept.

acone asks: "Have any national governments taken measures to subsidize open source projects? I'm aware that many have endorsed Linux in particular, and free software in general, but I was wondering about actual funding. I ask because the notion of a good built and maintained by the community almost inevitably suggests that such be treated as a public good. Many of the public goods we now take for granted--such as police, public libraries, and public fire departments--were historically provided either by private enterprises or by loosely-organized volunteers, neither of which have proven nearly as effectively for the common goods as their current government-run equivalents. An excellent example is the organization of the police force, libraries and fire department in colonial Philadelphia, in which these services became established in a very grassroots manner, then gradually gained acceptance as something that the state should provide. This pattern looks temptingly applicable to free software. In addition to the current, community-based mechanisms in which free software is developed, wouldn't it be beneficial to have dedicated groups of professional free software developers, paid by national governments to serve the overall interests of society? Seems to me like such would be a Good Thing."

16 of 445 comments (clear)

  1. KDE and Germany by Nick+of+NSTime · · Score: 3, Informative

    I remember reading something a year or so ago about the German government subsidizing KDE development. I may be wrong on that.

    1. Re:KDE and Germany by cabalamat2 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The German government is funding open source email encryption software under project Aegypten. Some of this is KDE software, for example work on the kmail mail client.

      See Project Aegypten Home Page for details.

    2. Re:KDE and Germany by phoenix_rizzen · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yeppers, that would be for the Kroupware project, which includes the Kolab server, Kolab client (KMail + KDEPIM integrated together), and other related projects. The funding was to create an Exchange Server replacement.

  2. Government Subsidy by Egonis · · Score: 2, Informative

    I am in the process of obtaining a government subsidy for the development of a Client Management System for Youth Shelters in Ontario... things are looking good, very good.

    So yes, if you present your plan to the Canadian Government, anyway, in good terms, showing that it will benefit all; it is easy to obtain a subsidy.

  3. Re:SkoleLinux (School Linux) by nordicfrost · · Score: 4, Informative

    A link could be useful... Sorry!

  4. DARPA by Megaslow · · Score: 2, Informative

    Was funding OpenBSD and OpenSSL, for a little while until they changed their minds

  5. America's Army game? by Thinkit3 · · Score: 2, Informative

    That's what America's Army game essentially does now. Try it out, it's a great example of government making software that is freely copyable (read the license).

    --
    -Libertarian secular transhumanist
  6. Who funded BSD? TCP/IP? by brentlaminack · · Score: 5, Informative

    Check your history. Guess who funded most of the BSD development? Right. The US Government. Who funded development of TCP/IP? Right again. Are these open source? Yes. Were they funded by Government for the Common Good? Yes. This is nothing new. This has been going on for a couple of decades now.

    1. Re:Who funded BSD? TCP/IP? by Strudelkugel · · Score: 2, Informative

      Not sure about which Dept. funded BSD, But TCP was derived from DARPA funding. ICs where driven by the Apollo space program. Browsers, as everyone knows, evolved from efforts at CERN. Like most whiz-bang tech, gov. funding is often at the root.

      BUT, that doesn't mean gov is interested in disseminating tech for commercial purposes. It's highly unlikely NASA and DARPA would have been interested in funding consumer email systems and web browsing, let alone something like AOL or GPUs for gaming.

      OSS discussions have become quite interesting from the perspective of sociology and economics. The role of a fire dept, police dept, etc, are well defined and relatively immutable. This certainly isn't true for software applications! Would the gov have funded DOOM? (Imagine all of the Congressional testimony from the morality types...) Obviously not, but w/o games, I doubt the industry would have invested much money in GPU development.

      Maybe it just been a while since the fall of the Berlin Wall or something, but there is a not-insignificant minority of posters who seem to subscribe to the notion of a socialist Utopia created by OSS. To those who have such views, I offer my opinion that GNU/Linux never would have made it out of Torvalds' and Stallman's minds had it not been for the all of private investment/VC (as in venture Capital, i.e. for profit) money put into the likes of Amazon, Apple, AOL, eBay, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun, TI, Yahoo, etc, which provided the environment in which OSS could get to the point it is today. To lose sight of this is to ignore the lessons of economic history.

