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.'"

Comments

Open Source

[Z00L00K]

Open Source is the ultimate in re-usable investments in the area of computer technology.

Re:Open Source

[dj245]

I'm not so sure I agree. When you build a bridge or a dam, you get something tangible that will be with you for 30+ years. Its there, and you can use it until it is demolished or replaced. The Brooklyn bridge, the Hoover Dam, etc have been with us for a very long time.

When you write some software, the benefit is not so obvious over the long term. Things have a habit of being rewritten completely in relatively short intervals. How much of the code from Linux of even 15 years ago is in the current kernel? How much of AutoCAD 1.0 is in the current version? The code gets rewritten and forgotten. The programmers learn experience and gain skill, but that isn't something that we need stimulus packages for. If we're going to spend unfathomable amounts of MY money, lets have something to show for it that will still be useful in 80 years.

Re:Open Source

[El_Muerte_TDS]

And that is exactly one of the benefits of Open Source/Free Software. You have the ability to change the software so that it will keep working in 15 years. With closed source/non-free software you have to rely on the software provider to keep their software updated while the runtime environment changed.

It doesn't matter if code is rewritten or forgotten. When you have the source you can always see it. If AutoCAD 1.0 does exactly what you need, then why would you want to get 2.0 or 23.0? Unless it's FLOSS, you simply have to, because 1.0 simply might not run on the replacement hardware. Software does not break because of old-age, unlike hardware.

Re:Open Source

[dvice_null]

Just because you have to rewrite something doesn't mean that it doesn't help you. E.g. I recently joined an open source project which was very good because of what it did, but very poor because of its code structure. So I did a massive refactoring for it, making changes to hundreds if not thousands of lines. This took about an week, but it would have taken much more if I had written the application from the scratch.

Re:Open Source

[justinlee37]

lets have something to show for it that will still be useful in 80 years.

You're neglecting present value theory and opportunity cost; if we can save people money by developing free software over the next 10 years, the money they saved and spent elsewhere will improve other parts of the economy, which could have longer-term benefits.

Also, is ANYTHING still useful in 80 years? Cars, buildings, roads, all that stuff wears out and becomes obsolete after a long enough time.

Re:Open Source

[turbidostato]

"When you write some software [...] Things have a habit of being rewritten completely in relatively short intervals."

When you write *privative* software, you meant. Privative software suffers from the "broken glass" problem: for the most part is redo what already was done, both among competing products and between versions of the same product (well, version shifting is more to add featuritis and in cases of dominant products both for vendor lock-in and to maintain third party/competing products at a distance). This is not usually the way with open source software.

"How much of the code from Linux of even 15 years ago is in the current kernel?"

Taking into account Linux is barely 15 y.o. not much, true. But there's indeed quite a lot of code that has been there for long years. And even then, you forget that even shifting code it there to allow third parties to cooperate.

"How much of AutoCAD 1.0 is in the current version?"

Privative software: at the very least one of the major differences among versions is changing file formats for lock-in and disallow competing products to stay at path. Not much benefit on this work for the users.

"The code gets rewritten and forgotten."

It is not. Minix is still used as a learning platform as it is with older versions of *BSDs. I bet that code from ls cp or a lot of basic Unix-related commands haven't changed for ages.

"If we're going to spend unfathomable amounts of MY money, lets have something to show for it that will still be useful in 80 years."

Nobody can forecast the future but, certainly, you will optimize your bets if such a software is open sourced.

Re:Open Source

[Thanshin]

Also, is ANYTHING still useful in 80 years?

Investments in education.

Re:Open Source

[Bwian_of_Nazareth]

You probably should not measure utility by how long it will last. Build a huge block of concrete and stick it in the middle of nowhere. There you go, will outlast you for your money.

Re:Open Source

[raju1kabir]

I'm not so sure I agree. When you build a bridge or a dam, you get something tangible that will be with you for 30+ years. Its there, and you can use it until it is demolished or replaced. The Brooklyn bridge, the Hoover Dam, etc have been with us for a very long time.

The roadbed and surfacing on the Brooklyn Bridge have been replaced countless times. It has been reconfigured to deal with a changing balance between road, rail, cycle, and pedestrian traffic. It has been repainted and seen the replacement of untold bolts, cables, struts, stanchions, gimlets, and both left and right phalanges.

In the same way, software is gradually upgraded and remodeled and renovated over the years, but much of the underlying code that powers what we do on our computers today is still more or less verbatim from decades ago.

So I really don't see the difference you're implying.

Re:Open Source

[RichardJenkins]

OSX is built on Darwin, a particular flavour of UNIX. It's best not to call it a 'distribution', because you risk confusing it with a linux distribution, which are collections of similar software, artwork and (Very often) repositories of more software built on the same kernel.

I know you're two nerds comment was a humourous exaggeration, but I really think there are people who believe that about major distributions like Ubuntu and Red Hat.

Re:Open Source

[jimicus]

Software does not break because of old-age, unlike hardware.

Addendum: In order for this to work, you need source-level access to the entire software stack from the OS upwards.

Re:Open Source

[Kjella]

It doesn't matter if code is rewritten or forgotten. When you have the source you can always see it. If AutoCAD 1.0 does exactly what you need, then why would you want to get 2.0 or 23.0? Unless it's FLOSS, you simply have to, because 1.0 simply might not run on the replacement hardware. Software does not break because of old-age, unlike hardware.

Try getting any piece of old software to run and you know it's a big pain. Hardware changes, APIs change, ABIs change, formats of choice change, they don't respect modern UI conventions, operating system hints, the anicent IPC means it doesn't talk to anything else and so on. FLOSS doesn't magically make it work on more hardware/environments, unless you're running version 2.0 or 23.0 of the open source software too. Yes, you have to pay the software provider for new versions but you're somehow assuming the FLOSS fairy would deliver updated code, but that work has to come from somewhere too.

The real advantage to open source isn't that there's less maintenance required, it's that without competiton there's no reason for a business not to gauge as much as possible out of their customers. Open source effectively caps what you can charge for a closed source "light" version, what you can charge for a closed source software or workflow because there's the option to go with open source, deal with or fix its limitations. Ideally, the most socially effective solution is typically to write something once - duplication is waste. Except we all know that is a real shitty solution if you got a selfish corporation gouging you for it.

A few open source implementations probably do more than hundred different attempts at making closed source clones to increase overall efficiency. Of course it'll suck for those people that are made superfluous but people are always needed elsewhere. Sure there's practical issues of unemployment and obsolete skillsets but ultimately we'll never have enough productivity. There'll never be a situation where we fundamentally don't need anyone anywhere. If we look a little past the current downturn, during the next 20-40 years most of the western world will have population stagnation or even retraction. The workforce will be less in comparison to the population than ever before. We *are* going to need every hour of work, better spent elsewhere than trying to clone some software that open source could have done once.

Re:Open Source

[tacocat]

This proposal is flawed. Especially if you compare it to the New Deal.

The infrastructure developed from the New Deal provided a tangible product which could be openly used by other segments of the economy and benefited far more. Roads affected the Automotive Industry and eventually the suburban sprawl and housing. Electrical networks, and others. And that's there the SuperHighway comparison ends.

But the current idea of FOSS will be replacing software that generates a billion dollars in revenue from other companies. So the lobbyist will be full power to block this one. You aren't creating a new infrastructure, but creating a replacement infrastructure. You will have to be very sure that the FOSS software savings will stimulate the economy more than the software industry collapse will hurt it. And understand that the damage will be highly localized.

You might be more effective at a internet boom if you actually put the US on top of the internet technology list by improving the infrastructure of internet service. If the US guaranteed connectivity to every house at a minimum speed sufficient to actually use the internet (9600 dial up is not it) then there would be some interest in more computers and more computer technology development. But you can't make 100% computer solutions when only a fraction of the people in the country have access to the internet on a practical basis.

Since I first got on the internet, prices have increased upwards of 5X to maintain a declining service level in a market of high saturation and high volumes. Both of these should be lowering costs rather than raising it.

Obama might be more inclined to apply a fixed rate regulation on internet services and push internet connectivity like the Rural Electrification Project. All I want is a static IP address, DNS server to access, and a fixed up/down speed. I don't want portals, email, or anything else for that matter.

Re:Open Source

[quickOnTheUptake]

Well, I'm in Rome right now and 90% of the city is 300+ years old, with some buildings in continuous use well over 1000. In the States, Hoover dam is getting close. So yeah, 80 seems manageable if you are actually building things to last and not just random crap that gets people on a payroll.

Re:Open Source

[xaxa]

Also, is ANYTHING still useful in 80 years? Cars, buildings, roads, all that stuff wears out and becomes obsolete after a long enough time.

I use plenty of structures that are over 80 years old. I regularly use a bridge built in 1886, a railway (and associated bridges) built in 1838 (and a subway opened in 1889). It's harder to find dates for buildings, but they last hundreds of years if they are built properly and maintained. Many of them were built by private companies, but the economics of the last 50 years means no one wants to build a railway any more, but I expect the ones built by the government to still be useful in 80 years -- even if the track is useless, the clear routes through cities may well be useful.

(Admittedly, the current stone bridge was built because the previous wooden bridge (built 1729) was obsolete, and wooden bridge was built because there was too much traffic for the ferry, which was running a service at least as early as 1086, and probably a lot earlier.)

The expensive part of buildings, roads, railways, bridges etc is the construction (and land), if they're useful maintaining them isn't a problem.

Re:Open Source

[tacocat]

In this case, the bridge was new.

In the case of writing FOSS, much of this would be replacing existing software rather than creating new software projects. That's the argument for saving money -- you have to remove the expense of the existing functional software.

Problem is, if you replace all the paid software with free software and you do a really good job of it, then all the software companies will fail in bulk and you will have a new problem to contend with.

Need to think this one through a little more. Wiping out Microsoft, Semantec, McAfee, Quicken, Adobe, SAP, Oracle, et al is not likely to improve the economy anytime soon.

Re:Open Source

[raju1kabir]

Need to think this one through a little more. Wiping out Microsoft, Semantec, McAfee, Quicken, Adobe, SAP, Oracle, et al is not likely to improve the economy anytime soon.

It's also not likely to be the outcome of tossing a few bucks at open source projects.

On the other hand, wiping out the need for McAfee probably would be a massive net productivity gain.

Re:Open Source

[quickOnTheUptake]

Well it would if they were *actually* rendered useless or redundant. Redistributing man-hours from less productive work to more is a natural (if sometimes painful) economic necessity that occurs in free markets, but is hindered in a protectionist environment. This is why bankruptcy shouldn't usually be averted through legislation. It just keeps a waste of labor and resources around longer. Besides none of them would go belly up overnight.

Re:Open Source

[wisty]

But this is education, because the software engineers will be honing their skills, and providing a literature (code) base for future generations. Training accountants or lawyers, on the other hand, is probably a dead loss.

Re:Open Source

[Thanshin]

But this is education, because the software engineers will be honing their skills, and providing a literature (code) base for future generations. Training accountants or lawyers, on the other hand, is probably a dead loss.

I was referring to a better public elementary education, but I agree with you on the need of carefully planning public investment in higher education.

Re:Open Source

[El_Muerte_TDS]

I wasn't implying it was easy, just that it is possible. And even when you have to recreate the software because so much has changed, it is easier to do so when you can see how it was done in the first place (and maybe even reuse various parts that are still compatible).

With closed/non-free software you simply do not have that option. A way out, no matter how difficult, is always better than no way out.

Re:Open Source

[RichardJenkins]

'a humourous exaggeration' in this context is synonymous with 'evidence of being a retard'.

Inaccuracies should be corrected, whether they are sincere or simply concoted to inflame. This minimises the risk they will be taken as truth by the naive.

Re:Open Source

[GreatBunzinni]

Also, is ANYTHING still useful in 80 years? Cars, buildings, roads, all that stuff wears out and becomes obsolete after a long enough time.

You may not be aware but there are quite a lot of roads and bridges that were built by the Romans that are still in use today. So we can safely state that some stuff is still useful in 80 years.

Re:Open Source

[TapeCutter]

+5 insightful just makes it more humorous.

Re:Open Source

[EatHam]

If AutoCAD 1.0 does exactly what you need, then why would you want to get 2.0 or 23.0?

Because you are a design shop, not a software development shop, and you do not want to spend $500,000 to save $50,000.

Re:Open Source

[jabjoe]

Addendum: In order for this to work, you need source-level access to the entire software stack from the OS upwards.

Er no. Once you have the source of the app, you can port it to different APIs, or make a wrapper to replace old APIs it uses. Of course if the APIs aren't open source, you have to rely on the documentation, if there is no documentation then you have to work on deduction.

It's better if everything is open, of course, but it doesn't all fall down if one bit isn't. Because the rest is open, you can always replace the bit that isn't.

Re:Open Source

[JasterBobaMereel]

Since the oldest software in the world is less than 50 years old you have just said that investing in computers is worthless as they do not produced lasting benefits ....

If there is not one character of code in common with the original version, you still need the original version to have existed to build on, note $2billion is what is spent on defence every 2 days ....

Re:Open Source

[Llanfairpwllgwyngyll]

Also, is ANYTHING still useful in 80 years? Cars, buildings, roads, all that stuff wears out and becomes obsolete after a long enough time.

I live in a house built in 1560. It's still very useful to me and my family. I make that about 448 years or 5.6 TIMES 80 years.

Re:Open Source

[c-reus]

a bridge will not become less useful when it is repainted. On the contrary, fresh paint will slow down rusting (and other types of deterioration due to weather). Besides, freshly painted bridge looks better than a bridge that hasn't been painted in a decade.

Bridges need to be maintained to remain useful. The same applies to software.

Re:Open Source

[Z00L00K]

Things like the theory of relativity is an algorithm that's very useful even today.

And a piece of software is an algorithm, so no big deal there.

You may have to rewrite it, but you don't have to re-research the basis for the algorithm.

Re:Open Source

[TheLinuxSRC]

Who said anything about spending $500k doing development? GP was simply stating that if X 1.0 does everything that you bought it for, what reason do you have for upgrading to X 2.0?

Re:Open Source

[denis-The-menace]

With the pricing of AutoCAD today, what you spend every year on AutoCAD upgrades and new licenses you could hire a programmer to do the changes that *YOU* care about. Also, that programmer could be paid as well by other firms. So in the end everybody wins. You effectively cut out the Marketing/Sales middle men.

Re:Open Source

[RobBebop]

If we're going to spend unfathomable amounts of MY money, lets have something to show for it that will still be useful in 80 years.

My preference to "paying the salaries of Open Source writers" would be a system for giving people income deductions if they contribute meaningfully to unfunded public projects (be they GPL development or be they performing free concerts in a public park).

I've written about this in more detail here.

Re:Open Source

[wanderingknight]

"Privative" is probably just a direct translation from "privativo", which is the word used in Spanish for "proprietary". Cut the dude some slack.

Re:Open Source

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

But it's not money saved if they are planning on spending $2 Bill. on it.

Re:Open Source

[SatanicPuppy]

Just to play devils advocate here, in the old days, the long long ago, when you bought a big app from some development house, it was understood that you were going to customize it, and you licensed the source along with the compiled app.

27 years later, I'm supporting one of those apps, and 27 years of customization has created a monster that I dream nightly of killing (preferably, with fire). Another business unit of the same company (which I also maintain) runs the same software, but their version was customized by different people, and the two systems are wildly divergent.

Individual customizations on software are necessarily not a good thing in the long run.

Re:Open Source

[CrazedSanity]

Sure, there's probably very little code in the Linux kernel from 15 years ago... but how much would we really want? Oh, and wait, Linux is built to run on i386 architecture, which I'm pretty sure was sometime prior to '95. Just my two cents.

Re:Open Source

[Skrynesaver]

I suspect that the Hover dam would be less useful than it currently is if it received no maintenance for the last 80 years, and I'm not sure I'd use a bridge that hadn't been maintained for 80 years, so why shouldn't software receive maintenance also?

Re:Open Source

[radarsat1]

Also, is ANYTHING still useful in 80 years?

Algorithms.

Re:Open Source

[jank1887]

just make sure you rebar'd it according to local code. and don't forget the permit.

Re:Open Source

[CrazedSanity]

If turbidostato supposedly created a "new derogatory term for closed source software", what was it? I don't understand why there are such flame wars for open source vs. closed source software.

