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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."
Since when is it the job of the government to promote open source?
Do we really want the government to actively go about picking winners and losers in entire areas of the worldwide economy?
I don't really see the document listing the impact to the economy if you did this all at once. A lot more than 20,000 programmers are employed writing and supporting software they're trying to phase out.
I have always been a proponent of go with whatever is the best model. Yet it seems that governments all over the world are trying to prop up open source to try and put companies (mostly Microsoft) out of business. If the product is better and the model works - why does the government have to get involved at all?
Why wait for a personal voucher, just personally take $100 out of your wallet and give it to the project of your choosing.
"Voucher" is the new monorail.
As much as I like fostering open source software competitions, I don't want my government funding or operating it. These are things that private individuals, contributors, users and corporations can setup. I don't mean to sound like I'm flamebaiting here, but the first thing that went through my head is "Hippy-haired RMS-style socialism".
And, if you live in a socialist country, that's great. But let's pick one.
Heck, while we're at it, why not put automotive companies out of business by having government-funded and operated initiatives to build and sell cheap or free cars in regional co-ops?
He wants to take $80-120 billion a year out of the economy and create a new tax payer funded federal agency? This is a good idea?
Last time I checked software and computers weren't expensive at all, certainly not enough that it needs some hair brained solution like this. Talk about a solution in search of a problem... yeesh!
Where's that written in the Consitution?
In contrast to my earlier post about this article, this one is going to flamebait.
Joel from Joel On Software is the software and internet equivelant of Star Jones. Isn't as interesting as he thinks he is. Isn't as revered as he thinks he should be. Isn't as authoritative and insightful and entertaining as he probably feels he is.
By the sheer number of craptastic "articles" (lame blog entries) he's had posted on Slashdot, I had been certain there was a little Joel on a Pole going on backdoors at Slashdot. It's only been trumped by the recent flooding of "the Escapist" craptastic articles.
True, true... I guess I felt it was the "less evil" of the two proposals. Big government-sponsored companies trying to "do open source"... sounds DoublePlusUnGood to me... lots of UML diagrams would be produced though, I dare say.
The Army reading list
Oh - by the way - it wouldn't work.
What genius is going to "donate" money for some software that hasn't been released yet? With the sheer amount of garbage software out there, the last thing I'm going to do is put up $10 for a piece of software that may never come (in which case my share of the money would get dumped into some frigging charity) or, when it does, is absolutely nothing like what I thought I was paying for.
Here's what I call the ransom model:
You make the software I want and if I like it, I'll buy it from you with cash. If you don't make the software I want or I don't like it, I won't buy it and will keep my cash. That's the true ransom model.
In the scenerio presented above, it's a lose/lose situation.
> The government runs things so effeciently...such as the DMV. I ;)
> can't wait for oversized beurocracies to get their hands on
> developing software. And they move so quickly and effieciently
> I'll bet software bugs would get corrected within seconds of
> discovery.
Yeah, because there's no such thing as bloated, inefficient private-sector software companies.
If you're going to be a bum, be a bum. Stop being a bum and calling yourself an "artist". If you didn't want to starve, you could have been a lawyer or something else in school that required more than the ability to coordinate color or sculpt clay between pot-smoking breaks (I grew up near Lewis & Clarke university and Reed college, so I know of what I speak).
An "Artistic Freedom Voucher" sounds like it's clearly a politically correct version of the vouchers they tried to use in San Francisco where, instead of giving the homeless money, you gave them vouchers to get services when they redeem them.
Not to mention, as creative as you might be in programming, you are not an artist. Creativity in a thing does not make it art. Nobody wrote Clippy to evoke emotional inquisitiveness or OpenOffice to convey some inward yearning for self-exposition on display.
This just sounds too hippy-ish. And I don't even really dislike hippies. But come on . . . Rather than doing useful work that people would pay you for, you're supposed to contribute to some government social program Cuba-style in return for a little redeemable voucher that someone offered in the spirit of charity?
I, for one, never want any sort of a job where I'm paid in fucking "vouchers". You might as well be coding for foodstamps for fuck's sake.
(By "you", I mean the collective, subjective "you" - not the parent poster).
US government-funded Software Development Corps?
I thought they were called graduate schools?
Seriously, it's already there in the form of graduate schools. Just up the funding of graduate school science programs rather than create an artificial agency.
