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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?
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.
See subject for sarcasm.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Poor Bastards? The Economist?
Am I the onlny one who got the pun?
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.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Since Linux came out almost 15 years ago I have seen so many students wasting their time on writing Linux software instead of finishing their thesis. Bad strategy.
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
"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
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
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.
Dude, you just described capitalism.
Are you saying capitalism is like holding people for ransom?
What. A. Fucking. Communist.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
"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'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 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.