If Microsoft Word were (as a predominant example) an open source application, doesn't it stand to reason that more of the bugs would have been found and squashed? It also stands to reason that a piece of software with such a massive following would invariably become a much better product with hundreds or thousands (more) of talented programmers working to add features and such. The other beauty of it is that there generally seem to be just as many people testing changes to the code as there are coders, so bugs would be found faster and features would be solidified quicker.

So what's with the flame wars? I don't understand why so many people seem to think closed source software is so awesome. It seems to me the problem isn't with whether it's closed or open sourced, but rather the perception. I've talked to a few people who were very much attached to Microsoft products; when I mentioned anything about Linux or the software that runs on it, they got incredibly uptight for no good reason. They seemed to quickly grasp that "open source" mean NOT Microsoft, and quickly became terribly defensive about anything that went against them.

This is the "fanboy" concept to a tee. Listen for a minute to the concept instead of thinking we're somehow bashing this way of life that you want to cling to so much.

Re:Open Source

[jank1887]

I believe the current economic system IS giving many people free income deductions.

sorry. had to pick on that one.

Re:Open Source

[RobBebop]

Income *tax* deductions... smart guy.

If I could report that I make $10-20k less per year for doing 10 hrs of development each week in my spare time, I'd be just as inclined to contribute as if they were paying me a wage of $30k per year.

Re:Open Source

[Nethemas the Great]

You are unduly limiting the scope of things. When it comes to computer science--or most any knowledge based field--investments made today provide the stepping stones of tomorrow. This is true whether it's open-source or even to some degree, closed-source. While the code itself might not be in use even five years from now, the knowledge and experience gained from development will be. Most of the DOT COM bubble software is now leeching electrons into the /dev/null ether. However, all of the effort and investment made back then has been instrumental in the success our modern b2b, b2c, p2p, etc. venues.

Re:Open Source

[evanbd]

And if the software in question was open source, those customizations could be contributed back upstream and used by more people. Which means they'd be less likely to be broken by other changes, and other people's customizations would be more likely to be compatible... in other words, less of a support nightmare. (Not trying to claim it would be easy... just better than it is now.)

Re:Open Source

[Hal_Porter]

If turbidostato supposedly created a "new derogatory term for closed source software", what was it?

Privative software.

priv-a-tive (prv-tv)
adj.
1. Causing deprivation, lack, or loss.
2. Grammar Altering the meaning of a term from positive to negative.

Re:Open Source

[OwnedByTwoCats]

German Submarine Pens built during WWII in France are still there. Hube blocks of concrete right at the edge of busy ports. Too big and expensive to remove.

Re:Open Source

[OwnedByTwoCats]

My house is 105. Still very useful. Keeps my stuff dry. Keeps me warm in the winter, and cool in the summer.

Re:Open Source

[OwnedByTwoCats]

But the current idea of FOSS will be replacing software that generates a billion dollars in revenue from other companies. So the lobbyist will be full power to block this one.

Where does the billion dollars in lost revenue go? It does go somewhere; the companies that used to be paying out the wazoo for software now get it for free. They can take that money, and hire their own lobbyists, to balance out the scales.

They can take that money, and hire more people to do work that management believes will benefit the company. They can take that money, and give themselves bonuses, which they spend. They can return the money to shareholders as a special dividend. Or they can pass savings on to their customers by lowering prices.

Re:Open Source

[nabsltd]

In the case of writing FOSS, much of this would be replacing existing software rather than creating new software projects.

At $2B investment, that would be 10000 man-years of development (if you assume that a programmer costs $200K/year including all benefits, workspace, tools, etc.).

Although I can think of many pieces of existing non-free software that could be replaced with that many resources (like Exchange), there's also some middle ground:

• making Samba 100% interoperable with the moving target that is Microsoft networking
• Building a better SSL certificate infrastructure
• Standardizing e-mail encryption for better interoperability

Then, there are some real new projects that could be tackled:

• Implementing a secure replacement for DNS better than DNSSEC
• Cryptography research
• Making P2P less of a problem for ISPs while still allowing it to work well
• Software that improves the ability of students to learn (either more fun, or just better)

I'm just throwing some things out there that come to mind right now...I'm sure there's a bunch more.

Re:Open Source

[OwnedByTwoCats]

You ARE going to pay for this, with higher taxes

Quite true. In this sense, W. didn't cut taxes at all; he merely deferred them.

and hyper-inflation.

Maybe, maybe not.

On the other hand, John Maynard Keynes was right. Recessions are caused by too little spending. Right now, consumers are (on average) overextended, so cannot increase spending. Businesses see no economic returns on additional spending. So they can't increase spending. That leaves government.

Government could waste the money on warfare and bridges to nowhere. Waste is waste, and taxpayers would be paying for it for a long time. Wise governments, in these circumstances, would spend money to create assets that pay dividends long into the future. Improve infrastructure. Not just bridges and highways, but other transportation (rail), energy (R&D, conservation), communication (internet!).

The last thing the government should do is to pass permanent tax cuts. Once the economy starts going again, taxes will have to go up to pay interest on all the borrowing. If that doesn't happen, then inflation and hyperinflation are possibilities.

Re:Open Source

[thtrgremlin]

So what you are saying is that progress always builds on the past? Wow, think you have just made a great argument for FlOSS, because the more we can keep track of past accomplishments, the less likely we will find ourselves reinventing the wheel.

Honestly though, I am not sure if you are being serious or not. There are two things going on with the Kernel to my understanding in this context: Either new things come about, and support is added (old code doesn't change) or people examine the way something is done and find a way to improve upon it (old code still exists in that the improved version is a derivative. how do you make something better without something to start with?).

Another thing I think of is the collective work of the ancient Greeks. Are you going to say that all their math, science, architecture, technology and such were a waste of time because we have stuff that is so much better now? Are you joking? There are many ways that the money could be wasted, but most of that is a matter of poor oversight. I would expect it to go something like Google Summer of Code where money will be given to specific projects that have specific goals and a track record of success... versus these banks that seem to have a history of scams and failures. FlOSS is a real way to invest in the community rather than giving someone money to find a way to get money from others. Government grants for science, medicine and such are released as public domain... so unless these are 'works for hire' (which they usually are) they can legally be GPL despite all the "restrictions".

"Collecting information is only the first step towards knowledge, but sharing information is walking the path to civilization."

Re:Open Source

[DerekLyons]

But the current idea of FOSS will be replacing software that generates a billion dollars in revenue from other companies.

You will have to be very sure that the FOSS software savings will stimulate the economy more than the software industry collapse will hurt it.

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head there - how exactly is wiping out the existing software industry supposed to lead to economic benefits? It's not like FOSS is even remotely likely to produce magic pixie dust software that will noticeably increase productivity. Not to mention the lost productivity during the software changeover.

Re:Open Source

[mabhatter654]

Turn it around though. The bridge is painted BECAUSE it is useful to many people, so it can't be allowed to fall in to disrepair. And the cost of repainting the bridge is far less than trying to find land and money to build a whole new one every few years.

This is where proprietary software breaks down, because we've gotten to the point that upgrades cost nearly the same as the full versions, and don't provide sufficiently big enough advances...they only seem to keep the company in business because they have copyright. Take for instance the yearly Autocad or Adobe updates that are far out of hand on the utility/cost curve.

Re:Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that it's not clear that investing in software is the wisest use of public money. But if you're going to invest public money in software, then it should be Free Software, because of all software, the public gets the most value for that.

How much of the code from Linux of even 15 years ago is in the current kernel?

Little, but that old code still serves us today, because it's the evolutionary starting point. Without the old code, the new code would not exist, because a viable working project would not exist.

For example, Linux 2.2's CPU scheduler isn't around anymore, but ext3 wouldn't have been written if there hadn't been a kernel with a working process scheduler to put it into. And 2.4's scheduler wouldn't exist if there had not been a working kernel with viable filesystems like ext2. The dead code not only played a role, but was essential in getting what we have today.

The programmers learn experience and gain skill, but that isn't something that we need stimulus packages for.

You're opening the can of worms by raising the question of what we do need stimulus packages for, and most people are going to come up blank. The reality is that the government has decided to dump money, and it no longer matters why. For good or evil, it's going to happen, so we should try to maximize the gains and minimize the harm. Maybe it really should be put into dams or bridges, but whatever's going to be spend on software, should be spent on software that can be used and maintained as much as possible, so let it be Free.

Re:Open Source

[Tanktalus]

lets have something to show for it that will still be useful in 80 years.

You're neglecting present value theory and opportunity cost; if we can save people money by developing free software over the next 10 years, the money they saved and spent elsewhere will improve other parts of the economy, which could have longer-term benefits.

Aw, jee, that sounds like Reagonomics. I thought that the world accepted that as a busted myth once Clinton took office.

Re:Open Source

[Americano]

Well said. And I'm not sure why they aren't simply directing additional grant & funding money to researchers at educational institutions. That model has worked pretty well, why not keep on doing it?

If a bunch of non-technical bureaucrats are going to start deciding what software should be written under the auspices of this program, I foresee $2Bn dollars going down the drain.

Are there REALLY not enough universities around the country that have Comp. Science departments with unfunded (but innovative, and probably viable) research projects? I keep seeing people say "But it's the stepping stone to new stuff." Great, then instead of paying a bunch of people to rewrite Samba and OpenOffice and put proprietary software companies out of business, fund real innovative research.

As a condition of research funding, require that any software written must be licensed under the GPL or some other compatible license, and made available to the public. Seems like a mission that's right up the alley of institutions of higher learning anyway.

Re:Open Source

[thtrgremlin]

So you do not believe that software is evolutionary where the present is always taking the past and building upon it to create a future where some code grows and some code dies and in the end 'better' is emergent?

You are really going to argue that each person or company exists in a bubble and just writes whatever code is necessary to make / improve their project in such a way that beats out all the competition?

That's great! Must mean we only have a few more years until the software we need will all be written and we will be done. And developers can spend the rest of their days doing seminars showing new people how to use the software.

Yeah, come to think of it, this whole progress just building upon progress building upon progress just sounds like an endless cycle that just creates more and more work for people, like as if for every answer there were just three new questions. Yuck, who wants to live in a world like that?


I think the best part about your vision of the world is that once we have this whole 'science' thing done, technology will be the best, nobody will ever become obsolete because their knowledge will always be up to date because they will only learn the right thing the first time, and schools will save TONS of money because they will never need to replace their science textbooks ever again.

And since we know it is perfect, we can then convert all the religious people because it is unchanging, so they can count on it, and everyone will start calling it The New Holy Bible, and it will be easy to see who is defective and unfit for society: Those who disagree with it are heretics, because only people that understand that we now live in a perfect world are good.

I think we should just give the money all to Microsoft since they are the closest to creating the one true operating system. They must be, just look at their market share. I am sure their team of geniuses are pretty close to making the one perfect operating system for everybody that will never need to be upgraded again and finally everyone can be happy!

And then not long after that, think of how easy Google will have it when it can finally finish indexing the Internet. I am sure it just pisses them off all the time that while they are busy trying to organize the Internet people just keep adding stuff to it over and over and over again. How does that help anybody?

I'm going to write Lawrence Lessig right now expressing my frustration for him lying to me all these years, nonsense about "ideas building on ideas of others". What non-sense! Stuff like that is for Pirates, Communists, and kids who cheat in school. Thanks for setting things straight.

Re:Open Source

[bbdb]

Open Source is the ultimate in re-usable investments in the area of computer technology.

Except govt funding proposed in the article would degenerate it to Frantic Orchestration of Silly Surfing. Or Open Scam.

Re:Open Source

[quanticle]

The expensive part of buildings, roads, railways, bridges etc is the construction (and land), if they're useful maintaining them isn't a problem.

Maybe maintenance isn't an issue for your stone bridge. But, for lots of bigger bridges (tunnels, roads, etc.), maintenance costs are certainly significant. Here in the US, we have many bridges and roads that have deteriorated to the point where they are barely serviceable, because cities, states, and the federal government focused on building flashy new structures rather than on maintaining the ones they already have.

In fact, this is one of the concerns I have about Obama's plan for massive fiscal stimulus. I worry that the federal government will build even more infrastructure, further increasing an already punishingly high maintenance debt.

Re:Open Source

[quanticle]

Present value theory and opportunity cost are pieces of fundamental economic theory. They're not necessarily tied to "Reaganomics" or any other public policy doctrine in any discernible way.

Re:Open Source

[TheSync]

The infrastructure developed from the New Deal provided a tangible product which could be openly used by other segments of the economy and benefited far more. Roads affected the Automotive Industry and eventually the suburban sprawl and housing.

It should be noted that the Interstate Highway System was not started until 1956.

The CCC improved roads in public parks. The WPA did pave or repair 300,000 miles of road, but keep in mind the US currently has 3.9 million miles of highway.

New Deal spending is actually a lot less than people generally think. Federal spending peaked at 8% of GDP during 1933-1941, whereas today it is over double that number (20%) while both state and local spending are both themselves are today over 8% of GDP.

The New Deal was more about dollar devaluation and regulation rather than spending.

Re:Open Source

[ArsonSmith]

The problems with funding this to a greater degree is you end up with more people there for the money than the mission. You also start to end up with things like powerful teacher unions that keep crappy teachers in place only because they've been in place for so long.

Re:Open Source

[Kadoo]

One problem I see is that during the new deal public works projects needed a ton of manual labor. These days most of the money goes to large contractors and engineering firms. The percentage of money that goes to the lower echelon is quite a bit smaller. I don't think the new (new) deal will have quite the same results.

Re:Open Source

[LingNoi]

Well first you have to plan out what you're doing, write it up, change your mind, start again, debugging.

Much more work then just moving code around.

Re:Open Source

[LingNoi]

Why the GPL? Why not just public domain?

Re:Open Source

[xaxa]

Problem is, if you replace all the paid software with free software and you do a really good job of it, then all the software companies will fail in bulk and you will have a new problem to contend with.

I'm not familiar with the Brooklyn Bridge, but I assume there was a ferry service before it was completed. The ferryman was out of a job the moment the bridge opened.

Re:Open Source

[Tubal-Cain]

I think he is saying it might cost $500K to port 1.0 to the current platform of choice.

Re:Open Source

[LingNoi]

Who says that the money spent on open projects would be to replace software provided by American companies?

How about providing better software for infrastructure, networking, routers, etc.

There's lots of areas where money could be spent on projects that aren't "fun" however very important.

Re:Open Source

[knewter]

If it's understood that the customer is going to customize it, surely you provided them with an API of some sort...no?

Plugin systems for the win.

Re:Open Source

[TheSync]

On the other hand, John Maynard Keynes was right. Recessions are caused by too little spending. Right now, consumers are (on average) overextended, so cannot increase spending. Businesses see no economic returns on additional spending. So they can't increase spending. That leaves government.

Or we could wait until the economy re-organizes itself (less finance and builiding, more health care & flying cars or whatever works) so that the economy can go back to creating wealth, enabling spending. By not spending tax dollars during that time, we save wasting wealth (current taxes or future taxes to pay down debt) on government boondoggles.

The economy can best re-organize when there are few inappropriate regulations to slow down the re-organization.

If you really are worried about short-term effects (like unemployment rises) during this period of re-organization, then perhaps reduce the tax on employment (payroll taxes, for example) and you can even offset it with a tax on something we don't want (such as carbon).

I do agree that if we had 10% unemployment for more than a year, it would hurt the human capital stock of the US. Longer term unemployment is linked to significantly reduced future personal earnings.

Re:Open Source

[fitten]

No... there are other ways. For example: You can achieve it through backwards compatibility (Windows XP can run 16-bit applications), through emulation (there are emulators for Apple][, C64, Atari ST, Amiga, Nintendo, etc.), and you can make something like WINE.

Re:Open Source

[Americano]

Why the GPL? Why not just public domain?

Public domain works are compatible with the GPL, and is therefore covered by my original statement of "GPL or some other compatible license."

My point was not to state a preference for a specific license; I was making the point that directing the money to research with the stipulation that any code created during the course of that funded research should be free & open would be preferable to simply hiring a bunch of developers and saying "go rewrite software that already exists."

