Economist's Take On Open Source Development

An anonymous reader writes "Economist Dean Baker outlines alternative funding mechanisms for software development in a new report called "Opening Doors and Smashing Windows" [PDF Warning], available at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. One proposal is to create a US government-funded Software Development Corps of public software corporations, which compete and produce only free and open source software. Baker estimates that through the resulting lower prices in software and computers, the government would recoup its annual $2 billion appropriation to the program and US consumers would save $80-120 billion each year -- all while 20,000 software developers are supported to work specifically on open source projects."

Comments

So in other words, Socialism

[ShatteredDream]

Don't get me wrong, I like Linux, GCC, Python, Tomcat and am posting this from Firefox, but this is such total bullshit on the face of it that you'd have to be either holed up in the Ivory Tower or an open source zealot who just wants to stick it to The Man to think that this is a good idea. 20,000 developers? That's ALL?! Microsoft currently has probably almost that many working for them, so the only thing that I can conclude from this proposal is that it would be an unmitigated disaster for the developer labor market if implemented.

Why not just come out and admit a cold, hard fact: open source software has been an abysmal failure if making a lot of money and keeping a lot of people employed is the goal. This proposal is a blatant admission that open source has not and will not work as a mainstream business model for anything but infrastructure software because that's the only software where support and custom development consulting is a major source of revenue. Can anyone point to solid evidence of desktop apps like cd burners, office suites and things of that nature thriving through support models? I can't seem to find any, and OpenOffice is not a good example because the project would probably implode if Sun pulled out.

Why is it that almost every single major open source projects aimed at software development with great documentation and consistent naming conventions are based on closed source products. Yeah, Classpath and Mono have designs and documentation that rival Sun and Microsoft's products, but that's because they're functional clones of them!

One of the things that I have gotten truly sick of is the hobbyist argument used to defend open source projects in so many cases. Desktop Linux has been maturing along the same timeframe as MacOS X has been in development--I remember seeing the proclamations of its ascension RSN in 1997-1999--and yet it is still very far away in terms of quality and capability. If Windows is "good enough" and Desktop Linux cannot meet or exceed it... any guess what that says about it?

Re:Nice but...

[greggman]

instead we'd get

• Forget the bugs, you can't fire me, this is a government job, I get paid regardless of results
• You want what feature? Hah, vote on it maybe it will get funded
• XYZ has that feature and you want it too? Why the F should I care? I get paid so I could care less that XYZ has that feature and we don't.
• get it done by when? It'll be done whenever I feel like working on it since I don't care about competition

Because the government has no fiduciary interest in the software they have no incentive to make it better than the competition. The competition has no incentive to even get in the market since they can't compete with free. Result, COMPLETE TECHINCAL STAGNATION. Skip forward a few year until there's an entire government bureaucracy just for deciding which features get funding, which bugs get fixed, which insider gets the contract to do it, and how many billions in cost overruns it's costing tax payers.