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Free Software as a Public Good
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."
Haven't they? And for good reason, this is basically what a good portion of his book "The Future of Ideas" is about....that is, a commons for everyone which enriches society, and how corporations are taking it over to the detriment of society in general. Read this book.
Don't be a zoa (zealous overbearing ass), be happy!
Police Forces are national.
.02
There are some United Forces (UN) but they really arent a major say in what goes on (US war on "Terrorists").
If governments have thier say, they will think what they choose to write is the right way. Governments of different nations dont always agree (AKA WAR).
Whats to stop the US government to hire more professional coders to get more of what they want to see in OSS
Yes OSS has the branches and someone has the overall say in what makes it in and what does not but when was the last time you heard someone disagreeing with the government and not getting some sort of herassment for it (raisethefist.com) ?
Do you really want to add that much more politics into OSS?
Do you really want to wait for the government to finish coding something that you need to use (we all know how governement deadlines work!!!) ?
Just my
Public goods need to benefit EVERYONE, not EVERYONE uses linux or open software.
and not everyone is driving his car on that road, but the gov payed for it. and not everyone is going to the public library, but the gov payed for it, and so on.
oss is just like a library: free information for everyone.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
It seems to me that the very idea of paying someone to write free software is the very antithesis of what free software is all about. (Not to mention the practical problems of managing the stable of programmers, ensuring that work actually gets done etc...)
Then you don't know much about free software. Free software is about freedom, not price. GNU and the FSF have sold free software since the 1980s, on magnetic tape and later CD ROM. Some of their products were quite pricy (and available for gratis download besides), but they still made some money selling the media, as the convinience was worth it to some.
Government funded public works is a Good Thing(tm), whether it is highways, the last mile of connectivity (which alas, is privately owned by local monopoly barons in most, but not all, of the US), or basic software infrastructure used to hold and manipulate public data.
We would never tolerate our highway system being held hostage by a single company. Why on earth would we tolerate such a thing with our public information?
As for private funding, that is all well and good, but private funding has limitations (such as the profit motive, which works sometimes but, contrary to right-wing myth, does not always work or yeild the best results). Public funding has its limitations as well, but pulling projects that are serving the public interest because of no immediate exploitable profit generally isn't one of them.
Indeed, the best public goods are those which include both private and public funding, where the limitations of one are generally countered by the strengths of the other. Examples include, but are not limited to, academia and university research.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I have no problem with the government sponsoring free software development, but if they do so, they should use a license that allows anyone and everyone to benefit from the software. That means a BSD style license versus a GPL license.
The GPL is probably the reason that the government would be unable to just take the reigns of free software funding, like they took over the operation of libraries. Simply because it is counterproductive for the government, which has effectively unlimited resources, to compete with commercial entities. Nobody wins in that situation, not the gov't, not the companies, and not the consumer. GPL code cannot be used commercially in a conventional sense, and if the government were to put serious efforts behind it, they could wind up destroying a lot of commercial enterprises, not to mention wasting taxpayer dollars for a while as they duplicate a service which is already being provided to the public. Eventually, once commercial developers go under, they would just be providing the same service more expensively (government is generally less efficient than private enterprise).
Developers who use the GPL have already decided that their software should not be a public good in the sense that libraries are (in that anyone could go to a library, read books on a subject, and then resell what they learned for money). Even though the knowledge to understand GPL code might be expensive to get, and difficult to package in a useful way, they insist that anyone should be able to redistribute such an effort, for free, in exchange only for recognition for the developer. This effectively makes knowledge easy to exchange, but at a cost of making it worthless, unsellable.
A BSD license on goverment developed code might not be much better initially, as what could result would be the government doing work for commercial companies for free (from their point of view), while they continue to charge comparable prices for their work of packaging the software. Eventually, though, prices would be driven down, as the software itself became a commodity, and the knowledge of how to package it was the only way companies could compete. This would be software as a public good, in a general sense. Companies like the initial consequence of this scenario, and fear the second, so they want to make sure that things stay in the first stage, where the government is doing a certain amount of work for them, without eating their lunch.
I think if the government were to step in and make certain kinds of software (starting with the most often used pieces of code, the OS) a commodity, it could have very positive results for society. On the other hand, open source developement is already going on, so maybe they don't need to be involved, except for preserving the legal conditions that allows this to happen.
The "mechanisms" you mention are "services" (libraries, police, and fire). The government provides these for the good of all people
What you want is a "product" and not a "service". What you're asking for is for the government to provide free every product which does "good for the public". This would include, soap, laundry detergent, deoderant (heh), cars, bikes, clothes, scissors, pens, pencils, paper, toilet paper, paper clips, computers, books, magazines (aka toilet paper), etc etc (you get my point).