Re:Open Source

[turbidostato]

"Oh Jesus Christ. Have you just invented a new derogatory term for closed source"

I'd accept to have invented a new term (without your "derogatory") but it was simply that I'm Spanish and I falled on a "false friend" term. Transalation into Spanish for "closed source" is "código privativo" so my fault.

Now, about the "derogatory" thing. Is it "derogatory" simply not supporting the opinion of the parent post? Or you will kindly point out where the "derogatory" part was?

"as to why Open Source is good?"

While I certainly hold my own opinions, I don't think those were explicitly stated on my post. All I did was expressing that saying "When you write some software [...] Things have a habit of being rewritten completely in relatively short intervals" is not applicable to all software equally but mainly to a subset ot it: that distributed under a closed source license. After that I went on reasoning why I supported such opinion which seems to be a bit over your 'standard practices'.

Re:Open Source

[turbidostato]

"You may have meant reinventing the wheel."

No, I meant to refer to the "broken window" parable: while it's true that "reinventing the wheel" is perfectly of application to closed source development I meant to focus on those that defend closed source because of the "tens of thousands of IT jobs" that "reinventing the wheel" due to closed source would allow for, as if just "doing things in order for money changing hands" were sufficient for wealth to be magically created, which is exactly the message from the "broken window".

Re:Open Source

[steelcaress]

I can see where he would think of Reaganomics. But this theory, unlike Voodoo Economics, is sound, I believe. Investing to reap a benefit in the long-term makes sense when it's mechanical, not when it's human beings who are happy in their greed.

Re:Open Source

[VTEX]

Also, is ANYTHING still useful in 80 years?

Investments in education.

Not really, in 80 years no amount of education will prevent you from being worn out an obsolete too.

Re:Open Source

[Thinboy00]

*If you pay people to do something they are less likely to do it for free, and may derive less pleasure from it
*Who defines "meaningfully", especially when you're discussing development with code-illiterate lawmakers?

Re:Open Source

[hany]

... "maybe more humorous" but still +5 insightfull.

Without the first step ("very good because of what it did, but very poor because of its code structure") there would never be second step (very good because of what it did with better code structure).

And this second step provides foundation for the third step. Etc.

So I agree with 'dvice_null' that it is not worthless to invest in the Open Source code even if the code gets rewritten maybe a lot in say 10-15 years. Still a lot long term benefits there.

(And it can be also humorous at the same time :)

Re:Open Source

[drsmithy]

If Microsoft Word were (as a predominant example) an open source application, doesn't it stand to reason that more of the bugs would have been found and squashed?

No. It might be true, it might not - most likely it could be either - but it is *certainly* not a given.

It also stands to reason that a piece of software with such a massive following would invariably become a much better product with hundreds or thousands (more) of talented programmers working to add features and such.

No, it doesn't. Consult, for example, books like "The Mythical Man Month".

So what's with the flame wars? I don't understand why so many people seem to think closed source software is so awesome. I've talked to a few people who were very much attached to Microsoft products; when I mentioned anything about Linux or the software that runs on it, they got incredibly uptight for no good reason. They seemed to quickly grasp that "open source" mean NOT Microsoft, and quickly became terribly defensive about anything that went against them.

So what's with the flame wars? I don't understand why so many people seem to think open source software is so awesome. I've talked to a few people who were very much attached to Open Source products; when I mentioned anything about Windows or the software that runs on it, they got incredibly uptight for no good reason. They seemed to quickly grasp that "Windows" mean NOT Open Source, and quickly became terribly defensive about anything that went against it.

Re:Open Source

[drsmithy]

When you write *privative* software, you meant. Privative software suffers from the "broken glass" problem: for the most part is redo what already was done, both among competing products and between versions of the same product (well, version shifting is more to add featuritis and in cases of dominant products both for vendor lock-in and to maintain third party/competing products at a distance). This is not usually the way with open source software.

You have *GOT* to be kidding. "Open Source" and "reinventing the wheel" are practically synonyms.

This is even before getting into how certain OSS licenses like the GPL make code reuse relatively unattractive.

Re:Open Source

[tacocat]

It doesn't matter where it goes. The point is it's not going into the pockets of an existing billion dollar industry. As a matter of survival, that industry will have no choice to to fight it every inch of the way. Since they have a lot of lobbyist embedded in Washington and you don't I would expect you to lose this argument on the hill in short order, regardless of being right or wrong.

Re:Open Source

[mahadiga]

Of course if the APIs aren't open source, you have to rely on the documentation, if there is no documentation then you have to work on deduction.

Open Standards != Open Source
I believe interoperability without Open Source is Oxymoron.

Re:Open Source

[Skrapion]

On the other hand, while it might cost $500K to port 1.0 to the platform of choice, it could also cost $1M to buy new copies of a proprietary package for every government employee in the US. Hell, that would only buy 2000 copies of Microsoft Office Pro.

Re:Open Source

[jbolden]

Assuming you have source getting old software to work usually is not a big deal, for a programmer. For example IBM was able to port all sorts of mainframe apps over to OS/2 easily and these used to be available on the IBM OS/2 bbs.

The net is filled with people who got old games to run even without source code.

Re:Open Source

[jbolden]

There is very little code reuse anywhere.

OTOH in terms of projects growing and forking and branching off from one another and then rejoining its hard to make any claims that the GPLed code doesn't encourage that. I think the evidence if you look at the large GPLed projects:

Linux kernel
KDE
Emacs
GNU tools (binutil, bash...)
GCC

Is that this happens quite freely.

Re:Open Source

[jbolden]

I think 98% penetration is reasonable, and we are mostly there.

Cable
DSL
Direct TV (any house with a clear view of the south)

My guess is that gets you to 95% of American households having the capability. In terms of pricing lets not forget how much speed is improving and bandwidth usage increasing. They are moving a lot more bytes. That being said regulation might help.

Re:Open Source

[drsmithy]

There is very little code reuse anywhere.

Eh ? There is mountains of code reuse everywhere. Or do the platforms you use not have mountains of shared libraries ?

Heck, you'd have to be a masochist in this day and age to write even the most basic program _without_ reusing code.

OTOH in terms of projects growing and forking and branching off from one another and then rejoining its hard to make any claims that the GPLed code doesn't encourage that.

The GPL requires you to GPL your code, if you wish to link against GPLed code. Compared to - well, basically every other software license - that doesn't, this most certainly discourages linking against (and hence reusing) GPLed code.

To put it more bluntly, basically everything else - from Windows to FreeBSD - is more "code reuse" - friendly than anything under the GPL license, because it places fewer restrictions on doing so.

Re:Open Source

[jbolden]

Libraries are not code reuse they are use. Reuse would be taking code from a library and building another library. So no I don't consider using a library to be code reuse.

But very few libraries are released GPL. So I'm not sure how relevant it is.

Re:Open Source

[justinlee37]

Yeah, but assuming the educated have children (or even just mentor some at some point), there will be a ripple effect. He does make kind of a good point.

Re:Open Source

[GWBasic]

I'm not so sure I agree. When you build a bridge or a dam, you get something tangible that will be with you for 30+ years. Its there, and you can use it until it is demolished or replaced. The Brooklyn bridge, the Hoover Dam, etc have been with us for a very long time.

Not quite. Bridges and dams require a lot of maintenance.

• The Golden Gate Bridge is repainted every year. (Or is it every other year? I know that re-painting the bridge is a full-time job.)
• Half of the Bay Bridge is being rebuilt. (The part that keeps collapsing in earthquakes.) However, in the case of the Bay Bridge, the tunnel through an island that connects the two haves is being kept; and all the on-off ramps are being kept.

While open-source software itself might be completely re-written every 15-years or so; the value isn't the actual source code. The value is having a set of reliable and well-known APIs, file formats, data exchange protocols, and user interfaces.

A set of well-defined APIs, file formats, protocols, and UIs will be as valuable to our society as our languages and works of culture.

Re:Open Source

[justinlee37]

It is, if they spend $2 billion dollars creating products and software that everyone can use for free, and the population at large then goes on to use that software as a substitute for other software they would have had to buy instead, at a total price higher than $2 billion dollars. Which is highly likely, given that everyone would have access to the intellectual property. The savings to the economy could be immense.

"Called the housing bust"

[rachit]

I mean who didn't realize housing was in a bubble, besides paid economists with special interests or complete morons? It was blindingly obvious since 2005.

I only credit anyone for calling exactly when it would completely implode. That took brains.

Re:"Called the housing bust"

[DreamsAreOkToo]

I only credit anyone for calling exactly when it would completely implode. That took brains.

Or luck. After all, every day SOMEBODY wins the lottery. With 6.7 billion people in the world, the "1,000 monkeys randomly pushing typewriters" analogy becomes a lot more relevant.

Re:"Called the housing bust"

[Animats]

I only credit anyone for calling exactly when it would completely implode. That took brains.

It was rather obvious to anyone who understands the fundamentals. I called it on Downside in 2004. I expected trouble sooner, around 2006. But the Fed cut rates, which merely postponed the inevitable and made it worse. Note that Baker also started predicting trouble in 2004.

This stuff isn't really that hard. There are certain ratios that are grounded in reality. A house is worth about 2.5x to 3x annual income. Stock in a stable company is worth about 10x to 20x earnings. Whenever prices get above those upper limits, they can be expected to go down, and when they get way above those limits, it's a speculative bubble. All speculative bubbles eventually burst, because the supply of "greater fools" who will buy overpriced assets in hopes of selling them for even more is finite

"The job of the Federal Reserve is to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going. -- William McChesney Martin,, head of the Federal Reserve from 1951 to 1970.

"I still do not fully understand why it happened." Alan Greenspan, October 2008.

Re:"Called the housing bust"

[rachit]

When I meant exactly when it would implode, I really meant to the accuracy to the quarter. Plus or minus a couple of years doesn't count :)

I started shorting the market late 2006 because house prices were already starting to clearly drop nationwide, but the craziness continued and the market continued to rise into late 2007. Luckily, I held onto them for long enough.

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

Re:"Called the housing bust"

[Jurily]

With 6.7 billion people in the world, the "1,000 monkeys randomly pushing typewriters" analogy becomes a lot more relevant.

Same goes for Open Source. Just take a look at some of the rejected patches.

Re:"Called the housing bust"

[raju1kabir]

I mean who didn't realize housing was in a bubble, besides paid economists with special interests or complete morons? It was blindingly obvious since 2005.

CEPR (the thinktank of which Baker is a co-founder) was stalking the housing bust many years before 2005. His co-conspirator was trying to make a believer out of me back around the turn of the millennium when I lived in DC.

Re:"Called the housing bust"

[DreamsAreOkToo]

I'm friends with a guy who works accounting in GM headquarters. The funny thing is, he knew basically, to the quarter, when the nation was going to start receding. Of course, he couldn't really come out and say this, as being an accountant he could easily get charged with insider trading or another white collar crime.

Re:"Called the housing bust"

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a pretty good idea that the housing market was going to collapse, just looking at the housing prices and the ratios, like you described. What I didn't realize was the extent to which it was being propped up by the finance industry through mortgage-backed securities and subprime loans.

For that matter, how many people outside of the finance industry even know what a mortgage-backed security is in the first place? Of course, the economists should have seen that something was fishy.

Re:"Called the housing bust"

[Daengbo]

If he knew the entire economy was ready to collapse but was legally restricted from talking about it by federal law, the situation is FUBAR.

Re:"Called the housing bust"

[khakipuce]

To all those people who "saw this coming" and new it was inevitable, did you bet everything you had on it? There was money to be made from the downturn and a lucky few did make money.

Any one that did not bet their house on it is just being wise after the event. FACT, everyone knows that that level of growth is unsustainable - EVERYONE - the trick was in knowing whta would be the trigger for the collapse and when it would occur.

Re:"Called the housing bust"

[dgriff]

"I still do not fully understand why it happened." Alan Greenspan, October 2008.

I want to be irrationally exuberant again.

Re:"Called the housing bust"

[lenski]

did you bet everything you had on it?

Yes.

We left the equity market, half in November 2007, and finished the job in January 2008. We knew that the financial markets were being manipulated, and we got out. We should have pulled it all in November but I am a bit conservative.

Re:"Called the housing bust"

[marcosdumay]

Heh... After he rate cuts of 2006, I nailed my prognostics down to august of 2007 (no link, sorry). Of course, I had the same problem you had, after it all started to fall apart, government stepped in and made a short term fix. That is the problem with prognostics, there is a huge irrational actor disturbing the playing field.

Re:"Called the housing bust"

[marcosdumay]

To tell you the truth, I didn't think about central banks being irrational before that. I'd probably have noticed if I was paying attention, but I wansn't.

Re:"Called the housing bust"

[vivaelamor]

I find it ironic that you are being speculative of other peoples motives in discrediting their statements. Your hypothesis would depend on their greed and self interest, not everyone chooses to play the money game even if they do have the capacity and often with good cause (wasn't greed a key factor in getting into this mess in the first place?).

That isn't to say you don't have a point about timing, but screaming hindsight 20/20 every time someone says they saw something coming is both redundant and exasperating.

Re:"Called the housing bust"

[lawpoop]

FACT, everyone knows that that level of growth is unsustainable - EVERYONE - the trick was in knowing what would be the trigger for the collapse and when it would occur.

No, wrong, lots of people, especially talking heads on TV and in government thought they economy was just fine. In fact, just before the collapse of Bear Sterns, McCain's economic advisor said that we were in a 'mental recession'. This was the same guy who wrote "Dow 30,000", which came out before the tech bubble burst.

So, a lot of people -- powerful, influential people -- were saying things were great, and that message was getting out there.

Peter Schiff predicted it. He'd been telling people to move out of US assets and into gold and BRIC investments for a while now.

You're right, nobody can time the market, but you are 180 degrees wrong when you say everybody saw this coming. Even Alan Greenspan said he didn't see it.

Possible Concerns

[DreamsAreOkToo]

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.

Re:Possible Concerns

[Bert64]

1, Shouldn't be, providing the software written is general enough... You wouldn't want people writing really niche stuff.... Speak to companies and individuals and find out where they spend most money on software, how they could save by using free software, and what they perceive as the barriers (ie missing features etc) to using the free alternatives.
2, Pay people after they have achieved noticeable results... Especially if they contribute to existing OSS projects, have the existing developers judge the worthiness of the new contributions.
3, This is what the GPL is for... Release the software under the GPL or a similar license to ensure future versions continue to be available under the same terms.

Re:Possible Concerns

[CodeBuster]

Would the overhead of allocating funds be greater than the reward? (always a question in government bullucracy)

Government spending is third parties (bureaucrats) spending other people's money (taxpayer's money) on still other people (beneficiaries) with little or no regard to profit or loss. This is the most wasteful and inefficient type of spending there is. The left likes to say that corporations don't do any better, but they ignore the main difference. If a corporation always loses money then it eventually folds (at least when governments don't bail them out, but that is a whole different gripe) and goes under. Governments can tax, spend, and print money and never go bankrupt (at least in theory, although Zimbabwe is testing the practical limits of hyperinflation as we speak and the results are NOT encouraging). It is fear of loss and motivation of gain which keeps corporations and individuals sharp and alert. Without those elements, we might all be as bad at spending as our children and our government.

How would we be sure the right people get the money, and not 'fakes'?

That is a tough one. I don't really have a good answer. However, I DO know that I DON'T like the idea of the government picking winners and losers. Perhaps they could ask Slashdot maybe and we could moderate the project bids?

How do we make sure projects continue to be free after they stop getting government funding?

Licensing (ala GPL) ensures that. Use of licenses from an approved list and mandatory distributions could be a prerequisite for receiving funding.

Re:Possible Concerns

[Nietz2000]

The US Government has been the primary investor in general research since WW2 and I would not consider it wasteful at all.

They even pick the winners and losers. They allow the universities and academies to publish to the public and allocate spending where it will be most beneficial.

The Government has done this because private corporations are not willing to pay for something you just give away free to the public, especially if that can be copied indefinitely (like research or software). Sure, it will grow the overall economy but the private company will be at a disadvantage.

In this case, Government quite often is more efficient at growing productivity because everyone gets to use it. Private research is often secret or even intentionally restrictive.

Re:Possible Concerns

[richlv]

i think google summer of code program has been one of the most widely known experiments and examples showing how this can work.

