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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."
School Linux has recieved a grand from the Norwegian educational ministery. The grant was for USD 27,673.81 and funded a fundamental research into the feasibility of Linux in schools.
But you will see various governments writing or commissioning code for their own needs. The important thing is to get that code licensed appropriately (BSD or GPL or whatever your particular views are) so that the populace can use it freely.
The German government sponsored GnuPG, an open-source version of PGP GnuPG press release
I'd be happy to take their money, it's their influence I don't want. As I see it, part of the freedom associated with free software is freedom from corporate or government bureaucracy deciding what goes into the software. I doubt most governments would agree to sponsor something if they could not exercise tight control over it.
Have any national governments taken measures to subsidize open source projects?
China?
Don't know for sure, but it would be a clear candidate to subsidize
Another case is Germany paying for that KDE project... how was it kalled? Kroupware? But that's not subsidizing...
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
Yes, software companies love to pay taxes and then the money used to create software to drive them out of business.
On the other hand, I do think it can be used for to help society in general.
But I feel it should be written under BSD-like(public domain) license, putting under a GPL-like license is just wrong for this situation.
Basically I would worry that if a burocracy was added to the development process, it would end up mucking the development process up.
However, I'm pretty sure that some OSS softwares are directly descended from various government projects that were developed under the GPL or made open source after completion. (can someone help me with examples, or tell me I'm wrong).
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
If you examine the parallel to its logical conclusion this is kind of scary. Do you really want to allow political action groups (such as all officers of the Microsoft corporation) the opportunity to affect the election of the Open Source Commissioner? Part of the state-sponsored common good is to put it under the control and regulation of elected officials. This is not a win to my mind...
One day, though, governments might find interesting to fund software that are essential to the internet (like, servers and clients for DNS, http, e-mail, etc).
So who will benifit from the funding other than open source developers? This will not provide any new software to the public. The same software will be availiable, only more developers will get paid for it.
Software certainly meets the non-rivalry requirement, but non-excludability is not met given the current legal atmosphere concerning the concept of intellectual property.
That said, there are cases where introducing excludability means that what used to be public goods can now be provided through market mechanisms: toll roads are not public goods, but universally accessible roads are. Government intervention is required to provide the latter, but (ideally) not the former. The same can be said for private security forces as a replacement for police. You could even slap gates around libraries so that only those who pay can gain access. The debate then turns to what resources *should* have non-excludability -- what goods and services should any person be able to expect from their government?
Outside that debate, you cannot eliminate non-excludability from certain items: national defense and global climate quality come to mind.
If you think having to fill out forms to requisition a 256M stick of RAM from the IT Department is oppressive...
If you think having to fill out more forms and get them signed by your manager, the IT manager, and the Purchasing Department's manager, and then wait two days for Purchasing to order the RAM is unproductive and oppressive...
If you think having to fill out even more forms the next week when you find that the fuckup in Purchasing bought two sticks 256M of PC133 SDRAM (or worse, one stick of 512M DDR instead of two sticks of 256M DDR for your dual-channel workstation), because "You wanted memory, and we found that PC133 was cheaper"... is assinine, counterproductive, and oppressive...
NOTICE: As a condition of receiving a grant under the Patriots' Freedom Software Allowance Act, I affirm, under penalty of perjury that Software developed under the Patriots' Freedom License will in no way be used to transfer data by Specially Designated Nationals, nor any data in violation of the PATRIOT Act, nor will it be used by any third party to facilitate violations of the Communications Decency Act. Software will not be made available to Migrant Employees of any Railroad as per the Railroad Workers' Protection Act of 1966, except such Migrant Employees of Railroads covered under the Railroad Pensioners' Guarantee Act of 1968 (amended 1972), and will comply with all other ordinances and conditions of local, state, and Federal law, subject to amendment.
Friday Afternoon Paradox: Free Software is a Public Good, but the instant it becomes a Public Goods, it ceases to be Free Software.
Me, I think Bill Gates should get the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing them together.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Instead of gov't providing a product (software), why not provide a service (security auditing)?
1. The police/fire/library examples are services. While the gov't sucks at providing services efficiently, they would be even worse at providing products.
2. The Administration bitches about needing a secure national information infrastructure.
3. The gov't has already done a little bit of this already (i.e., NSA).
If we can get dollars and/or support directed towards security audits and contributions to key OSS projects, that would be great. If it came out of the DHS or defense budgets, that would be better. (insert your favorite "Code, not bombs" or "Code, not CAPPS" styled comments here) We would get the double benefit of A.) getting support for secure software and infrastructure, and B.) diverting away at least some funding from privacy-eroding and people-oppressing programs elsewhere.
Things like the Linux kernel, SSH, Apache, FreeS/WAN, etc. come to mind.
The government would need to do something to ensure that the code they produce stays open for the good of the commons. The easiest way would be for them to release their submitted patches into the public domain.
One big hurdle: the gov't needs to get off of the brain-dead, schizophrenic kick about "crypto == munitions". Strong, effective crypto, without gov't backdoors that would eventually be discovered, is the only real way to secure our national information infrastructure.
"Oh, the terrorists might use our crypto against us!" Bollocks. Terrorists use roads, but we don't stop building those.
"Yeah, but we license drivers, so we should license Internet users." Bollocks. Anyone can physically operate a vehicle on the roads without a license, since rigid 100% enforcement is quite impossible in the real world, so licensing does not deter terrorism. Licensing Internet users will NEVER deter terrorism, and would only be limited to people within the US (and maybe ex-pats).
ANY speech could potentially be a signal for harm to be done (steganography, anyone?) Therefore, demanding weak/no crypto to deter terrorism is an empty hope.
The gov't should put its money where its mouth is and promote true security auditing in an open, peer-reviewable way.
I think we are going to see more targeted development, so if the government of a country wants all the gnome tools (or KDE or whatever) to work in the local language they will pay someone to do it. Or if some department needs something for some specific need they may pay for it. I think if we want the government (whichever one you are talking about) to fund software the best bet is form a company and compete for their software contracts. If you could convice say the DOJ to use Linux/Gnome on the desktop vs Windows that would very effectivly fund a lot of development. Some of it would be specific to whatever DOJ wanted but most of it would be good for everyone.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Another great point the parent poster mentions is the fact that software can be reproduced as much as needed without actually taking away from anyone else. This is important because it is commonly overlooked by the anti-linux zealots. They love to call the open source crowd "thieves" because of the SCO lawsuit but even if there is SCO code in the kernel, no user would be a theif. Besides the fact that code is copyrighted (which is meant to protect copying of published works, which is not the case with propietary software), the end user did not know about the code, and more importantly no person is deprived of that "stolen" code.
Back to the topic at hand...
Should free software be subsidized? No. Not yet at least. Obviously some people are not ready for it. If free software becomes dominant and acceptable by the masses in the future then I believe it might be a good idea, as long as government is not as crooked as it is now and that's a big "if".
Personally I believe that Microsoft fanboys have finally lost any ground to attack linux on technical merits so now they have to attack open source as anti-american. I haven't really heard the "communist/socialist" FUD until more recently. It at least wasn't as prevalent as it is now until the 2.4 kernel. The 2.4 kernel and the advancement of individual distros in this time awoke a fear amongst people with blind allegiances to other operating systems. They'll attempt to kill it in anyway they can to help save Bill's criminal monopoly.
Time makes more converts than reason