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

Lots of economists are interested in open source

[Anonymous Coward]

www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WEBSUC.html

The url above is for "The Success of Open Source" by Weber. Another take on open source is by Clayton Christensen in his books on innovation. I highly recommend both.

The thing about open source is that it puts the lie to the notion that people only do things for monetary gain. It is a poisonous notion when it is used as the basis for economic policy. In that light, the notion of massive government subsidies for open source efforts, is ham handed. IMHO, economists and policy makers should make the effort to understand how open source actually works before they propose to spend billions of taxpayers' dollars. I suggest they start with The Bazaar and the Cathedral. It's available for free download.

There is a place for publicly funded research. There is a place for publicly funded open source work. The model for both is probably similar. The idea that private enterprise should fund all research and software development produces bad results. For instance, having drug companies do all medical research means that only profitable drugs are produced. A free cure for cancer won't happen in such a regime. Similarly, pouring money into private corporations to fund research is usually a massive waste of money.

I'm not against public funding; I just don't think that this proposal is sufficiently enlightened to work.

Re:Bad math...

[seebs]

The amount saved per person has nothing to do with how much they are paid. Just because there's two numbers and one's bigger doesn't mean the right thing to do is divide the bigger one by the little one.

The theory is that $2 billion pays for 20,000 programmers. Calculating this out will show you an estimated cost of $100k/year/programmer, which is a reasonable figure for salaries plus overhead. The savings are not that those 20,000 programmers don't have to get paid elsewhere, but that their code will be more widely used than it would be if they were writing proprietary code, and as a result, the economic value to our society, in the form of lower software costs, would be something like $80 billion.

Which is frankly not a particularly unrealistic notion.