Slashdot Mirror
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."
The ransom model works pretty well in RPG communities and is already used for programs, but I don't remember where. What, you may ask, is the ransom model? Joel from Joel on software (who is a much better writer than me), says this about the subject:
Have you ever heard of the ransom model?
In short it works like this: you create some sort of downloadable product and set a date at which a specific amount of money (the ransom) has to be donated. If that amount will be collected before the deadline, the product will be released for free for everyone. If not, the money will be donated to a charity organisation and the product will never be released.
I wonder how this would work for software. It is, after all, a different beast entirely than Dungeons & Dragons books.
120B/yr saved / 20k new jobs = 6M.
Last I checked most software developers make less then 6M/yr, with overhead, more like 250k. So you're talking about replacing 480K jobs, with 20K jobs. Sounds great to me, they just have to work 24 times as hard. And we can outsource them so we only have to pay them 10k/yr too!
Our local McDonalds REALLY needs someone working there that speaks English, so those 460k unemployed software folks will have jobs waiting for them.
This will of course be moderated as -1 Flamebait: disturbing Slashdot reality distortion field subclause 37 - everything should always be free, and subclause 17 - people that don't get paid love taking my support calls.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
I doubt government funds could be appropriated in this fashion. Instead what will happen is this would be treated like any other government contract. Companites, rather then individuals would compete, and skill/quality would be low on the list of requirements.
I am a big open source advocate where I work, and I feel the Apache model has the most merit. Of course projects such as Apache only really succede when they are large enough to attact a large number of developers and companies to support it. As with any open source projects, the vast majority of ASF's projects fail, mainly do to lack of intrest. But they come out with the ocasional gem.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
in my country - Estonia, far away in eastern/northern Europe, we have a model for culture funding. Every year goverment gives a lot of money to a association called Culturecapital, Estonian Film Foundation, etc, and the people who decide who should get the money are the people who work in that business. so far ~10 years it has been really effective way and produced a lot of good stuff. maybe you could use the same system for free software.
luuletaja
The nine worst words in business are "I'm from the Government and I'm here to help." I'm sorry, but the last thing I want gumming up the Open Source model is some government yo-yo oversight organization. I don't want some dipstick bureaucrat deciding which projects get funded and which ones go hungry. All that would do is create a layer of suckups and lobbyists who's sole responsibility is to write proposals for funds. This is the same disease that has plagued NASA. If this organization hires engineers-- do you honestly think you're going to get the cream of the crop? I know Alan Cox would really resent working for the Feds. So would the Rasterman. I would hate it (and I'm not even an engineer).
DARPA offers prizes-- that's great. Ongoing funding or bureaucratic employment is the last thing OSS needs.
davejenkins.com |
We need an open source software stock market. If you have software like mozilla or open office, which is either profitable or valueable, we should be able to buy stock, bonds or shares, and gain votes as a result. Transgaming had a good model, but we need to create a market and make it profitable to own shares.
I didn't RTFA, but I like the idea -- even though I am a libertarian-leaning Republican. I've always considered it ridiculous for the govt to send billions of dollars to MS for Office when, for a fraction of that amount, they could help develop a good, free alternative. Everybody wins -- except MS, of course. The govt saves money, and the general public is freed from the shackles of MS proprietary formats.
OK, now maybe I'll RTFA.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
I'm very seldom moved to post on Slashdot, but this article did it.
The nonsense starts with the author's blithe assertion that an asymtotic-to-zero cost of software distribution over the Internet implies zero cost of production, and proceeds from there.
In fact there are lots of goods that have a high cost to produce the first copy and near-zero-cost to produce the second copy, but any self-described 'economist' who uses that cost pattern as an excuse to ignore the production cost of the first copy is exhibiting severe brain damage.
The little that is true in this paper (the argument on the high costs of IPR) just gets overwhelmed by the tide of toxic nonsense. If anyone asks *me* what I think of this government-funding scheme, it'll get both barrels...
>>esr>>
I don't know if I'd trust the numbers in this paper at all.
From TFA:
There are three distinct ways in which IPRs in software lead to economic inefficiency:
1) The gap between the IPR-protected price and
the competitive-market price (which would be
zero for most software, since it can be transferred
costlessly over the Internet) leads to a deadweight
efficiency loss...
Obviously, distribution costs != development costs.
I'm a believer in Free software, but it appears that this study has been built upon a foundation of sand. So I stopped reading that 20-page PDF at that point, on page 5. I may finish it at some point, out of curiosity, but it doesn't get any more of my precious weekend time.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.