Re:Possible Concerns

[marcosdumay]

Questions #1 and #2 have merit, but #3 doesn't. You make sure projects continue to be free by distributing them under a free license. Authors can not change their terms after they put the code under them.

Re:Possible Concerns

[Shotgun]

You are correct. So the prudent thing for the new administration to do is to look at things where government spending works, and concentrate on those.

I have a friend that does air-control design. It goes a little beyond your basic HVAC, but involves quite a bit of it. He was around during the 70's/80's when the US Feds were giving out money for "solar heating" devices. He says that it got so ridiculous, you would see companies sticking a solar panel on a wood stove and calling it a solar heater. The government just isn't good at subsidizing industries in this way. The laws can't be written specifically enough to allow innovation, while at the same time limiting those who just want to game the system. I foresee the same thing happening with the incoming president's "energy policy". It will be a grab-bag for a bunch of scammers. What the government should do is build up the infrastructure (to enable commerce), set the interface standards, and then let anyone that thinks they can make a profit selling energy at market rates have a go at it.

For software, the better alternative is to fund an open office suite or other tools for use by all federal agencies. Any company can participate (including Microsoft), but the results would be open source and free from licensing/patent baggage, and owned by "the people". The data exchange formats would be likewise unencumbered. If you can work within that framework and make a better widgit than the "hobbyist", then you should be able to earn a tidy profit. Otherwise, don't quit your day job.

Re:Possible Concerns

[digitalunity]

I would like the feds to set up a grant program for corporations with noteworthy software programs willing to GPL/LGPL/BSD license their closed source programs and assign their relevant patents to public domain.

Basically, the federal government would be "buying" the program from the corporation that developed it and the people would win. Eligibility would have to be determined by a broad spectrum panel of IT/CS professionals from business and academia and would be based on net benefit to the government and the citizens, taking into account whether adequate OSS projects already exist to cover that use.

A few good examples:

• Adobe Acrobat - There really is no PDF editing program with anything close to the capabilities of Adobe's Acrobat product. OSS alternatives exist but most have very limited functionality in comparison. The net benefit to corporations and governments alike would be tremendous.
• SolidWorks, AutoCAD - OSS alternatives exist but are not truly competitive.
• Lotus Domino/Notes - Like it or not, its one of the most popular enterprise mail/scheduling suites out there, popular with large corporations and schools. With some OSS developer time, it could be the Exchange killer.

These are just a few examples. I'm sure there are hundreds more. A good place to start is just poll companies who can't switch to Linux on the desktops and you'll get a hit-list of programs that the OSS community has yet to develop.

With the remaining money, they should sink that into federal work study grants for CS students to work on open source software. Given that companies have a lot of overhead compared to schools and there would be no oversight for private companies or persons to spend that money appropriately - this is the best option.

Re:Possible Concerns

[maxume]

A copyright holder certainly can change the terms under which they distribute something, they just can't effectively rescind past terms.

Re:Possible Concerns

[CodeBuster]

The US Government has been the primary investor in general research since WW2 and I would not consider it wasteful at all.

The US Government has spent hundreds of dollars, perhaps trillions, of dollars since WW2 on research. One would hope that at least a few gems emerged from all of that spending, but just because some good things have come from government financed research doesn't meant that it was efficient. The space program, for example, has resulted in lots of useful product spin-offs, but almost nothing that could not have been discovered independently without spending billions on a manned space program. Just because good things can come from government spending doesn't mean that we get a good value or don't overpay.

Re:Possible Concerns

[bbdb]

The space program, for example, has resulted in lots of useful product spin-offs, but almost nothing that could not have been discovered independently without spending billions on a manned space program

If this site: http://www.vectorsite.net/tamrc_24.html is worth anything, it didn't do even that:

"In contemporary dollars, Apollo cost $25 billion USD, and at its peak it accounted for almost one cent on every dollar of US economic output. Apollo funds similarly totaled about 20% of all US public and private research money at that time. In 1971, NASA commissioned a study that claimed the Apollo program generated a $7 USD return for every dollar spent. The impartiality of such a study was suspect, since NASA used it to justify their funding requests, and the Congressional General Accounting Office (GAO), never much of a friend to the agency, was highly critical.

There was also the question of how relevant such a statistic was even if it was true. A critic could easily observe that to justify the Apollo program only in terms of its incidental benefits and not on its own merit was to imply that it had no merit in itself. States with industries and centers that were the beneficiaries of Apollo funding, such as Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, and California, of course obtained an economic benefit from the work, but could the money have been better spent?

The US interstate highway program, another huge Federal project, also boosted the economy through government contracts, but the end result of the interstate highway system was an "infrastructure" that was directly useful to the vast majority of American citizens, and by even conservative accounting exercises paid back its investment many times over. It is difficult to identify similar long-term benefits from Apollo. The specific technologies developed for the program, such as the Saturn V booster, were more or less abandoned later. While manufacturers used the publicity hype associated with Apollo to promote "space age" products such as Velcro and Teflon, these products had been developed long before. Teflon was actually discovered, more or less by accident, in 1938, and had been used in chemical processing for the US atomic bomb project in World War II.

The only major consumer products to obviously owe their origins to the Apollo program are cordless tools. The Black & Decker company had won a contract to develop a lightweight portable drill for the Apollo program, and promptly developed and delivered it. The company thought they could leverage this effort into a commercial product, and in 1974, Black & Decker introduced a multifunction portable tool that could be configured as a drill, portable vacuum cleaner, and a hedge trimmer. The product died in the marketplace, since nobody had developed low-cost rechargeable batteries that had acceptable lifetimes. The Moon drill itself had used high-grade silver-zinc batteries that were too expensive for a consumer product. It wasn't until 1978 that General Electric was able to provide Black & Decker with rechargeable batteries that could last from five to six years, and in 1979 Black & Decker introduced the popular "Dustbuster" cordless vacuum cleaner. "

I would defend Moon program on the argument that it *made entire humanity more ambitious and feeling less constrained on this planet*, but not even on basis on producing usable technologies as side effects.

Re:Possible Concerns

[quanticle]

Regarding your idea, I think a viable model would be to set up a prize system, by which various office suites are compared on technical and UI measures, and the publisher of the best one gets a prize. Even if the prize itself wasn't big enough to motivate a big company like Microsoft, the publicity resulting from a victory in a head-to-head contest might.

Re:Possible Concerns

[bbdb]

Basically, the federal government would be "buying" the program from the corporation that developed it and the people would win. Eligibility would have to be determined by a broad spectrum panel of IT/CS professionals from business and academia and would be based on net benefit to the government and the citizens, taking into account whether adequate OSS projects already exist to cover that use.

Why do people always treat politics as non-issue and just assume "hey this is a nice idea let's do this" without consideration for political aspects in person selection, group responsibility, pecking order, pet ideas, lobbying, corruption, laziness, incompetence, Socialist Calculation Problem, inefficiency, irresponsibility....

This principle you describe could conceivably be used in just about any venue of life. Hey! We could make socialism work! Except not: historically and demonstrably, you can't make socialism or govt-backed FOSS work for complex political, sociological and economic reasons. Covering "why" in detail would take 20,000 times the volume of "The Road to Serfdom" by Hayek. Or more.

Yes, those people were dumb, which is why they couldn't make it work. We're not that dumb. Right?

Re:Possible Concerns

[bbdb]

1. Small scale.

2. Has vested incentives to make it worthwhile. Not much different from private contributor to FOSS.

Re:Possible Concerns

[TheSync]

The Government has done this because private corporations are not willing to pay for something you just give away free to the public

The one counter-example are private Universities, which do spend their own money on publicly available basic research.

  (source) total basic research spending in universities in 2001 was $20.8 billion. $12.9 billion came from the Federal government, and $7.8 billion came from non-Federal sources.

Institutional funds (e.g. university endowments) are the largest source of non-Federal university basic research spending, followed by industry and state/local funding.

Basic research, of course, pales in comparison with the $250 billion total amount of US R&D done (source).

Re:Possible Concerns

[digitalunity]

I'm not generally advocating socialism. Quite the opposite.

I'm saying for the government to use our tax money and invest it in a company and in return the citizens get a GPL, LGPL or BSD program that is of great value.

Lets say just for instance the feds bought Lotus Notes/Domino from IBM for $150 million and 5,000 medium businesses moved to Linux, with Exchange being Window's last foothold on their desktops.

Each company only needs to save $30,000 in licensing costs before there is a net benefit to society. The cost to taxpayers as a whole is about $1.50. My guess is that many medium businesses would save substantially more than $30,000 by dumping Exchange, even if they STAY with Windows.

What do you think those companies will do with their extra $30,000? Hire another employee maybe? Who can say, but the overall effect on the economy is a positive one. I can tell you this though. Simply dumping whatever ridiculous amount of money Obama wants to spend as a stimulus package into software development will only foster job growth in the highly paid, educated CS demographic. My plan of "buying back" software to give it to small-medium businesses will foster job growth in the SMB arena - the area that needs job growth most desperately.

It isn't socialism - it's just good business.

Re:Possible Concerns

[marcosdumay]

Yeah, he can distribute it in a non-open way, but he can't forbid others from distributing it by the original license.

Re:Possible Concerns

[bbdb]

What I meant is not that you advocated socialism. You may or may not do so; but that is orthogonal to the problem that all govt-backing proposals have so called "socialist calculation problem", in that not being individual purchases they do not have collective wealth of opportunity cost estimation done for them by the large group of people each evaluating utility of the solution in question and voting with dollars accordingly. You don't have to advocate socialism to have an economic calculation problem!

And ugh, Lotus Notes, the worst program ever written (even though as I write I'm forced to use it). Believe me, such crap is best rewritten from scratch. Judging what I can see at work (big computer corporation) software vendors acquiring and selling other software makers are largely trading in crap...

I really don't think that opening Notes source would create healthy open source project. If Mozilla experience is any guide, that is, and even then look how many years it took them, and even then a spinoff project of Firefox was meant to be complementary product while it took off as main thing. Let's even assume IBM would let Notes go for $150 mln, which I don't believe it would.

Making Notes "free product" would certainly have some utility, but without healthy open source project on one hand, and without fee-paying customers supporting development on the other, how much time would it take for it to undergo "bit rot"?

The question remains, how *exactly and in detail*, without hand-waving, you select the programs worth turning into public domain / OSS, and how you provide for their development? I'm afraid you're wishing for good business and would not get one...

Just the idea is enough

[Thanshin]

Simply establishing the idea that a source code base is like physical infrastructure will benefit open source projects even more than the actual investment.

Having that reality as a frame of reference would make it much easier to push for the growth of that source code infrastructure.

What about Microsoft?

[fyoder]

In addition to employing programmers, 'the savings [to consumers] in the United States alone could easily exceed the cost of supporting software development.'"

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?

Surely the sensible thing to do would be to give the money directly to Microsoft and Adobe and the like. You wouldn't bail out the auto industry by giving money to custom car builders, nor the banking industry by giving money to loan sharks.

Kidding, of course. But I'll bet there will be corporations that won't be thrilled by this.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[im_thatoneguy]

I would say the money could be much better spent on R&D. Buying patents and opening up technology to the public to use.

FOSS projects might create... I actually don't have any idea what area they could invest in which would be useful... but opening up patents on the other hand allows both FOSS projects and commercial projects create jobs with a lot less overhead.

Let's say I open up a patent on an algorithm that's sitting idle. Now that' it's open you have people putting their own money on the line to in the hope of being the company or open source group which garners the most money. Instead of paying for the employees directly with federal grants you created an opportunity for people to create jobs from their own cash reserves. Leverage entrepeurs to kickstart the economy.

If you were really concerned about kickstarting the US economy specifically the US Government could license the patent to any US citizen whose operations and employees are local. (Ditto if you're in the UK, India, China France etc... nationalize patents and license them for free to your citizens.)

Re:What about Microsoft?

[El_Muerte_TDS]

There will always be corporations/people that won't be thrilled by the [lack of] an action.

Also, Microsoft and Adobe do not make a lot of software for the consumer market. Most of their software is way to overpowered for consumers. You don't need Photoshop for drawing or photo editing. There are enough gratis products that can do all that an average consumer wants to do. Same thing with MS Word, most people don't get any further than some text, an image, and maybe a table or two.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[rlanctot]

"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.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[jesterzog]

For what it's worth, both Adobe[1] and Microsoft[2] work on a variety of Open Source projects (for some definition of open source), which I'm sure they could convince the relevant people are worthy of funding under whatever scheme might be proposed. And if they get government money to fund their open source labs, I guess they can potentially divert more of their open source lab money into closed source projects.

All of this would depend upon the terms of which a grant is given out, though, and none of the detail has really been specified here. If something like this ever happened, don't be surprised if, by the end of it, there were clauses to either channel most of the money to corporates through some kind of absurd requirements, or to make sure that nothing being funded would directly hurt corporates.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[Yvanhoe]

Nothing forbids Microsoft and Adobe to get government money for developing FOSS

Re:What about Microsoft?

[Faluzeer]

Nothing forbids Microsoft and Adobe to get government money for developing FOSS

...and given how easily politicians are bought via campaign donations the companies would probably be able to get the money for supposedly doing open source development whilst actually doing nothing...

Re:What about Microsoft?

[kaizokuace]

Seems to me corporate America is all for the free market economy except when it's not to their favor.

Since when does corporate America follow some sort of ideology? It's in favor of business to never play fair. Being unfair is inherently to your advantage!

Re:What about Microsoft?

[Bert64]

These companies are based around the goal of harvesting a large amount of wealth and locking it up in a small place... In the case of something so easily written and distributed as software, combined with intentional anti-customer actions like creating lock-in means that this is actually very bad for everyone but the original company.

The government has a duty to all of it's people, and if you can't suit everyone (which is virtually impossible) they should aim to suit the majority. Of course, money talks and governments are universally corrupt to varying degrees, so it often looks like the government is simply working for these major corporations and against it's people.

Cars are a very different prospect...
Auto makers don't benefit from the ability to lock their consumers in like software makers do, and as a result the auto market is far more competitive.

Cars also require significant resources to produce each unit, and a large up front investment in equipment to perform the manufacturing process.

Software on the other hand, requires very little equipment, a computer that people would have anyway, and some development tools which can be acquired for free... The results can be duplicated infinitely and distributed instantly over the internet. The only significant input is development time, and unlike physical goods, the results from this development time can be reused infinitely.

I think this is a great idea, the government creates jobs for programmers, who write code that everyone can make use of. Millions of taxpaying individuals and companies can save money by using the resulting free software and a competitive market is opened up for third party organizations to provide ancillary services such as support and installation services based around the government sponsored code.

The only losers are commercial software makers, who make up a tiny minority of the population, and frequently operate anti-consumer policies such as promoting or forcing lock-in to their products.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[CodeBuster]

Being unfair is inherently to your advantage!

Spoken like someone who has never owned a business, but this can be shown to be false even in abstraction. Consider the iterated prisoner's dilema game where the optimal strategy is actually tit for tat and NOT always being unfair. Business is like the iterated prisoner's dilema, if you constantly screw over every customer, supplier, and even competitors then you will be retaliated against until no longer in business. If what you said was true then the world would be completely run by the biggest assholes which, despite present appearances and common perceptions, isn't really the case. It's like Bob Marley sang, "You can fool some people sometimes, but you can't fool all the people all the time."

Re:What about Microsoft?

[Xiroth]

The fact is, it's impossible to beat the government in competition, because the government doesn't need to make a profit. This is why government corporations always need to be stimulatory, filling a niche that no private company will fill, or filling a natural monopoly market (where the advantages of capitalism disappear).

Publicly funded FOSS might work, but it should be carefully guided - rather than directly competing in fields with already decent competition, grants would need to be issued in fields where either there's no existing software or there's insufficient competition - otherwise the grants may end up being counter-productive economy-wise.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[silentcoder]

By that logic, the government should stop funding cancer research by universities because it may directly compete with drug companies ?

Re:What about Microsoft?