So what you're asking for is the government to determine what "product" is for the public good, subsidize it to limit business opprotunities to provide individuals who are looking to earn a living and profit from their work. Not to mention stock holders who make money on the profits made by companies who sell these products.
Doing this would not only affect the general moral of workers who provide such services, but will put thousands of people out of work while at the same time increasing our taxes to figures that I don't even want to imagine.
Generally, bad idea. Period. Besides, this "public good" is only to be for the public good of about 1/4 the US population.
Oh and by the way, most towns in the U.S. still have volunteer services where very little money is provided by the town.
Government influence over software isn't likely to work by government heavies leaning on you to make your software do this or that. It's much more likely to work by the government deciding to fund the people who do what they want, and not to fund others. If what you want to do isn't in line with what the government wants, you probably weren't going to get funded anyway. If it is, it's hard to imagine the government investing heavily in micro-managing your project.
First of all public goods only need to benefit enough people to enjoy a majority support. Does the military benefit everyone? How about the people who disagree with how the military is being used? Does the bus system benefit everyone? Does welfare benefit everyone?
Arguably all of these do support everyone; that is, everyone benefits by living in a country where the destitute don't have to resort to theft to avoid starvation, everyone benefits from living in a society which is well protected from foreign aggressors, and society as a whole benefits from having people who are incapable of passing a driving test, or unable to afford a car, never the less able to hold a job and be productive so that they won't have to live on welfare.
Likewise open software benefits everyone -- if not directly then indirectly -- in lower prices for services, in greater productivity, resulting in greater general prosperity, in better and cheaper communication technologies, and greater efficiency for those areas that open software is able to cover.
Where would we be without open software. Let's see. No email, no Internet (no DNS), no TCP/IP, no world wide web, no interoperable software. Novell, Microsoft, MacOS, and the mainframes would all still be separate islands.
Yeah, I guess that doesn't add up to squat.
--
BitTorrent in C -- LibBT
http://www.sf.net/projects/libbt
Government funded projects should use BSD style licenses. All of them. Everything the government creates should be available to everyone, regardless of what they want to do with it. "Everyone" paid for it, so "everyone" should be able to use it however they want.
Sometimes, I don't see why folks complain that MS used some government source code in a product. If they want it to become a standard, then everyone needs to be able to freely integrate it into their systems, including commercial interests.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
I agree that the development process would be tainted by the influence of goverment money. However, if the software is truly open sourced, how much influence could they have over it? True, those that took the money could be influenced, but anyone could contribute.
I would go so far as to argue that the freedom from corporate and goverment influence is one of the most essential notions surrounding the development of free software. Although, if a government is willing to concede that open code is of higher quality and more secure than its closed source counterpart, then they really couldn't exert much influence on the development. The inefficiencies that would result from their meddling would be out in public for all to see.
Its an interesting concept, which definately deserves more attention.
Traxman
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Yes socialism seems to be the answer for dealing with the digital world, its not the answer for the physical world but definately for the digital world.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Now imagine a scenario where there is governmnet funding. Out of work programmers, people who took a semester of pascal in highschool and are now looking for cash, etc., will go looking for projects to do to get in on the funding chuckwagon rather than responding to an existing need. Other hangers-on will attempt to join, not because they know the subject well or feel the same need to create a particular bit of software, but because they want in on the $$$. Arguments over which code to include would be biased by the author's desire to prove to the funding source that they had added the most lines of code, and not on technical merrit. Overall, it would become the opposite of what a good open source project should be.
Everyone does use Free Software, even if they are not aware of it.
Much of the web is run on Free Software, and most (if not all) packets will cross routers, firewalls or bridges that are running Free Software at some point during thier journey.
In fact, thier own computers may be using code that was directly derived from Free Software, such as the improved network stack in Windows (from BSD, IIRC).
The world of propietary, closed source software has benefitted greatly from Free Software development, and this has benefitted EVERYONE, even if they know nothing about it.
Including you.
Also, there is no precident to a "benefit EVERYONE" requirement for government funding (at least in the U.S.).
One example of government funding for a select few persons would be the funding of natural disater insurance programs for persons who choose to build thier houses on flood plains and on beaches. Government funded flood plain insurance enables people to live along rivers and the same coverage allowed the wealthier americans to ensure that most of us could not afford to live near the beach. (Before natural disaster relief plans covered beachfront property, it was quite inexpensive to have a house on or near the beach, but most chose not to because of the possibility of storm damage or erosion.)
Another would be farming subsidies for tobbacco farmers. I fail to see how one could conscrue such funding as "beneficial to EVERYONE".
Read, L