The last thing the free software community needs is the US government fucking it over with beauracracy and red tape and project proposals and grants, etc. The best thing the governments of the world can do to encourage and promote the free software movement is to officially adopt open standards (open protocols, open document formats, etc) for all official business. Don't screw over a good thing by trying to play parent to it. We get by fine on our own thanks.
11*43+456^2
Since when is it the job of the government to promote open source?
Do we really want the government to actively go about picking winners and losers in entire areas of the worldwide economy?
While I agree that free and open source software is fine without the governments help (in fact, we don't need it or want it), since when is it the job of the government to enforce and impose restrictions on copying for the sake of large media companies??
This first paragraph ....
Copyrights and patents are forms of government intervention in the market that are relics of the medieval guild system. They are an outdated and inefficient means to support creative and innovative work in the 21s t century. These government-granted monopolies lead protected software to sell at prices that are far above the free-market price. In most cases, in the absence of copyright and patent protection, software would be available over the Internet at zero cost.
.. blew me away and is probably the most insightfull thing I've ever read in a government publication. What a hero, the author will probably get fired for such blatnet honesty.
I'm still failing to understand how the free market has failed for software. Between home and the office, I have multiple flavors of linux, OSX, Solaris, HP-UX and Windows. I have the choice of paying for the standard $400 MS Office suite or downloading OpenOffice or StarOffice (or even others). I have a plethora of decent browsers, music players, art programs, entertainment, games and everything else under the sun between free, cheap, costly or expensive.
How exactly is the free market failing? If it weren't for the free market, what incentive would there be to operate at anything higher than 50mhz? Who would care about 128bit audio when 8bit audio is just fine? The incentive is in the mass market and that market is not going to be served with good products by guys getting paid with in coupons and vouchers from random users.
Yeah, Microsoft has a huge chunk of the market. Yeah, microsoft sucks. But Microsoft isn't the only game in town. As I mentioned above.
Tell me some things the government has taken over that have been exemplary? They really have that welfare thing nailed down. Efficient. No fraud. No waste. You bet. Oh, and that Amtrak. What with it being friendly, efficient, on time, clean and accessible in every destination you could possibly want. And that telephone thing always goes so well, too... And utility companies. And.. yeah everything they touch turns to gold. I definitely want my software funded by government beauracracy that can't even fix a pothole.
it is done just like everyone else who contribute to open source.
If the governemnt contributes funds then it must be without strings.
What would make sence, is to simply focus in on development of the applications the government themselves would use and to make this open source on teh grounds that it is the tax payers who have paid for it. If they want to hire open source programmers to do so, then so be it. But to subsidize open source development in general is against the legal scope of the government and contridicts the competitive economic system we are supposed to have.
Open source doesn't need that kind of help from the government.
But in teh spirit and intent of open source, it is within the scope of the government to make use of and even contribute to open source as other do, by contributing code or sponsoring projects of potential use by the governemt themselves.
It is teh ability to create and modify for your use, that makes open source more what the usrs want than software dictated to the user (i.e. proprietary).
Yeah, absolutely! And that DARPANet thing? Total bureaucratic government waste. Never went anywhere. Stupid long-haired hippie socialists, with their dumb ideas about standardized protocols and decentralized networks. Fortunately, that failed like all wasteful government programs, and we now operate on computer networks such as Compuserve, Prodigy, and GEnie developed and run by the free-market genius of efficient private enterprise.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Not anticompetitive - it'll 'interfere with interstate commerce', one of the most overused and abused exuses for government regulation of which I am aware.
And for the parent commenter: the US gov't already tries to pick and choose winners in the global economy all the time. Look at the way we subsidise agribusiness, for instance. And this isn't exactly a recent development - look at our seizure of Hawai'i for Dole pineapple, for instance.
Actually, by the time you recouped your initial software development expenses you already spent more money on further development, bug fixes and new features, and compatibility with new devices and new OSes... so you have to claim the profits from the next 100,000 copies, and so it goes. I don't know many software products that are developed once and then frozen. They bitrot within months, and even if they still work (big if) they look ancient. If you sell a software product you just have to have people working on it every single day.
When did the Center for Economic and Policy Research become a branch of the government?
Answer: It's not. It looks like a blue-sky, privately funded, 6-year old non-profit. In fact, from their site, "It is an independent nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, DC. CEPR functions as an economic "truth squad," conducting professional research and getting it out to the media, policy-makers, and advocates."
A "truth squad". Yeah, that sounds like a totally unbiased organization with no agenda whatsoever...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
One reason it didn't work for the communists was bad communication. I had a boss that had done work in the early eighties there. He said that there was no reason for someone to share info; it was better for the boss of e.g. a university or company to build their own little mini-empires. With the net and rules for organizations, that might be avoided this time.