[kaizokuace]

Then please allow me to elaborate on my comment. I do still think business doesn't play fair. What I see as 'fair' is different than gaming the system with lawyers and such to gain an advantage through the system's faults rather than on meeting a customer with a product or service competitively against other businesses.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[Seth Kriticos]

Code is code, not more. It is a good idea to make a reusable codebase. Seeing it as an infrastructure is also good. Still code has no fancy effects, no content and no artistic work in it. So if we would work a bit better on the base, we would stop reinventing the damn wheel over and over again and start using it for specific content like entertainment or stuff. To reinvent the wheel and copyright the n-th incarnation is really lame, an that is what we are doing since 40 years. Didn't bring us too far, did it?

If we establish a sane common software base / infrastructure, then these companies would have to start to argue with actual quality of the product for product compositions for different use cases. I'm all for it.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[PhilHibbs]

Nonsense. Do you really think that Microsoft has a huge stack of dollar bills in a safe? No, they have it in bank accounts and in stock portfolios, in other words they are driving the economy with their wealth. As to what they are "based around", they are based around self-interest, the division of labour, and the free market. These are the three principles of modern market economies and have been the cornerstone of our prosperity for hundreds of years as pointed out by Adam Smith. State ownership of the means of production has another name.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[khakipuce]

You are quite right that the commercial firms would whinge, but does goverment funding of Arts and theater undermine Broadway, TV Companies, Record Companies - no.

Most of the FOSS produced would be quite abstract and esoteric - just like the FOSS we have now, - server software, specialised client software, packet sniffers, testing tools, languages.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[lenski]

No, they have it in bank accounts and in stock portfolios, in other words they are driving the economy with their wealth.

As is the case for most large, influential companies, their capital can move much more fluidly than people can move themselves or their skills.

The consequence is the economic whipsaw that fucks normal people over while giving large companies freedom to get their labor from places where the political/governmental systems prevent their workers from demanding parity.

America benefited from *open* market economy, back when production and consumption were both much more decentralized.

When you refer to State Ownership of the means of production (dog-whistle talk for "communism"), you are bringing in several connotations, the most important of which is the failure of the concept of the "planned economy".

Keep that thought, then count how many people are planning *this* economy. You will learn that the concentration of influence (4 major banks, 3 big auto companies, 5 communication companies, etc etc) results in exactly the same problem: Too few people are pulling the levers of the eca similarlythe same pessimal situation as the classical planned economies of "communism".

My favorite exmple is banking: There are 4 major banks now, but only one attitude.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[lwsimon]

nationalize patents and license them for free to your citizens

Maybe I'm reading too far into this, but say what!?

You're telling me the best way to increase productivity it to take the properties of the knowledge workers who have been most productive, and give it to those who aren't as productive? What incentive do people have to invent and patent anything now?

Re:What about Microsoft?

[Dolohov]

I don't think I'm happy with this, really. What happens if this government agency decides to pump a half million dollars into a FOSS project that competes with the software I write? We have FOSS competition now, but it's not well maintained and doesn't have a very rich featureset -- if all of a sudden it's backed by a serious chunk of money, we just can't compete. Our jobs would be lost, all our customers would have to retrain their people on new software, and once the money goes away, the FOSS project will inevitably stall. Seems to me that everyone loses here in the long term.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[Dolohov]

I'm not a fan of nationalizing, but *buying* those patents is an intriguing idea. It would reward those people who've been productive with a lump-sum bonus that they could use to invest in R&D, and would be an excellent way to wipe the slate clean in advance of patent reform.

This would add further incentive to invent and patent, in the hopes not only of licensing the technology, but of possibly being eligible to sell it off and not have to invest energy into marketing.

The major downside, in my view, is that it would reward patent trolls, but at least the free availability of those patents would enable companies to move forward without fear of litigation.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[MtViewGuy]

There's also this problem: Microsoft products are so entrenched that the cost of converting people to use an Open Source alternative in terms of re-writing software and re-training people to use it is going to be steeply expensive.

Open Source software makes more sense for computing environments where ease of use is less an issue, such as server machines. Why do you think IBM ported Linux to run on their "big iron" hardware?

Re:What about Microsoft?

[PhilHibbs]

Thanks for that interesting and thought-provoking answer (and yes, I was being a little provocative myself, but I feel justified by your great reply). Getting back to the original subject, I guess it all hangs on how the government sponsorship of OSS is going to be handled - it could work if it's open to competition like the DARPA challenges, but it could be what others have referred to as the "road to nowhere".

Re:What about Microsoft?

[lwriemen]

The government has still failed to remedy the anti-competitive damage done by Microsoft to the computer industry. Maybe this would be a step toward reestablishing competition in the marketplace.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[evanbd]

Patents are supposed to be about the non-obvious. Most software, and most software patents, are relatively obvious improvements to the current state of the art. The fact that it is obvious does not mean the problem does not exist, or that your solution is not useful and marketable. For the software industry as it stands today, patents are more of a hindrance to innovation than a component of it. Your customers want the software, so you write it. You patent it so you can sue your competitors and as a defensive act -- but the profit to be made from a patent, either in licensing it or in keeping competitors out, is rarely part of the decision to develop the software. Most of the competitive advantage a software company has is well protected by copyright, without any need for patents.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Business is like the iterated prisoner's dilema, if you constantly screw over every customer, supplier, and even competitors then you will be retaliated against until no longer in business.

That explains why Bill Gates is in the poorhouse.

Re:What about Microsoft?

[Arterion]

Sure, but what about Microsoft, or Adobe, or various other companies that make software?

Microsoft, Adobe, and others are consumers of open source software.

New Deal?

[DigiShaman]

or should we just call it the "Great Leap Forward". I mean, the Federal Gov seems to think money and wealth can be created with the stroke of a pin and all will be well. Right? Nevermind the fact central planning will lead to another "bridge to no where" on a colossal scale!

Re:New Deal?

[CodeBuster]

or should we just call it the "Great Leap Forward"

Well, we aren't being forced to wear identical Mao jackets or being marched out into the countryside to grow basic foodstuffs with hand tools and ox carts while cheap loudspeakers shout slogans like, "Twenty years progress in a single day!". So it hasn't exactly reached the dire level of an American Cultural Revolution, at least not yet anyway.

Re:New Deal?

[Arterion]

On the other hand, it can't really be destroyed with a pen, either. As long as there are people willing to labor, and resources or assets that have value, "wealth" will exist.

What the pen can do is control how that "wealth" is distributed and how it flows from person to person.

It's like a foreclosure. Consider: banks don't need homes. People need homes. So it really does the banks no good to take a house away if they know they can't sell it to anyone else. It isn't "wealth" if it's sitting on a lot somewhere being unused. But people want the house, and so it has value to those people, in so much that they are willing to labor to make use of it. That basic premise will never change, no matter what happens with the economy.

Re:New Deal?

[CZakalwe]

stroke of a pin

OUCH! Who would have thought Government funding could hurt so much??

only if you create some decent criteria

[PhantomHarlock]

How would you decide who gets the money? Would you need to demonstrate suitable skill in coding first? There should be some sort of filtering criteria so the money isn't thrown away, especially since you are redistributing other people's wealth.

Perhaps some type of competition format for ideas would do best. Various private companies such as Google have done this, I believe.

Re:only if you create some decent criteria

[Alyeska]

The competition angle has been pretty successful for DARPA, too....

Re:only if you create some decent criteria

[Bert64]

Have people contribute towards existing well known projects, have the existing developers judge the submissions, including assessing the quality of the code to judge who is worthy of being paid to write more.

Re:only if you create some decent criteria

[Daengbo]

I propose that I be allowed to work on your project. If you approve of my submissions (actually yours, but you can fake the attribution), there's an envelope with 50% of the grant money in it waiting for you.

Re:only if you create some decent criteria

[shiftless]

Make it 70% and you got a deal

Re:only if you create some decent criteria

[Bert64]

If i'm going to be making the submissions, i think i'll just get the grant for myself and keep 100% of the grant money thanks.

Re:only if you create some decent criteria

[bbdb]

Have people contribute towards existing well known projects, have the existing developers judge the submissions, including assessing the quality of the code to judge who is worthy of being paid to write more.

Except:

• Why would clerks bother (let alone be capable of!) with making sure anything good done? The track record suggests smth different. Did smth artistically valuable come out of those federal grants to artists during the New Deal?

• You think current developers are incorruptible? You think that GROUP of developers as such is incorruptible? Those are very real concerns.

• Most FOSS is done to scratch the developer's itch. Whose itch would such projects scratch?

• I can already see $$$s in lobbyists eyes and empty-shell companies created overnight to scam as much money as possible out of this dense govt milk cow.

I could go on like this for a long time, and I think each of such points would be an obstacle that would be politically insurmountable to overcome.

Re:only if you create some decent criteria

[bbdb]

Hey, you were supposed to *distribute* the money to worthy submitters.

*Distribute* some to me or govt audit costing $2,000,000 will get you code from behind bars.

Re:only if you create some decent criteria

[laddiebuck]

For goodness sakes' this is the government, with a century's history of truly excellent investment into research. Why the hell do you take them for incompetents? It's private companies that do inefficient, closed, duplicated and wasteful research.

Makes too much sense to ever happen

[pembo13]

I have faith that something so logical could be implemented, in this day and age. Those with the power to support this simply won't be comprehend the simplicity of such a plan. I mean, seems like the worse case scenario in said plan would be a set of coders end up spending way too much money of soda, video games, and geek toys.

Re:Makes too much sense to ever happen

[bbdb]

Nope. The worst case is as it often happens with govt funding, politically connected companies get to spend it *legally* on producing ultra-expensive and poor stuff. Just look at weapons industries. To make sure even that happens, an elaborate govt control apparatus has to be developed, or else it would all be sucked out to private accounts in Bahamas and other Liechtensteins.

The Limbaughs and O'Reillys of the world...

[Alyeska]

...would just use this as a wedge issue, further "proof" of Obama's "socialism," and Obama has been going out of his way to avoid wedge issues. I think he knows that he can rule, but can't be effective, with a 51% majority.
As much as I love the entire open source movement, I don't think it would ever fly, politically, in our current culture.

Re:The Limbaughs and O'Reillys of the world...

[fretlessjazz]

Sadly, I have to agree. Furthermore, I think that it would be very difficult to concoct a mechanism that dictates which FOSS project receives more money than another. Would it be need-based, or dependent upon the amount of capital that a project could inject into the economy?

It would become to politically charged and too biased before it got off the ground.

Re:The Limbaughs and O'Reillys of the world...

[Temposs]

I think there are a couple ways to decide which projects to fund:

1) Applications for which there is no adequate solution yet(including those that have only adequate proprietary solutions)

2) Applications that would directly benefit various government projects(including improving security of government through code transparency)

3) Specific projects that have the largest user or developer base(objective metric for measuring attractiveness of the project)

Well, they're not great, but I don't think most decisions made by government are done much better...

Re:The Limbaughs and O'Reillys of the world...

[Bert64]

Or do it the standard government way...

Most money goes to the project who offers the biggest "incentives" to whoever is responsible for making the decision.

Re:The Limbaughs and O'Reillys of the world...

[lwsimon]

US Presidents aren't "rulers."

What the hell has happened to this country?

Re:The Limbaughs and O'Reillys of the world...

[Shotgun]

How about the Feds just stick to contracting for code to run the Fed, and then opening the code. There is no business process done in any business that isn't also done by the federal government at some level. Instead of handing out money to build a VRML viewer, they're building out the federal infrastructure, and giving the people something which the people have already paid for anyway. O'Reilly, et.al., would be shut down from the get go.

Re:The Limbaughs and O'Reillys of the world...

[Creepy Crawler]

They have a hell of a lot more power than we plebes do. They can organize meetings with damn near anybody they wish, and people will listen. And since the president of the executive branch, they can ruin somebody by sicing FBI, IRS and various agencies on them. Nixon did precisely that.

And there is the "This guy sucks so the whole party does" mentality. Obama wont rock the boat for long, due to his handlers. They dont want to make the majority of the US hate him, public opinion killed GWB and McCain's chances in the White House.

Re:The Limbaughs and O'Reillys of the world...

[lwsimon]

Power granted by the populace does not make a ruler.

I'm hoping he cools from his campaign promises. He may yet make a good - even great - President.

FWIW, there are about a half dozen people in the whole of the Democratic party that I respect in any way, shape or form. There are maybe a dozen Republicans. The whole system needs to change.

A good idea, but...

[fretlessjazz]

This sounds awesome, but let's be realistic. How can we determine who gets funding? If the government treats the appropriation of funds for FOSS projects similarly to the bail-out of financial institutions, the only projects that would qualify are the ones that are ailing. At the risk of being a troll (albeit a realistic one), can you justify taxpayer dollars for projects like OpenOffice?

Clearly, the government cannot treat FOSS projects in the same as financial bailouts. Therefore, what system could be put in place that determines which projects receive stimulus funding?

Re:A good idea, but...

[Bert64]

Why not? Companies spend billions on proprietary products, improving OpenOffice would be hugely beneficial to millions of companies and individuals.

What's more important tho, would be for the government to take a stand against proprietary formats and protocols... If you level the playing field, OpenOffice would improve far more rapidly on it's own anyway.

Right but not stimulizing

[Anonymous Coward]

As free software conquers more and more areas, funding will become an issue. I think the government will play a crucial role there; in the end, a large part of the software industry will have to be socialized.

However, free software can cause whole industries to implode (call it a positive side effect). So the net effect of funding free software is more and better software solutions for the citizens but also more unemployment and lower salaries for the software developers.

So unless you find enough freeway construction projects for unemployed software developers, free software has the potential of lowering the GDP in the short term. Also, the government generally doesn't want to compete directly with private industry. The society is gradually coming to an understanding that health care and the Internet should be government functions, but it is still a long way from accepting that software should be done by the government as well.

Re:Right but not stimulizing

[Bert64]

Software is a key part of the Internet....

The government should ensure that there is a fair and competitive market, but i wouldn't go so far as to say they should enter it themselves. If the government took actions to outlaw anti consumer lock-in practices, and forced vendors to comply with existing standards or fully open up their own if nothing else yet exists, then it would create a far more level marketplace encouraging innovation and free market competition.

This should be true for any market....

And agreed wrt healthcare and internet, and other similar markets where infrastructure constraints will create unavoidable monopolies... For internet/telecoms i would say let the government own and maintain the physical infrastructure, while allowing private companies to rent access to it on an equal footing... If everyone has the same costs, then competition will emerge with value-add services...

Healthcare, and especially development of treatments should definitely not be operated by for-profit companies... Such companies primary duty is to their own profit, even if that comes at the expense of the patient's health. Someone who suffers for years with an unpleasant disease, but has drugs to mitigate the agony is far more profitable than someone who can be cured. Similarly, a disease that affects millions on an ongoing basis is far more profitable than wiping out a disease.

Re:Right but not stimulizing

[Shotgun]

The government should ensure that there is a fair and competitive market, but i wouldn't go so far as to say they should enter it themselves.

They shouldn't, but they don't need to to accomplish the goal of open sourcing software. They should commission a software project to do what they need done, put a contract out for bidding, and then simply open source the results.

Re:Right but not stimulizing

[bbdb]

As free software conquers more and more areas, funding will become an issue. I think the government will play a crucial role there; in the end, a large part of the software industry will have to be socialized.

With all the consequences one sees (if bothers to look) found in "socialized" medicine (govt medicine is anti-socialized really), on "socialized" roads, and in total flop of everything "socialized" in former Soviet systems. You think people employed by Soviets were dumb, which is why it all collapsed? Think again.

This is a bad idea

[symbolset]

FOSS software increases productivity. It reduces overhead and costs. The evolution of free software reduces the demand for programming and support labor in the long term.

This is not good for the economy. Our economy is hopelessly reliant on unskilled twits who can barely keep our infrastructure running; who spend many hours increasing the problem rather than diminishing it, and who get paid a good wage doing that so they can buy the latest Plasma TV and show off to their friends their XBox skillz in HiDef. If everybody converted to Linux and BSD in the server room, there's another quarter million MCSEs out of work. Imagine all the servers that won't need to be updated on Patch Tuesday and Surprise Thursday! It'll be utter anarchy! Some servers won't be rebooted for months.

This is bad... for Obama.

Re:This is a bad idea

[El Lobo]

FOSS software increases productivity. It reduces overhead and costs. The evolution of free software reduces the demand for programming and support labor in the long term.

