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FOSS Development As Economic Stimulus
heybus writes "Economist Dean Baker, best known for calling the housing bust and warning of the ensuing economic collapse, has just published his recommendations for how to allocate President-elect Obama's estimated $800 billion economic stimulus plan. Among other things, Baker calls for juicing the economy with $2 billion worth of government spending to support the development of free and open source software. Baker's idea is similar to the New Deal federal arts and writers' projects: the government would fund projects as long as they produce freely available code. In addition to employing programmers, 'the savings [to consumers] in the United States alone could easily exceed the cost of supporting software development.'"
Open Source is the ultimate in re-usable investments in the area of computer technology.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I like FOSS, I like it a lot in fact. However, I still have some concerns about this.
1) Would the overhead of allocating funds be greater than the reward? (always a question in government bullucracy)
2) How would we be sure the right people get the money, and not 'fakes'?
3) How do we make sure projects continue to be free after they stop getting government funding?
Maybe these issues have been addressed, but most people will (or should) ask these questions, about ANY government subsidization/awards.
"Sure, but what about Microsoft, or Adobe, or various other companies that make software? Won't this be competing directly with them? It's bad enough that they have to compete with FOSS as is, but FOSS supercharged with two billion government dollars?"
Isn't capitalism supposed to be based on a free market economy? I'm sure that the government hires Adobe and Microsoft to work on software projects they don't readily talk about, doesn't that compete with FOSS software? Seems to me corporate America is all for the free market economy except when it's not to their favor.
Notice how open source is supposed to work the same way as scientific research does? Both of them requires socialism economics in order to work well.
Look at scientific research for example, you pour a large amount of money into it, but you can't sell the results of your research. You can only see the impact of your research, if any, a couple of years after some companies see the commercial value of your research and decided to use it.
Look at LHC for example, is there any commercial value for investing such large amount of money for the research? No. How about research on nature and species in a certain natural ecosystem? Other than probably selling the video to few people who are interested and willing to pay, I don't see much commercial value in such research.
So then think about it, why on earth can such research still exist today? If the world is under pure capitalism, nobody is going to spend any money to support these research. Instead, you need a socialism model to support the research.
The current socialism model to support research is to gather a pool of fund from a large group of people, and distribute the resource to everyone in a centralised way. Our pool of resource may be from university, which is paid by university students or sponsored by government. Or the resource may be directly from government, which acts as a pool of fund from the taxpayers.
Hence in some way, everyone in a nation contributes a tiny fraction of money to the research institution. The results of the research would then get contributed back to the society and benefits everyone.
In fact, tax is a kind of socialism that solves problem of requiring tiny fraction of resource from huge amount of people. A country with 100% socialism is just meaning a country with 100% tax.
So compare this with open source, what's the different? If you divide the cost of development with the number of people who benefit, everyone is supposed to pay a very small amount of money.
The current difficulties of open source is that there is actually no way to collect this small amount of money from everyone, and thus open source projects usually require small number of people to donate for most of the cost, while all other people becomes freeriders.
I believe that in order for open source projects to grow in a healthy way, a socialism model for open source has to be established, and we have to have a pool of fund to support the projects. And currently, the only kind of pool of fund I can think of is from the government.
the savings [to consumers] in the United States alone could easily exceed the cost of supporting software development
Capitalist economics doesn't work like that. Money that consumers don't spend doesn't contribute to GDP, but money they do spend does, and GDP is the magic number (remember, we're all happier when the numbers go up).
This highlights why OSS won't be a pillar of Obama's spending spree. Microsoft sell software made by developers they pay and these developers then spend their pay on other software (say). This moves money round the economy continuously and makes the GDP look great. Paying a developer to create a free piece of software is effectively a one off payment and doesn't contribute to GDP much (it mainly increases coffee consumption), in fact all it does really is inflate government spending/borrowing.
The end result for the user is clearly better in the second case, but better for the "economy" in the first. If you want the government to choose what's better for the user at the expense of the "economy", well, I guess you'd better move to Canada or one of those other commie countries cos it won't happen in the US of A.
Profit is market inefficiency due to lack of competition---someone selling a product for more than the marginal cost of production, which hasn't yet been exploited by an undercutting competitor, often due to difficulty of market access or strongly entrenched incumbents.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10