I think another problem would be the "NASA effect", when good people get old and couldn't move anywhere since there was no other place to go, then started to stay around for the paycheck. Or whatever it was that happened to NASA in the Shuttle era, forward.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
What's the catch?
The catch is that someone has to decide who gets the money. Even if it escapes overt empire-building and fraud, it risks becoming an ivory tower where lots of cool propsals are generated to impress the grant agencies without actually fulfilling a useful purpose efficiently.
But as catches go, it's not too bad. Basically just create a who whack of extra CS postdoc positions with an emphasis on coding over academic papers.
Open Source is a failure. No, that's not me saying it, that's what the report says. Once you get past the rhetoric, it's essentially saying that Open Source cannot survive in the marketplace, and needs government protection.
Bullshit. Linux came about during the very decade that everyone said no one could compete against the Microsoft monopoly. It succeeded where BeOS, OS/2 and DR-DOS could not. I'm also seeing Firefix usage zooming. OpenOffice is getting noticed. And of course, the web belongs to Apache. Open Source *IS* succeeding! If you think otherwise it's because you're trying to judge its success by the failures of others. That's not how the game works.
If government wants to help, then it can help by getting out of the way! Government can stop standardizing on proprietary formats. Government can stop handing out software patents. Government can stop recognizing mouse click licensing. Government could liberalize copyright and abolish the DMCA.
Whenever you hear someone say "I'm from the government and I'm here to help," run the other way!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The tax collected is always less than what people are paying to buy the software, plus the time they spend reading licensing, monitoring lawful use, worrying about return policies, throwing away packaging, and all of the other costs and maintenance commercial software typically faces.
Since people no longer have to buy the software, it is like giving every user a tax credit and lowering the barrier to entry, allowing computers to be even cheaper, more accessible and more widespread. Everyone has more money left over to buy other things, which generate tax revenue, or they save it, which increases the savings rate and allows cheaper lending. Either way, the money doesn't disappear, it simply gets redirected into other businesses, so that they experience a boost. (Not only consumers would benefit from OSS, it will simplify life for businesses and government too. )
In the meantime, this would help increase the use of software and push people towards broadband. People would be freer to try out new and different things, and so they would. They wouldn't be stuck using things that don't meet their requirements. (Well, at least until some lobbyists mandate that rootkits, spyware and bloat cannot be taken out, or some other betrayal of consumers' interests happens.)
Turning it around: What ever happens to the R&D tax credits the government gives to the large software companies? Do you think those will be missed?
Because the government has no fiduciary interest in the software (the government is, after all, simply an agent of the people; they won't be selling it) you don't have those kind of problems. If the government funded some development, they would have no reason to utter phrases such as the following in planning meetings:
I think we all know what the internet would look like if we let the corporations of today design it. You'd have the Sprint-ernet, the Comcast-ernet, the Time Warner-net, etc; and none could talk to any of the others, without an extra free per month. After all, you can't let your cable modem customers go to DSL when the price is lower can you? You need lock-in!.
While this wouldn't work for everything (games, for example) I could see it doing good for some things.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
"You're the first person I've met (besides my ex-girlfriend) who thinks that saving money is a bad thing."
It is. Spending money makes the US economy go round. Take a look at Macro Economics.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Whenever the government gets involved in franchises, subsidies, etc. the end result is a government-created monopoly.
Just remember that the government is a big stick, wielded by those in political power. A government monopoly is not sustained through economic production, but rather through the forced expropriation of taxpayer money to prop it up.
Mine is Good
One needs to realize that, currently OSS (specifically, GNU/Linux) is not targeted towards the typical computer user. If the government were to write their own open source operating system (presumably targeted towards the typical user), it would have a different audience, hence it would be a fundamentally different product. This could change Linux in ways I would not like to see.
Also, on a somewhat different note, this guy really doesn't know that much about software development. From my limited experience, Eric Raymond's distinction between The Cathedral and The Bazaar styles of software development hold true. If the government were to begin writing OSS, they would be producing a product written using the "Cathedral" style, which, again, would result in a fundamentally different product. Again, this is not something I would like to see.
On the plus side, I am guessing many avid Linux users and developers would agree with me, and Linux distributions targeted to more advanced users would still be around.