That all sounds incredibly politically correct, and yes, you can repeat it ad nauseum and it will become one of those myths that people just repeat and repeat because it sounds , oh so good and logical. However there is absolutely no scientific base that confirms (or refute, for that matter) these claims, so please stop stating this as the holy truth. OS and commercial development both have their strong and weak sides and none of them is intrinsically better than the other, OS is not a magic key that solves all problems and cure cancer.

Re:This is a bad idea

[El Lobo]

An anecdotal case: I am the author of a pretty successful freeware (as in beer) program. After 9 versions I was tired of maintaining it: thousands users screaming for new features every day, etc for years is not an easy task for a single programmer. So 3 years ago I decided to open the source of the program and put it out on SourceForge (the place where 98% of the programs are put to die). And yes, a bunch of people picked it up and began developing a new version. After 2 years nothing new happened. So I decided to create a new closed source version myself, again, and guess what: it is now out and kicking stronger than ever.

I am not telling you that all projects are the same, but you listen every time about a few successful OS projects: mozilla's thingies, linux thingies, etc, but nobody actually talks about the million of OS projects that actually DIE a painful death. And they are many: just visit SourceForge and you'll see.

Re:This is a bad idea

[dangitman]

there's another quarter million MCSEs out of work.

Simple solution: Soylent Green.

Re:This is a bad idea

[Bert64]

But you can actually *see* the open source projects that die, and potentially make use of them in the future, and if you were already using them you can continue to do so.

What about all the commercial projects that die, many of which never even reached the release stage.

One such example, is PostPath (http://www.postpath.com) which used to be advertised frequently on slashdot, they used to make a mail server which was a drop in replacement for ms exchange, while outperforming it by a huge margin... We had their demo version and very much liked it, it would have freed us from several niggles we have with exchange 2003, while costing significantly less than 2007 would while not necessarily fixing the issues we have.
However, PostPath were bought out by Cisco... Their existing mail server product is no longer available, and future versions won't be developed... The company will in the future, as part of cisco, be doing mail as a service - which is completely unacceptable for us, as we need to maintain control over our own email for legal (not to mention performance - don't want large attachments going over our slow wan link) reasons. So now what? Our planned migration had to be cancelled, had we already completed it we would have been stuck with an ageing product that would never be updated....

If it had been open source and abandoned on sourceforge, then not only would we still be able to acquire it despite the original developers having lost interest, but there would be a chance of new developers picking up the project.

If i want to create an updated version of a dead sourceforge project, i can use the existing code as a base... If i want to create a new version of a dead closed source project i have to start from scratch, and may have to spend significant time reverse engineering binary formats or such.

Re:This is a bad idea

[MichaelSmith]

there's another quarter million MCSEs out of work.

Simple solution: Soylent Green.

But they taste terrible!

Re:This is a bad idea

[richlv]

because creating an opensource _project_ is not equivalent of throwing some code out. it takes social, communication, management and a bunch of other skills.

what you describe is a code dump. chances of that taking off are slim, of course.

Re:This is a bad idea

[symbolset]

isn't FREE software going to increase productivity?

Of course it is. You've found the problem exactly.

When people are more productive, you need fewer of them. So you can let the rest of them go. And they can go home and lose their mortgage. Which will then put a bite on their bank's ability to lend - to your company. That will put a pinch in your ability to produce, so you'll need fewer people to produce less. And around and around we go.

Efficiency and productivity are not always desirable goals. This is going to sound very odd, but one purpose of government is to deplete the surplus productivity, thereby preventing a surfeit of harmful leisure. They're not taxing us enough, but instead are providing our services mostly with borrowed money. That means we have excess productivity in the present day. In the macro scale, that means high unemployment. It's simple really.

The only problems is

[amiga500]

all code must be written in ADA.

Re:The only problems is

[MichaelSmith]

all code must be written in ADA.

Listen I actually support an ADA software development environment. I spent the last week and a half merging 10 million lines of the stuff (its a good thing I don't know the language or I would be really stressed right now) and I have to say that no crime is worth that punishment.

Re:The US won't get the benefit

[oever]

Think of all the money the other industries can save by reducing the cost of software. Also code literacy will go up when the code is more visible. A population the knows how to program well, is very useful and can benefit other industries. Right know you know about computers when you know where to click in a windows user interface. When more people use FOSS, it will be easier for them to fix code and improve it to do as they want. When this mindset takes hold, it will become more normal to be able to code.

Really...

[scjohnno]

Top Tag: fascism? Really?

Fingers Crossed

[hyades1]

Paying good programmers to develop Open Source software would be a brilliant and very, very effective use of taxpayer dollars. You get "the gift that keeps on giving", because people who want to work on a project for nothing after the funding phase is over can keep making improvements. For example: project Dogwaffle isn't PhotoShop, but it's pretty damned good, and it's not going to cost you half a grand every time you want to get the next version. It would also be possible to mandate software that runs efficiently on systems that are considerably less than state-of-the-art.

If there's a down side, it's that as our computing needs grow and change, we either let poor and otherwise-disadvantaged people start falling behind, or fork out more bucks to ensure that whatever the new killer ap happens to be five years from now is Open Source.

Re:Fingers Crossed

[Bert64]

Dogwaffle isn't open source... They make a commercial version, and offer a crippled free version without source code...
Gimp would have been a better comparison.

Open Source is Socialism

[crf00]

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.

Re:Open Source is Socialism

[meringuoid]

As a matter of fact I think open source is a triumph of Socialism. Hitherto, compilers cost a fortune, UNIX distributions even more. You had to buy such software from a capitalist - or more likely, be employed by a capitalist who could afford it. The GNU project put the means of production in the hands of the workers, allowing us to enjoy the fruits of our labour ourselves.

Re:Open Source is Socialism

[Creepy Crawler]

Socialism == System of production owned by State.
Communism == System of production owned by the People.

Just looking at that, the GPL is much more communistic, as it places the machinery to create in the hands of everybody.

Id say that is a terribly good thing.

Re:Open Source is Socialism

[NineNine]

Bzzt. It doesn't work because software is a competitive advantage to companies. It's that simple. I won't give away the custom app that I wrote for my business because it gives me an advantage. No amount of theoretical developers altering the code would make it worth it.

Re:Open Source is Socialism

[bbdb]

Socialism == System of production owned by State.
Communism == System of production owned by the People.

GNU == System of production owned by voyeuristic developers pissing on 99% of users and 99% of users pissing on GNU software. The People declared war on Microsoft and Microsoft won.

P.S. Communism == Silly sentiment system of castles flying in air, believed into by economically illiterate and sociologically hopelessly dense and impervious to experience, all wrapped in pink package.

Meanwhile, I say, Ubuntu or DEATH! Err, that was socialism or death.

Re:Open Source is Socialism

[bnenning]

The GNU project put the means of production in the hands of the workers, allowing us to enjoy the fruits of our labour ourselves.

Or the invisible hand of the market lowered the price of software to its marginal cost of near-zero, resulting in maximum economic efficiency. But both versions are silly, because socialism and capitalism are sets of policies to allocate scarce resources. Open source is neither; it avoids the core problem by eliminating scarcity altogether.

Re:Open Source is Socialism

[mahadiga]

Closed Source = Islam
Open Source = Buddhism

Not good

[abigsmurf]

It would be a pretty bad way of stimulating the economy. If you're pouring billions of taxpayers money into developing software that's then provided for free. This would put a lot of small software houses out of business. Why should a company pay for your software when this government produced piece of software had 10 times the budget and is available for free?

If a supermarket that's vital for a community is struggling and at risk of closing, forcing it to cut back on staff, you wouldn't help things by opening a temporary, government subsidised store opposite that, thanks to the tax dollars behind it, can undercut the struggling store's prices.

The supermarket will close and the community will be left with the unviable government store that's chewing through the town's budget.

It's all well and good providing a vital service and short term employment but it has to be done in a way which won't drive other companies out of business.

Re:Not good

[Bert64]

The supermarket will close, leaving a small number of people out of work, which will be offset by the new people employed by the government store, and the government store may even employ more people resulting in a net win... Meanwhile, every single person in the town benefits from the lower prices.

Re:Not good

[Bert64]

It's because McDonalds is a large faceless corporation which has spread all over the place... Whereas a small kebab shop will typically be run by a family or an individual...

The staff in your local McDonald's typically couldn't care less about their job, and usually won't work there very long... They will be there to pay their way through college, or because they couldn't find anything better.
Your local kebab shop on the other hand will get to know you, have a friendly chat with you and greet you in the street.

It is perhaps quite insidious, but a very effective strategy.

As for the quality of the source materials, it will vary greatly in a small kebab shop, whereas McDonald's will be consistent. Quality of preparation is likely to be higher in a family run kebab store where the staff know you compared to a McDonald's where the staff couldn't care less.

Packaging - the kebab store here hands out their kebabs wrapped in plain paper, which rots away (or burns very nicely because of the grease), McDonald's uses branded glossy packaging which will take longer to rot. But the biggest issue here is branding, McDonald's packaging is distinctively branded so it is easily noticed, plain packaging from a kebab store cannot be identified as to where it came from.

Incidentally, i don't hate proprietary software, but i do hate the behaviour of many of the companies who make it. Trying to force people to continue using their products by making them as non standard as possible is deplorable. I want the freedom to choose what software i use, what software i can use with it and regardless of what software is being used by the people i communicate or do business with. Proprietary file formats and protocols take away my freedom.
However, as someone with experience in various programming languages, i would always prefer to have access to source code.

Re:Not good

[bbdb]

"The supermarket will close, leaving a small number of people out of work, which will be offset by the new people employed by the government store, and the government store may even employ more people resulting in a net win... Meanwhile, every single person in the town benefits from the lower prices."

Is this sarcasm on your part or have you reached new depths of economic illiteracy?

Re:Not good

[Bert64]

Not at all.. If operated correctly a government store can be more efficient than a commercial one. There are no shareholders pushing for higher profits, a government store that breaks even or generates a small profit while keeping people employed and providing good value to the people would be a win win.

Of course, most previous attempts at government run operations have ended up horrendously inefficient and incompetently or corruptly managed. But the potential is there.

Microsoft will NEVER let that happen

[erroneus]

There are no limits to what Microsoft, companies like Microsoft and their supporters would do to prevent that from happening.

I have often wondered what sort of chaos would ensue if the plight of the "big 3 auto" were shared by Microsoft. It could upset employment at all levels of the economy. The ripples of the effect would be global. But in the end, I believe people and business would simply work around the issue if Microsoft simply failed and ceased to be. I think that perhaps the overall effect would be somewhere between three and four times as annoying as the latest daylight savings time changes. But people would move off of Microsoft Windows because the platform would just be too unsafe to work with.

One way or another, people will eventually find that Microsoft isn't as "necessary" as they currently believe. Ultimately, when you break down computing and data processing to what needs they serve, it is easy to see that just about anything will do. The biggest problem is getting over people's natural fear of the unknown. Microsoft is all that most people know and so anything else is to be feared and avoided. But when shoved into the water, people will swim.

Publicly funded F/OSS software projects would show the world that Microsoft isn't as necessary as they currently believe. Microsoft would pull no stops in preventing that from happening and I would even go so far as to say they would collectively hold the value of no single life above the interests of their business and business model.

Re:Microsoft will NEVER let that happen

[mjwx]

I have often wondered what sort of chaos would ensue if the plight of the "big 3 auto" were shared by Microsoft.

It's not like all the GM cars on the road will stop working if GM goes under. It's the same with Microsoft. If the situation was the same I doubt business would be affected in any meaningful manner. Windows wont stop working (oxymoron, I know) when MS goes out of business, they will just getting licensing fees. The only industry that "could" be affected is the consumer computer sales, but they will just switch to Linux or keep selling old versions of windows.

Many people make the critical assumption that software licenses are tangible and can be removed from use or sale without intervention. They cant, if MS goes under the worlds industries can ignore it long enough for a complete migration to another OS. When it comes down to it, not even the US would uphold Microsoft copyrights and patents if it meant destroying all other industries.

Microsoft would never attempt to withhold or withdraw its licenses en mass because regardless of weather it works or not it will be Microsoft's death knell. Either everyone will ignore it (most likely) or everyone will run a different OS.

Further more, Windows does not require Microsoft to go on, more then one government has the Windows source code, including the US and China as well as Taiwan where its legal to reverse engineer software.

Re:Microsoft will NEVER let that happen

[mahadiga]

Microsoft is accumulating irrational cash every quarter ($19.71B MRQ) http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MSFT

If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.-- Reagon
Hence it is time to regulate Microsoft unless they invest significant portion of their cash reserves either in FOSS ecosystem or in economy

Bad example. What about the NIH?

[Kupfernigk]

The NIH has driven all the drug companies and medical equipment companies out of business, hasn't it?

Your example is bad. A supermarket is a consumer, not a producer. Now let me give you a real example, one I know something about.

Years ago, there were many companies making marine engines. They were typically very bespoke and very expensive, and though they were very solidly built they were not terribly reliable. Then what happened was consolidation. Volume manufacturers appeared who produced limited ranges of engines that were much cheaper and, because R&D was amortised over high volume, much more reliable - companies like Kubota, Mitsubishi, Mercedes, Volvo. So the small manufacturers went bust, didn't they?

Of course not. They simply absorbed the high volume engines into their product range. They took the core engines and used their marinising parts to provide a range of options for different applications, which they could now do more cheaply. They focussed on services and added value. Because they did not have to have lots of capital tied up in core engine production, they had lower financial risk. The reduction in cost is one reason for the explosion in the powerboat market.

Same thing for software. Most small companies do not run by making core services. They survive on supplying special markets. Common core software allows them to focus their expertise on the added value in those markets. Because the vertical market software now has a lower cost basis, more people can afford it. The market grows. The company has a more diversified customer base so it has to do more customisation. This absorbs the resources that were once trying to maintain the invisible code.

nope

[nicklott]

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.

Re:nope

[digitaldruid]

A common solution to get out of an economic crisis is investing in building roads and other infrastructures. When the government spends to build a road, do you pay to use that road afterwards? It works because the workers get the money (they increase coffee consumption as you say, and that's exactly what increases GDP the most..) and the industry gets better infrastuctures so that they can reduce costs and compete better.

Re:nope

[Xifeng]

Paying a developer to create a free piece of software is effectively a one off payment

I used to think that too. Then I realized that FOSS is also supported by companies!

Don't believe me? Go take a look at Novell, Red Hat and Sun.

Re:nope

[AceJohnny]

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).

That's actually the broken window fallacy. If someone breaks your window, they're helping the economy because you will then spend money to buy a new window and pay a worker to install it for you.

But actually what's happening is that resources that would go into something productive for the economy get diverted to replacing something previously existent, thus reducing economic growth.

Re:nope

[jellomizer]

Did you look at those numbers before you posted this.

All three are not doing very good right now.

Re:nope

[EmagGeek]

This is actually the Wikipedia Fallacy.

Manufacturing a bottle of Coke only goes to replace another bottle of Coke that was previously existent, thus reducing economic growth. Multiply that by the millions upon millions of bottles of Coke that are manufactured every year, and whoa nellie, I am surprised we have had any economic growth at all since the advent of cola.

Whether the shopkeeper enriches the cobbler, bread maker, or window maker, is completely irrelevant, and depends on the assumption that the shopkeeper is going to spend those resources at all instead of saving them, which is only true if someone does indeed break his window.

Re:nope

[Xifeng]

Um, nothing is doing well right now. In case you haven't noticed, we're in a recession.

Even Google and Apple are falling.

Re:nope

[Ugmo]

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.

What about highway spending? If the government pays people to build highways does this money disappear? Do all the roads paid for by government need to be toll roads so we can employ toll collectors othewise no jobs are created and no GDP growth takes place?

No, companies are contracted, workers are hired, people are paid, infrastructure gets built enabling other companies to more easily and efficiently provide goods and services.

Likewise, this proposal says: pay people to produce free software. People are paid, a pool of talent and experience is built up. Businesses get software that will enable them to provide goods and services more cheaply and efficintly. At the end of the program we will have experienced programmers who may go on to create their own businesses, rather than unemployed road contstruction workers. There will also be an aftermarket for services of installing and maintaining this software.

This is an infrastructure program.

The downsides are to companies like Microsoft that sell boxed software but no services. They would be the only ones hurt by this program. All others would benefit.

