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

Re:The Ransom model is cool

[hawkeyeMI]

It works better for requested features/improvements on existing software. For example. I'd pay a lot of money for a Tiger upgrade to the ext2fs plugin for OS X. Unfortunately, no (reasonable) amount of money will convince the author to make time for the upgrade right now.

If, however, he did perhaps have time, he could say something like, "I'll add this feature once I get X dollars of donations toward it."

Then people can chip in, he does the work, releases it open-source, and everybody wins. There's some website now that will help facilitate this -- it holds the money in escrow, and returns it if the minimum is not raised. I can't remember the name of the site though.

What a pile of flaming nonsense

[ESR]

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...