I was thinking of having the software released but not opensourced, and then the author says he will no longer work on the software so people will pay to make it opensource so others can work on it
Used to be a time we'd go to war against things such as this communistic/socialistic ideal....
Yeah, fuck those guys who want things like public utilities and infrastructure. If I want to drive on a road or walk on a sidewalk, it better not be funded by everbody for the common good and all that hippie BS. Our society would fall apart!
Wow, 3-digit UID and such idiocy. The current auto market looks good to you? Glad you find it that way, but there was a time when American automobiles sucked royally and there was widespread dissatisfaction. Maybe the Feds should've gotten into the automobile business then? After all, cars are pretty much compulsory through most of America (esp in the 60s/70s when public transit systems were sparser) so everyone could benefit from cheap cars.
Heck, the Soviets, Yugoslavs and Indians tried their hand at cars built by government-built entities. They sucked. Wonder why...
> Every industry other than health care would benefit from a
> streamlined, socialized health-care system.
The problem with health-care is that it's not allowed to be an industry, with rational risk/cost structures. It's overregulated and E&OE insurance is prohibitive. Oh and socialized healthcare? Go and actually look at Europe's state-run healthcare systems sometime, they're tottering and will not last a generation for the countries with declining populations.
The solution to healthcare woes isn't socialized healthcare, it's about distinguishing medical risk from malpractice and make sure customers can tell the difference.
Go somewhere random
(Assuming you aren't just trolling) Al Gore sponsored the bill that allowed commercial firms to connect to the Internet, thus creating the modern net as we know it. Regardless of your opinion of him, he probably was the only guy in Congress at the time that could even spell Internet, much less understand the potential of the thing.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I think we should be hiring economists to figure out how to make open source profitable, but using the private sector is just politically impossible. It's difficult enough to get people to accept open source as a model, the last thing you need to do is link it directly to communism or socialism.
Instead we should make open source as profitable as possible for the private sector, forget the public sector. Also how the hell is it good for an economy to save 200 billion in consumer spending? what the hell is this economist on crack? I completely understand what hes saying from a socialist perspective, but America is as far to the right as the scale can handle, to think we can even entertain these ideas in the current environment is futile and stupid.
Honestly, a better idea would be for private companies to pool their resources and fund R&D collectively, by forming an OPEC like group to take on Microsoft, an Open Source Commission of some sort which would be IBM, Novell, Sun, Redhat, Google, and any other company that wants to fund open source, and collectively they can throw 2 billion a year of their own money into the pot to fund it.
On the state level we can also implement the socialist ideas if the individual states would like to pay for it. You could try it in california and massachusettes, start with the most liberal progressive socialist states and don't think about it in texas. Google and other companies can also fund college scholarships and do the summer of code things in a more collective international fashion. Governments could give tax deductions for companies which use and support open source software also.
Maybe, but I don't think that was his point. His point was that DARPANet, which undeniably grew into one of the most impressive of man's modern achievements, started as a government funded project. This was in response to the GP's assertion that the government fails to do anything right.
The truth is, private enterprise has so far been pretty bad about architecting anything with interoperability in mind. As economists say, incentives matter, and they're right: there's no incentive for a private company to make life easier for its competitors. That's why Microsoft won't release the doc format, that's why Sony loves MD so much, I mean, you'd have to be purposely daft to not be able to list literally hundreds of examples of private companies attempting to lock out the competetion and lock in their customers. I'm not even going to say that this is necessarily a bad thing, in all cases.
But -- and there is a but -- the internet was, and remains, a network of networks. If any project depends on interoperability, it's the internet. So while I don't doubt that efficient private enterprise could have come up with something similar or maybe even better, how long would it have taken? How long would we have been stuck using Prodigy? Bill Gates didn't even see the internet boom coming!
What always cracks me up about communists and libertarians is how inflexible some of them seem to be. Communists believe that the market is evil, and do all they can to suppress it , and libertarians worship the invisible hand to the point that they can't see that there are places where the market is simply not as efficient as, dare I say it, socialist programs. The horror!
The funny thing is that economists recognize that there are some things the free market does poorly, even though in most cases it is by far and away the most efficient allocator of scarce resources. Why can't you? It's not like it has to be one or the other.
But you didn't answer on how to keep it effective for a longer period of time.
Private companies are more effective in e.g. health care. (A few years ago, the "responsible" Swedish minister defended that literally half the time for doctors and nurses was administration! If you don't have an acute problem or is an elite athlete, doctors here generally don't bother finding non-obvious problems; they just don't have time.)