Re:nope

[Creepy Crawler]

That's your fallacy.

The broken window fallacy is only true when:

Summation(cost of things things sold) + summation(cost of things bought) 0

Things sold results in positive cost, while things bought result in negative cost. Under ideal circumstances, these should be equal. However, in the Broken Window story, the first thing bought was to replace - a punitive damage to remedy the broken window.

Re:nope

[dwye]

> It works because the workers get the money
> (they increase coffee consumption as you say, and that's
> exactly what increases GDP the most..)

No, increased coffee production increases the economy the least. Increased buying from local producers (say, for milk) improves the economy; increased imports improves the economy in the source country at the expense of the importing country, because any economic multiplier effect occurs there and not here.

> and the industry gets better infrastuctures so that they can reduce costs and compete better.

Taxpaying (i.e., local) industry gets the better infrastructure, not everyone else in the world (and only if the infrastructure is useful; bridges to nowhere do not help at any time, unless "nowhere" is suddenly exploitable when it had not been before, and has resources to exploit).

NASA paying for the Apollo program improved the American economy, but NASA paying Australia to support the Deep Space Network only helped the US economy to the extent that it was cheaper to rent their help than to do it ourselves (perhaps a carrier-based radio dish, or something), and only after the multiplier effect of paying an American company to do those modifications was taken into effect.

Perhaps the USA paying for FOSS software will improve the entire world economy, but unless it can be confined to the USA it will not improve the USA economy, which is the US Government's job in a recession, not helping the other 94% of the world's populace, as well. If the FOSS support is restricted to US residents, it may be politically feasible, but otherwise it is nonsense politically as well as economically.

Re:nope

[DerekLyons]

That's actually the broken window fallacy. If someone breaks your window, they're helping the economy because you will then spend money to buy a new window and pay a worker to install it for you.

But actually what's happening is that resources that would go into something productive for the economy get diverted to replacing something previously existent, thus reducing economic growth.

Which is pretty much what I see this proposal as - breaking the software industry window and then paying FOSS developers to replace it.

Re:nope

[bbdb]

Most important point: it is not hard to estimate that city A needs to be connected to B. Just look at the map.

This largely deflates Socialist Calculation Problem. A road is also comparatively easy to build, technology is established and not much different than it was before, and there are many other reasons why roads are pretty much exception to "govt production".

Software doesn't have any economic properties of a road: it definitely isn't easy to flesh out, design, monitor its development and evaluate skills of people developing it. A better comparison of software would be to aerospace work or perhaps weapons development. Check the prices and efficiency of those.

As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[Shivetya]

Why all these comparisons to the New Deal? It didn't work. If it wasn't for WW2 we would never have gotten out of it. All we got in eight years was government debt and unemployment did not change. Sorry but this use it for FOSS is simply pie in the sky type crap. Why? Because those who actually implement it will not have any relation to those in the community. It will simply route money to schools, after all they can do this just fine and they need the money as well as the computers.

No, instead of spending the money by the government why not let those who actually earn it decide what to do with it? Give all those who pay income tax a tax holiday. This will do two things, one is to allow the working American to spend his money where he wants thereby focusing the bailout on businesses that matter to the earners as show them just how much a burden the government truly is.

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[Nietz2000]

WW2 was the New Deal on steroids. The Government quite literally quadrupled spending and took full control of the economy, even to the point of regulating wages and dictating output. If you want to argue WW2 pulled the US out of the Depression, then you're just saying the New Deal was too small.

The GI Bill created the most educated workforce on the planet and paid for 60% of all University graduates. Poverty among the elderly was reduced by 80%. Home ownership and the middle class was created in just a few years from the New Deal. It was a huge success.

You're also ignoring the rest of the world. As each country implemented Keynesian policies, their economies quickly recovered. The US was just one of the last to join the party.

There are no mainstream free-market Austrian economists anymore... they died out. Even Bush's economists are New-Deal Keynesians.

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[Wildclaw]

Why all these comparisons to the New Deal? It didn't work

It worked incredibly well. Unfortunally FDR was relativly conservative which made the depression last longer than it should have. His biggest misstake being the budget balancing in 1937 that immediatly sent the country into a second recession. Fortunally, he corrected the mistake by increasing the efforts again.

All we got in eight years was government debt

The goverment debt/GNP 1933: ~40%
The goverment debt/GNP 1941: ~40%

unemployment did not change

Unemployment (using Darby figures which includes those involved in work efforts)

1933: 20.6%
1937: 9.1%
1938: 12.5%
1941: 8.0%

The unadjusted Lebergott numbers that counts a lot of those involved in work efforts as unemployed of course looks slighly worse, but they still show a significant reduction in unemployment. And the GNP increase is there to prove it.

If you can't even get the basics right I won't bother with the rest.

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[Notquitecajun]

All those weren't the results of the New Deal, which had some colossal failures that are still dragging along today (like the TVA, which NEVER turned a profit, from what I understand). WWII produced a massively technically educated workforce, as well as the GI Bill. Soldiers came home with technical know-how and the ability to do a lot of modern jobs that drug us out of a primarily agrarian economy.

It wasn't the New Deal, it was actually primarily technology and education (which you were right about). The only other thing that I think may have helped was the CCC Camps, which physically prepared many young men to fight in a war (a problem we had going into WWI.)

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[Nietz2000]

We are mostly arguing semantics. I have no problem if you want to say most of the higher education came post-war, but I would point out that was just a planned continuation of the New Deal. I don't know of any government agency that has profitability as a goal - the TVA's purpose was to electrify rural areas and provide cheaper electricity & modernize agriculture, which it did.

The wage compression that created the middle class was unmistakably during the New Deal. Economists typically attribute this to wage controls and unionization. You aren't going to find a pension program with the security or anything near the low administration costs of Social Security. Even today, most elderly Americans would be in poverty without it.

True, the widespread gains in health were probably motivated by the war. As I recall, 60% of recruits were rejected in many areas because they had STDs or were missing too many teeth. Nevertheless, it took massive Government programs to turn it around.

According to the OECD, the large investment in science & engineering in the mid-late 40s is responsible for the US' early lead in productivity and education. I know you don't attribute this to the New Deal, but it doesn't really matter because it was still the Government's demand-side investment that created these gains.

As I said before, the early New Deal was rather small - especially by the standards of Government today. However, the Keynesian policies of the New Deal DID pull us out of the Depression and created a modern society unseen even in the best years of the gilded age. WW2 was just a magnification of these policies.

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[mrlibertarian]

If you want to argue WW2 pulled the US out of the Depression, then you're just saying the New Deal was too small.

I would argue that both the New Deal and WW2 were very bad for the economy. As an example: From 1923 to 1929, the square feet of office space in Chicago almost doubled. From 1931 to 1950, no new office buildings were erected and no new large hotel was built in Chicago. But I guess we did kill a lot of people and destroy a lot of buildings.

So, yes, WW2 "saved" us, in the same way that a broken window saves a glazier. But what if there had been no New Deal, and no second world war? Perhaps we might have had a real economic recovery during those years...

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[washort]

There are no mainstream free-market Austrian economists anymore

Hell, there never were any, depending on how you define mainstream. Even Mises himself, while allowed to call himself a "visiting professor" at New York University, never got paid to do so. Economists who say that governments can help business best by mostly leaving it alone tend to not get paid very much. No surprise, since the government and government-sponsored universities tend to be the major employer of economists.

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[sgtrock]

Long, protracted wars are nearly always bad for an economy, though, as we've known for thousands of years:

He who wishes to fight must first count the cost. When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be dampened. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain. Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor dampened, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue... In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.

-Sun Tzu, the Art of War

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[TheSync]

WW2 was the New Deal on steroids. The Government quite literally quadrupled spending and took full control of the economy, even to the point of regulating wages and dictating output.

WW2 "fixed" the unemployment problem by putting millions of American men to work at gunpoint (the draft).

WW2 also enhanced the US export market by destroying the main competition, Western Europe (of course, pre-war trade was destroyed by the Depression-era global trade war).

WW2 ended "regime uncertainty" in the United States with the death of FDR and the realization that Communism was the enemy, and not a good potential idea for the US. Pre-war polls of businesspeople revealed that they were very worried of a fascist/communist regime coming to power in the US, which probably reduced US private investment.

Private spending did not return to pre-1929 levels until several years after WW2 was over, mind you.

FDR did one thing right - ending the contractionary "speculation busting" Fed monetary policy of 1929-1933 (through the gold clause ban and dollar devalution). Much of the rest of his efforts were anti-growth, as revealed by the recession of 1937-1938 after the initial recovery began slowly in 1933.

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[bbdb]

> WW2 was the New Deal on steroids.

Except it wasn't. Wages were reduced (by National Labor Board, or some such), which allowed unemployment to go down. And Federal Reserve stopped strangling the economy by keeping low money supply.

Those two critical factors dwarfed everything else in economy. Even increase in govt spending wasn't as important.

>The Government quite literally quadrupled spending

Spending on what? Weapons? That also makes a difference, as opposed to previous spending on jobless hacks to break up good pavement and lay a new one.

To produce viable weapons, *real* infrastructure has to be built. That's another difference.

To compare war spending and New Deal is a huge misunderstanding.

>>and took full control of the economy, even to the point of regulating wages and dictating output. If you want to argue WW2 pulled the US out of the Depression, then you're just saying the New Deal was too small.

Nope. It's not the size that matters, it's the actual policies. How you use it. :-)

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[TheSync]

There are no mainstream free-market Austrian economists anymore

I don't know what you mean by this, but every economist still reads Mises and Hayek, and I haven't seen someone refute the Socialist Calculation problem identified by Hayek. There are minor differences between Monetarists and Austrians (and the more honest of both sides agree that inflation is a monetary issue but that can also inter-react with distortionary over-investment in sectors).

The Austrians are actually claiming that the housing bubble during a time of otherwise low inflation is proof of the Austrian Business Cycle versus Monetarist/Chicago business cycle models.

Here are six Austrian economists and also the Review of Austrian Economics.

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[TheSync]

As each country implemented Keynesian policies, their economies quickly recovered. The US was just one of the last to join the party.

Do you have good stats on that (say percent of GDP spent by government versus recovery time)?

Another point is that the US was one of the last countries to leave the Gold Standard, and that countries that left earlier tended to do better as well. I believe there was a lot of damage done by the contractionary "speculation busting" US monetary regime from 1929-1933.

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[Notquitecajun]

The problem with the TVA is that it is far too costly, and is questionable if its costs outweigh its benefits.

The New Deal's problem is that it adopted the philosophy of throwing money at problems and hoping something stuck, even if plenty of others didn't work out. We won't really know if the New Deal really worked because of the WWII issues at hand, which did so much more than the busy-work the New Deal provided. The large scale investment for technology and industry was due to the war, not something that the New Deal was working out. You cannot assume that simply because something coincided with the New Deal AND WWII that the New Deal and Keynesian economics both were massive successes - the context of WWII completely throws it out the window as to whether or not it worked, because of the massive sacrifice and work ethic of the nation at the time.

We'll probably see in the modern context if it really works or not, and if the supply-siders will have to bail everyone out again like we did during Reagan's term and bailing out the failures of LBJ's Great Society, Nixonian price controls, and Carter's ineptitude.

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[TheSync]

His biggest misstake being the budget balancing in 1937 that immediatly sent the country into a second recession.

Obviously balancing a budget can't send a country into a recession in itself (or the US would have been in a recession in 1998). Raising taxes or reducing spending might. As it happens, Congress passed the Undistributed Profits Tax in 1936.

There are other competing theories on 1937: the Fed doubled bank reserve requirements in 1937; scary talk by FDR in April, 1937; the economy feeling the full effect of the Social Security and Federal unemployment payroll taxes that came into force in 1936. Perhaps they all played a roll.

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[DragonWriter]

Why all these comparisons to the New Deal? It didn't work.

In aggregate economic terms Roosevelt's pre-war policies, including the New Deal, appear to have worked pretty well; the recession that begain in 1929 ended in 1933, and 1933-1937 saw fairly strong aggregate economic growth; the 1937-38 recession, while substantial, was much shallower than the 1929-1933 one. So, why do we say that the "Great Depression" lasted until sometime in WWII? Because the 1929-1933 recession was let go so long without effective response that unemployment got up to 25%, and even though it recovered substantially under Roosevelt, it remained high (over 10%) until war spending put a two-pronged attack on unemployment, by both radically increasing government spending and radically shrinking the civilian labor force.

The evidence is not that the New Deal "didn't work", its that if you let things get horrible enough, even making them much better can leave them very bad, so its a good idea not to wait till things get that horrible before dealing with them.

No, instead of spending the money by the government why not let those who actually earn it decide what to do with it?

Tragedy of the commons: the private incentives in an economy featuring deflation and high volatility are, beyond necessities, to hoard and/or invest in "risk-free" investments (like T-bills -- which is why short-term T-bill yield is hovering around 0% right now). If, of all available federal taxes, you specifically give an income tax holiday, almost all of the money you give back is going to people who aren't spending on necessities, and thus, in the current economic environment, can be expected to use the money in ways which will not, by and large, produce any stimulus.

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[bbdb]

"1933: 20.6%
1937: 9.1%
1938: 12.5%
1941: 8.0%" ...except if that idiot Roosevelt didn't conspire with unions to keep the labor prices artificially high and didn't force retailers to keep the prices artificially high (he publicly berated and regulated the "bad shopkeepers" who dared to reduce prices - just imagine what that did to consumer demand), the recession would have ended in 2 years *at most*, not in 10 years.

Just ask any semi-competent economist, really.

And get it once and for all: correlation is not causation. What you cite is not the proof that New Deal helped reduce the unemployment, what you show is that New Deal kept unemployment *artificially high* for 10 years! In most not very high regulated economies, recession is over in 1-2 years. All by itself. Provided central bank doesn't strangle money supply, and idiot like Roosevelt doesn't prevent prices of labor and goods to naturally adjust.

Just because you stop systematically beating someone doesn't mean you help his health, even if his health improves.

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[bbdb]

"In aggregate economic terms Roosevelt's pre-war policies, including the New Deal, appear to have worked pretty well; the recession that begain in 1929 ended in 1933, and 1933-1937 saw fairly strong aggregate economic growth; the 1937-38 recession, while substantial, was much shallower than the 1929-1933 one."

In aggregate Roosevelt has done horribly badly: were it not for his idiot policies, recession would have been over in 2 years at most. 10 years recession combined with permanent high unemployment (reduced during war by National War Labor Board I think that forced unions to knock off wage demands, and that helped to increase demand for labor) *just do not happen if not caused by policies making them last*.

Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't

[DragonWriter]

In aggregate Roosevelt has done horribly badly: were it not for his idiot policies, recession would have been over in 2 years at most.

The only recession that lasted more than two years that overlapped any part of the Roosevelt Presidency was the 1929-1933 recession that Roosevelt inherited from Hoover. The recession began in late 1929. Roosevelt was elected in 1932. He took office in January of 1933. The recession ended in March of 1933. The idea that without the policies of his administration, the recession would have ended by late 1931, more than a year before he took office is an extraordinary claim requiring policies to change events that transpire long before the policies are implemented, which would require extraordinary justification, to say the least, to accept, since it would challenge essentially everything understood about causality.

10 years recession

There was no 10 year recession. There was a just over three year recession which ended shortly after Roosevelt came to office (the 1929-1933 recession) and a shallower, shorter recession four years later in 1937-1938.

combined with permanent high unemployment

This was a real problem, though unemployment began dropping when Roosevelt's policies replaced Hoover's; its just that Hoovers were such a failure that even when Roosevelt's policies had cut them in half, you still had over 10% unemployment.

(reduced during war by National War Labor Board I think that forced unions to knock off wage demands, and that helped to increase demand for labor)

The National War Labor Board actually helped unions and favored increases in low-end pay while being prone to restrict high-end pay. It was a big factor in the reduction of wage inequality and expansion of the middle class in the US which persisted long after the the Board itself was gone.

*just do not happen if not caused by policies making them last*.

Even if we accept your argument that 10-year recessions with these features don't happen without policies making them last, it would be irrelevant, since no such recession actually occurred. (And if the NWLB had ended the "recession" that started in 1929, it would have had to have been at least a 12+ year recession, since the NWLB wasn't recreated until January of 1942.)