      --
      Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
  7. the united states by drfireman · · Score: 3, Informative

    The US, through the NIH (Dept. HHS), funds software development projects, some of which are free (GPLed) software projects. NIH funding comes to researchers through a variety of mechanisms, including specific requests for proposals, and often through programs devoted to particular public health related goals. Fundees are often at Universities and sometimes have the freedom to release their software under whatever licenses they choose.

    I don't want to Slashdot the particular office that funds my work, but if you poke around on the NIH web site (www.nih.gov) for informatics-related programs, you can find some good examples of programs that fund software development. If you poke further, you'll find that some of those projects develop GPLed software.

    I don't know that this is the ultimate expression of a government supporting free software as a public good, but it's certainly an area in which you'll find examples of government-funded free software that's designed to promote public health and/or basic science.

  8. Re:Good idea but. by TheIzzy · · Score: 2, Informative
    Essentially anyone can do anything in the linux community...

    Hence the free-as-in-speech. We WANT anyone to be able to do anything with the open source projects. Linus, however, maintains the official "untainted" kernel tree. You use his when you want the raw kernel, and apply patches such as openmosix (http://openmosix.sf.net) when you require extra functionality. The infrastructure is there, but it's also circumventable if it doesn't meet your needs.

  9. Free Software and the German government by greppling · · Score: 2, Informative
    The German "Innenministerium" directly funded the development of gnupg. However, after seeing the small success of the project (in terms of adoption rate), and maybe other reasons, the ministery finally decided to stop direct funding of OSS development, and instead relying on other means to support OSS.

    The other high-profile project funded by the German government is Kollaborate. This was done by the "BSI" (Federal Agency for IT security), which is known to be very Linux-friendly (and equally MS-unfriendly).

  10. Re:There won't be some "Office of Open Source" by agentZ · · Score: 3, Informative

    This isn't a worry in the United States. According to 17 USC 105, works of the US Government are not eligible for copyright protection.

    Thus, all of the code written by government employees for government business, if released to the public, is public domain.

    For example, check out my computer forensic tools: md5deep and foremost. Your tax dollars at work!

  11. Re:China by jratcliffe · · Score: 2, Informative

    Ummm...Taiwan IS the ROC (Republic of China). Mainland China is the PRC (People's Republic of China). If you're referring to this story, then there's no int'l cooperation involved, it's purely an effort of Taiwan (aka the ROC) - the PRC has nothing to do with it.

  12. Re:Public AND Private Funding are both Appropriate by urbazewski · · Score: 5, Informative
    Public funding is nearly ALWAYS a bad thing. It distorts the market place and a distorted market place means inefficiently allocated recourses. That's economic 101. It's a BAD THING.

    What's missing from this discussion is a definition of what a public good is:

    ...a public good is essentially a good that is difficult to exclude someone from using, and that one person's use does not deny someone else the use of that good. A public park or clean air are typical examples of public goods. (read this article for typical incorrect definitions of public goods provided by econ 101 students)
    Free software is indeed a public good because by definitoin it is difficult to exclude other people from using it and other than the cost of bandwidth to make the code available my using doesn't prevent anyone else using it. The problem with public goods is that most people want them, but no one has much of an incentive to provide them individually --- which is why public goods are typically provided by the government. Public funding of public goods does not "distort the market" because the non-excludability of public goods means there's not much of a market for them in the first place.

    Anything that can be copied digitally becomes more and more like a public good everyday...

    --
    foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
  13. German Government by kris · · Score: 2, Informative

    The German government has paid for a number of applications that have been implemented as GPLed software products. In particular, there have been several high profile projects such as Sphinx (gpg and kmail integration) and kroupware (now transforming into kolab and kontact).

    But there is a lot of OSS activity at lower levels, for example the Java Anon Proxy (JAP) project as a joint venture between Dresden University and the privacy commissioner of Land Schleswig-Holstein, several School Linux Projects, a large scale Linux deployment for schools around the city of Moers (serving 250.000 users), and many more projects at a similar level.

    In studies on Open Source Development, many European countries come out "on top", that is the number of developers from European countries is higher than it should be according to their proportional headcount. Such Government subsidized OSS projects and deployments are a strong factor, creating a climate where OSS can flourish and produce many good projects and products.