But if you had answered that, you'd visit Sweden for a Nobel prize this year. :-)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
"All that would do is create a layer of suckups and lobbyists who's sole responsibility is to write proposals for funds." Sounds like you're a bit too familiar with the academic world. Nearest I can tell, the "principle investigators" spend the vast majority of their time talking up the importance of their work in an effort to get funds.
This is basically how the government works, you politick and network or else you will not succeed. Anyone doing real work will not be successful because they don't spend enough time advocating themselves. This is also true in the the corporate environment, the bigger the company is, the more you have to politick and network to get things done and the less real work gets done. The difference is that in the business world, these inefficiencies will eventually get bad enough that the company will no longer be competitive (except through anti-competive practices, usually, but not always, involving government intervention).
So with the proposal mentioned in the summary, it would probably start out as $2 billion, and have good results. Then as time went on, more bureaucracy would develop, managers would become entrenched, and the cost would balloon as quality would diminish. Soon, no good software would ever be released, and it would essentially turn into a welfare program for developers. This is the point NASA is at today. The US military is not far behind, but the government seems to be intent on tearing down the established military complex and rebuilding it from scratch, hoping to start over at the point were it is relatively efficient.
I did RTFA. And although I was quite impressed with how the author grasps many of the underlying issues, their entanglement and complexity I was bluffed by sheer naievete(sp?) of the underlying economic assumptions and the their theoretical underpinnings.
He documents quite accurately how 'IPR' works and how it effects the development of software and the *costs* this form of development has for society, yet these *costs* are not the subject of the mathetical extrapolations which he engages in. The mathematics used in this essay as well as the entirety of latent definitions of value/waste present in the text are based on a woefully inadequate naieve economic understanding.
I am not an economist and I have never formally studied economics but the assumptions at work in the economic understanding revealed in his terminology and his calculations are baffling to say the least. If such is what is taught to students of economy is it any wonder our economy is so supremely fucked.
It is a shame that otherwise good arguments and a good grasp of the complexities involved are so thoroughly underminded by such sophmoric misuse of mathematics (with their appeal to 'empirical reality' ie. facts) and woefully inept econcomic theory.
The profound weakness of the underlining economic theory at work in his paper is that each and every argument can be turned to it's opposite and equally proven. He states that if all software were available at 0 cost and freely modifiable that there would be no duplication of software-ie. no one would bother righting something already written. Anyone who has opened their eyes knows that the reality directly contradicts such nonsense. He forgets that where economy is understood merely as a system of incentives/disincentives, and that such are purely monetary in nature, that in order to prevent people from duplicating programs one would have to a) pay them not to do so or b) not pay them for having done so(two sides of same coin). But this negates his complaint against unnecessary duplication of software because those who do duplicate software are being paid to do so. In totality the economic assumptions underlying this essay are fundamentally incapable of grasping what FOSS is and how it works.
So at once the author is capable of providing a rather damning indictment of IPR and he succeeds in painting an accuarate picture of the *costs* of this regime, but he is incapable of grasping that which he wishes to see as an alternative to IPR, namely FOSS. His argument is that one can substitute FOSS for IPR by creating public corporations which employ FOSS programmers. In so doing he ignores that it was the contention of the conditions of employment as a software developer which gave birth to FOSS.
What FOSS is, is only relevant within the terms of reference which constitute the status quo. How FOSS is, is an insight into that which already is no longer captured in our grasp of the status quo-for it is different, different in the sort of way which makes a difference for those engaged in it.
Ayn Rand... latecomer... I refer you to Adam Smith.
Capitalism would work just fine without intellectual property, in fact it would be a much better world for consumers. So much resources are diverted from otherwise useful pursuits because of corporations being able to acquire monopoly profits.
There are natural monopolies. Those we can do little about other than introduce government regulation to keep things from getting silly. But truly there is no longer a compelling reason for most intellectual property. Best case is it is abolished. Next best case is that terms are brought back onto a scale that actually strikes a reasonable balance between consumers and rights holders.
It is so out of wack with life+70 for copyright and 20 years for patents it would be funny if it weren't so disgusting. This is corruption of the government at its most apparent. The regulation of thought and action in such an incredibly insidious way... it purports to protect the individual and spur innovation but it really puts our very minds in shackles. If the government thinks a monopoly spurs innovation, great... but isn't it reasonable to only grant as much of a monopoly as is required to produce the desired effect?
As engineers we are the first to see the true issue because we are the first wave of citizens who actually create intellectual property as a matter of course. Authors and inventors used to be rare specialists. Today anyone who creates a web page is a creator. Another 20 years and I think the situation will become clear to most people. The "knowledge worker" must not be operating in a minefield, but allowed to produce freely. This will be better for everyone. I just tire of the "socialist" and "commie" comments. It is such a know-nothing attitude... the same people who spout such garbage would claim to be for a free market.
I'd be interesting in seeing a free market in intellectual property. I just don't think any politicians have the balls to give us such a free market.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hmm, a lot of the problems with the general arguments for or against capitalism stem from the use of different concepts as if they were the same. Free market, capitalism and private enterprise are not the same thing and people shouldn't use them as if they are. And don't ever make the mistake of thinking that capitalists or private enterprise are in favor of a free market. What they want is to have their cake and eat it, keep competitors out and no interference from the government with any scheme they manage to come up with.
It falls to the government to keep the market free and open. To keep the playing field level. Needless to say that once private enterprise gets to be as powerful as the government things start to break down.
1) Of that $2 billion for this agency, over half would likely go to government bloat and other non-development work. Which means you're splitting less then $1bil to 20k developers. That sticks your mean pay at $50k/year. How many senior developers are you going to hold onto for $50k/year? ...
Business has bloat, too. Marketing, accounting, advertising, management, legal department,
One could collect the "ransom" deposits into an escrow account. Then if the reserve price isn't reached after a specified time limit (e.g. 1 year), you'd get your deposit back, plus interest.
What a trashy paper. The author starts out with predjudices and conclusions, and goes from there. He never even tries to provide a basis for his conclusions. He compounds it with stupid statements.
"This is a result of the fact that IPR protection leads to unnecessary duplication, as developers have substantial incentive to produce software that simply replicates the function of existing software." He talks about innovation, yet he views efficiency as leading to exactly one (G.I.) version of everything. He should apply his IPR theories to Hollywood's type of software. One book, one movie, one song, and one TV show should be enough for everyone, and priced at the marginal cost of production. Any more would be unnecessary duplication.
"One of the most basic principles in economics is that efficiency is maximized when products sell at their marginal cost of production." Since when? The principle of free market economies is that prices move to their free market levels, duh. If those prices match costs, the producers soon go bankrupt and sources of investment for new products dry up.
I've worked my whole career in software, and made a lot of innovations. Many times I wanted to contribute to open software, but I didn't work for an institution or on the public dole. I had to keep my nose to the grindstone doing the things that benefited my employer, not the world. My employment contracts further restricted me from doing open software on my own time in the evenings. The fairness of that sounds dubious at first, but when one thinks of the conflicts of interest that might arise it seems wise.
I've always thought that the greatest weakness in the open software movement is that only a tiny fraction of the software savy people in the world can contribute. The rest need to feed their families by working for ordinary for-profit entities.
The thing about charity and whatnot -- I just don't get why that would work as an incentive (i.e. I agree with you).
The thing about charity makes sense if a lot of people transfer very small amounts of money. Refunding may be prohibitively expensive for a failed tender, and the promise of donating it to charity is supposed to convince people that the party that made the 'ransom' tender has no economic interest in the tender failing.
Socialism usually works out quite well actually, compared to econo-anarchistic systems like capitalism, leaving 25% of the population in extreme poverty.
Now if we're done with the stereotypes, we can talk about the reasons of profit and failures of proprietary software.
With proprietary software, it usually boils down to two things, marketing and packaging.
Skype is experiencing immense popularity due to marketing, a slick user interface and ease of usage, however, compared to the more mature, technically superior (and open) protocols such as SIP or IAX2 it is clearly not the way to go.
Reasons: calling landlines is expensive, the sound quality is extremely bad, it cannot traverse many firewall setups, cannot be customised, nor is there _any_ hardware available for it. (we set up an asterisk pbx system with 10 sip lines, ordinary/sip phones within one day)
There are a lot of examples where technically/economically superior solutions "lose" when they are filtered out as static, due to marketing, OS/2 anyone?
People want open source, because it is the only development model that can ensure software quality, "free" interchange, security and, that it really does what it says it does.
Now, people who don't know how to use computers argue that a "not windows interface" is a price too high to pay for ensuring quality software.
However, the question is really; should we be listening to them, or shouldn't we demand users comprehend a device they intend to use?
If this government initiative is going to trumpet up more open standard users, then I'm all for it.
Hopefully we will be able to trade our thoughts soon, without breaking any laws.