You would be more credible in attempting to post explanations of events if you get the facts even close to straight on the events you are attempting to explain.

Complete misunderstanding of Democaracy 2.0

[supersnail]

He may be a clever guy with a good idea but he totaly misunderstands how democracy 2.0 works in hte U.S.

Voters are largly irrelevant in Dem 2.0, The suckers vote for whoever has the best TV adds.

Therefore what really matters are the campaign contributors so you can by better and more TV adds than your rivals.

The best contibutors are big businesses and the people who own big businesses. So if you get elected you need to keep these people happy and ensure the funds keep coming your way. MS, Oracle etc. are all big campaign contributors -- it would be electoral suicide for a government to fund a open source initiative which ate into there revenues.

Re:The US won't get the benefit

[Bert64]

Software development is an extremely small industry, which is made to look bigger by the excessively high profit margins that are possible when it costs nothing to produce and sell infinite copies... The same is true for other similar areas, like production of movies and music... How many currently active musicians, actors and ancillary support staff there are? Now compare that to the staff working to produce a car... Don't forget those who mine and refine the raw materials, and not just those working for the big car companies but also those people working for all the thousands of smaller companies who supply parts.

of course, because an ideal market has no profit

[Trepidity]

In a perfectly efficient, competitive market, profit goes to zero. Obviously companies don't want that, so it's in their interest to work against the establishment of a free-market economy.

Definition of Open Source?

[AliasMarlowe]

Watch the definition of Open Source getting brutally molested if there's government money available to subsidize its development.

I would not be surprised to see a Microsoft "Open Source" license which requires use of Microsoft APIs or development tools, and/or restricts use to specific versions of Windows, and/or forbids building for or porting to non-Windows platforms, and/or forbids use of code excerpts under any other type of license. In other words, an OSS license which is the very antithesis of Apache or BSD or GPL or MIT, and is open only in name.

Re:Insanity!

[Bert64]

2,

These monopolies are built on shaky foundations, the idea of keeping consumers locked in (effectively holding them to ransom) rather than keeping them wanting to buy your products based on them being better than the competition... Sooner or later the customers will come to realise how bad this is for them, and try to break out of the cycle, once this happens the monopoly will collapse and you will have another financial crisis.

3,

The hardest hit consumers will likely keep their existing hardware rather than buy new, if they can breathe new life into their existing hardware for free by putting an up to date version of linux on it instead of an ageing unsupported version of windows then absolutely they will care.
You can also buy new computers for less than the price of a wii these days, and old ones even cheaper...

Re:of course, because an ideal market has no profi

[camcorder]

In a perfectly efficient, competitive market, profit goes to zero.

What are you talking about? Being efficient and competitive have nothing to do with profits.

sure they do

[Trepidity]

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.

So, what is the software equivalent of ethanol?

[jcr]

Not everything that's worth doing is worth doing with tax money.

-jcr

Simple stuff

[smoker2]

Why not spend the money on converting closed format documents to ODF ? The public benefits, both from increased capability to access government records, and from having to be somewhat IT literate in order to do the conversion work.

I'm sure there are plenty of other situations where having an army of operators ready to convert and/or digitise records would be to the public benefit. Exposure to OSS in schools would reduce costs, and increase knowledge and even help to address the claims of whiners who claim that there aren't enough OSS educational programs for use in general education.

Spend money now, to save money later. No matter which side of the political divide you're on, you have to accept that government by definition is inherently socialist, in that it seeks to promote or protect the well being of its citizens. Surely the freedom to access public records without paying for software and the freedom to create your own software to access those records is in the interests of every citizen. No public website should demand that you use a certain browser, or need access to proprietary software to view the content. You might even extend that to the service sector too. After all, there are regulations about disabled access already. Surely we are all disabled when a bank demands you run activex, or refuses to tell you your balance unless you are using IE, or you can't watch a video on a news site because you don't run the latest DRM encrusted media player. It's discrimination when these things occur, and that is one of the things government is supposed to eliminate.

My niece has just moved up to the next level of school and now needs a computer to do homework. But it has to be Windows. Whatever you say about the cost of Windows, it is not capable of standing alone in the market without professional people to support it. It is like requiring all school children to carry an expensive bucket which is known to have a hole in it. But that doesn't matter, because you create jobs by having other people follow the kids around with a non-holed bucket, and clearing up after them. It is not efficient, and lack of efficiency is what costs money. You never make things better by legislating inefficiency.

It's a bit like the old "teach a man to fish" saying. If you give kids only proprietary software, is it surprising that they have to keep paying for it in adulthood ? Teach them OSS and they have the tools for the rest of their lives, plus they come to expect that anything government related is open to inspection and criticism, which is the way it should be.

Re:2 billion?

[smchris]

Ah, a fellow cynic. Some people just don't appreciate good sarcasm.

Yes, I could see Congressmen who dine regularly with their Microsoft lobbyist giving speeches about how excessive $2 billion would be for "hobbyists". While the (foreign) Citibank got -- $300 billion, right? To produce what?

This whole idea shows way too much pragmatic sense for 21st century America.

...and Socialism is the bogeyman

[PinkyDead]

The fundamentals of socialism is about who owns and controls the capital in the means of production. In a capitalist system it is individuals - in the socialist system it is the state.

Now whatever you say about this investment in OSS, you can't say it's socialism unless the state expects a measure on control of the OSS projects, which they are not.

One can say that this is government intervention in free market capitalism - and the free market capitalist will, true to form, roll out the "Socialism" bogeyman to batter any attempts at government intervention. Unfortunately, the free market is, excuse my French, fucked. The economic crisis we are all going through at the moment is because of Lassez Faire principals which have had their day in court and come up serious wanting. It is time to try something else.

To suggest that there is only either "Reckless Abandon Free Market Capitalism" or "Soviet Style Communist Socialism" is a nonsense. It is quite possible to have a capitalist system that involves a sensible government intervention and regulation, that is not socialist.

(Although other than the use of the term Socialism, on the grounds that it will be intentionally abused by the dim-witted jingoists, I agree with everything else you said).

Re:...and Socialism is the bogeyman

[geoffrobinson]

There would be several to argue that the current crisis has a lot to do with government action and meddling.

Re:...and Socialism is the bogeyman

[quanticle]

How did any government regulation directly cause the current crisis? I can see several reasons that government regulation indirectly caused this mess (like encouraging the use of Credit Default Swaps to move risk off bank balance sheets), but there aren't any government regulations that forced banks to engage in the risky practices that resulted in this mess.

Re:...and Socialism is the bogeyman

[quanticle]

Also, regarding your sig, how did war end communism? As I see it, communism imploded due to it not being able to keep up with Western capitalism's higher productivity, not due to any real military confrontation.

Re:...and Socialism is the bogeyman

[bbdb]

There was quite a lot of politics and govt regulation *directly* feeding the problem over the years:

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=307061229501695

Tragi-comical version:

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/03/subprime-mortgage-blues.html

Re:...and Socialism is the bogeyman

[quanticle]

Unfortunately for your argument, CRA loans had tighter regulations and were less likely to be securitized.

At the very least, you have to accept that its far from a foregone conclusion that the Community Reinvestment Act was a major contributor to the propagation and securitization of subprime mortgages.

Re:...and Socialism is the bogeyman

[mattrumpus]

Yes, and those people would be wrong. The market is inherently unstable, despite the fine propaganda effort to convince us its gods gift to man and somehow a state of nature for the human race.

Why?

[GottliebPins]

I have a better idea. Why don't they just give us our damn money back and let us decide how to spend it? Why should a bunch of career politicians be allowed to pick and choose who gets the money? Individuals invest money with the intent of making a return on their investment. Politicians spend money to get more votes. Once they get their hands on our money it becomes dirty money, used to buy votes. You might as well be accepting money from crack dealers. I guarantee if they did decide to spend money supporting "open source" software there would be strings attached. They would put so many rules and stipulations on it that it wouldn't be open source anymore.

Re:Why?

[evanbd]

Because if they do that, you'll save it. Normally, that would be a good thing -- invested money promotes growth and all that. In a recession, though, everyone is worried that their investments will go down, so they just hold their dollars. These concerns apply to money in your savings account that the bank would normally invest as well. However, if the government spends the money, that doesn't happen.

You can view the economic situation right now as a Prisoner's Dilemma. Everyone would be better off if everyone would just get over it and spend money. But, short term, the economy is on shaky ground at best, so I'm better off not spending regardless of what other people do. So no one spends money, even though everyone would be better off if everyone spent money. Once the cycle starts, it's no longer a PD problem, but the initial state is. One way out of a PD is by agreement -- both players make a contract to not rat each other out (ie spend money). That contract needs enforcing, though, and one way to do that is to have the government spend money via taxes and deficit spending (ie delayed taxes / tax by inflation).

In other words... lower taxes promote growth, normally. But when the trust that is the basis of our economy starts to crumble, it can make sense to have the government spend money by spending it rather than by cutting taxes.

Re:Why?

[bile]

Saving and holding on to your money is exactly what needs to happen. The lack of savings and constant borrowing is caused this in the first place. Demand for dollars is high. Good. Makes things cheaper. That high demand is what people want. What you advocate is forcing people buy things they don't want. That by definition is economically less efficient. The government can't and will never be able to assess the needs and wants of the people as well as the people, the market.

You can't spend your way to prosperity. There is no free lunch. Bastiat clearly explained this over 150 years ago. What's so difficult to follow?

Re:Why?

[p0on]

Where are they going to get the money they are handing out in the first place:

A. people who have saved and can buy treasury instruments thus crowding out private investment.

B. taxes on the people who would invest in businesses that buy things and employ people

C. monetizing the cost and inflating prices across the board

D. All of the above

Re:Why?

[evanbd]

You missed a couple:

Taxes on people who were going to put their money in a bank account because they're scared to invest right now.

Borrow from foreigners and banks and others who weren't going to invest in US businesses (see above about banks being scared to invest right now -- that's the whole 'credit crunch' thing) via treasury instruments.

Government spending isn't inherently good or bad; neither is deficit spending. Much like private spending, and private spending with borrowed money (eg a mortgage). In both cases you have to look at the details before deciding whether it's a good idea or not. Surprise! Economics is not trivial.

Re:Why?

[p0on]

Treasuries are guaranteed and bank accounts are not - unless you mean the FDIC insurance which taxpayers provide for anyway. So no, investors would rather buy government bonds than keep it in banks since risk is lower and return is (supposedly) higher. And foreign investment is still part of the economy - government borrowing will crowd out the private investment. I never claimed government spending was good or bad. I claimed it's inefficient and ineffective as economic stimulus.

Re:Why?

[evanbd]

Do you think that some form of stimulus is required? If so, and it's not gov spending, what is it? (And, from a policy standpoint, I would say that inefficient and ineffective counts as bad. If the stimulus won't help anything, then I'd just as soon have lower taxes and less national debt.)

Just like clockwork

[tjstork]

Open source people suddenly argue that the economy demands the government give them money, so that their software can continue to be "free". Always knew the end game of FOSS was a tax supported infrastructure.

The New Deal failed.

[tjstork]

WW2 was the New Deal on steroids.

WW2 was certainly a huge capital outlay, and brought people to work, but let's not forget some basic things:

a. WW2 took place 9 years after Roosevelt was elected. He had nearly a decade of New Deal to end the Depression and really didn't accomplish anything.

b. We are already in a war, two of them actually, and the economy still sucks. IF we wanted to raise the military budget to 6T a year, we would have WWII levels of spending on the military, and, what would that accomplish?

c. The prosperity of US postwar had more to do with the total destruction of American industrial rivals. Even GB, our ally, was so bankrupted by the war that she hit the skids. Continental Europe and Japan were destroyed, and the damage caused to Russia by the German invasion was so severe it doomed Russia to be a third world economy for decades afterwards. USA economy has been in relative decline as each of these players rebuilt and retooled.

You're also ignoring the rest of the world. As each country implemented Keynesian policies, their economies quickly recovered

IT was Keynesian policies they implemented, it was classic mercantilism, protecting their own industries as much as possible to let them rebuild, while selling their goods to the USA. This dysfunctional world economy has persisted for 60 years. First it depleted USA gold reserves so that in the 1970s the USA floated the dollar. Then, it depleted USA dollars so that in the 1980s the USA began borrowing, and then, when Bush finally pulls the plug on the whole damned thing by lowering the dollar, we're left with an economy that is reflective of what it really is, a large economic power with a bunch of smaller, but capable, economic powers, and a bunch of goods and a so-called free trading system that is actually irrationally priced due to the junkie's desire to keep the postwar ball rolling.

No more.

Americans aren't going to tolerate the economic dislocation and fiscal ruin caused by all the imports, and finally, you are going to have to see USA's trading partners actually construct meaningful domestic demand on their end, while at the same time the USA will have to build more of what it needs and stop treating the developing world as so much indentured servants.

Re:The New Deal failed.

[Nietz2000]

a) Well, to be honest, the economy was actually growing very fast under the New Deal, between 5% and 10% every year, from 1933 right up to the US entry into WW2. Millions of jobs were added before WW2. There was only one recessionary year when the Government tried to cut spending too early, but quickly corrected it.

b) You don't have to be in a war to push an economy out of a recession... rather than bombing Europe, you could spend the money building infrastructure.

c) The prosperity of the US was very real. The improvement in technology, health, education, employment and productive capacity was much higher from the wartime investments. The same was in fact true of the rest of Europe. Sweden was the first to apply the principles and became just as wealthy as the US.

I'm not sure where you are getting the mercantilism connection to Keynesian policies. Keynesians were very much against the Gold standard... Everyone from Friedman to Keynes to Bernanke agree the Gold standard was a primary cause of the Depression.

You clearly oppose Globalization, but I don't think it really matters. The New Deal really didn't have anything to say about global trade and it really doesn't make much of a difference when everyone is in a deep recession as well.

Re:The New Deal failed.

[tjstork]

Well, to be honest, the economy was actually growing very fast under the New Deal, between 5% and 10% every year, from 1933 right up to the US entry into WW2. Millions of jobs were added before WW2. There was only one recessionary year when the Government tried to cut spending too early, but quickly corrected it.

What?! That's crazy talk. The unemployment rate in 1939 was 17.2%. Oh, ok, I've read that this statistic was cherry picked because it ignores all those "good" years before hand where unemployment was only 10-15%, but even if you go by the best way of interpreting the New Deal, unemployment was never lower than 9%, INCLUDING make work jobs, which means that, 8 years of Roosevelt were NEVER as good as the WORST year of George Bush JR. They should put Bush on the dime, and take Roosevelt off!

Now, with that said, the reason that the new deal "failed" was that it had Keynes tendency to not actually buy anything of lasting value... like, I was dead set against Bush just throwing money out there with these refund checks because, you've got so much money supply contraction taking place anyway that its not enough. Instead you have to create things that create wealth. So, if anyone actually really ended the great depression, ( the economy sucked under Truman ), it was Eisenhower, when he built the US interstates. Created lasting value, generated all sorts of opportunities. I'm hoping Obama's investments in energy and infrastructure will yield similar fruits, and then, if that works, then, put his ass on the dime, and get Bush off.

I'm not sure where you are getting the mercantilism connection to Keynesian policies. Keynesians were very much against the Gold standard... Everyone from Friedman to Keynes to Bernanke agree the Gold standard was a primary cause of the Depression.

If you substitute dollars for gold, every economy aside from the USA and the EU, is essentially mercantile.

Look at asia.. they get dollars, and they -hoard them-.

Hoarding is the hallmark of mercantilism and is ultimately why its ultimately a foolish economic policy. It could be gold or any standard, but hoarding is the problem. You have a room full of gold, or dollars, and its not in the economy, that means people aren't investing, building, making more of it. When we talk about the cause of the great depression and how it was prolonged, its hoarding. Hoarding is ultimately stupid, and that's why you saw FDR confiscate all of the gold, so he could spend it, because nobody else would.

The cause of this depression is hoarding. You have asian countries piling up tons of dollars doing nothing, and, the world loses all of that economic activity.. ultimately it screws the USA so the USA borrows, and the asians hoard more dollars, until, well, Bush pulls the plug on it all and devalues the dollar, to say, hey, I can change the value of your hoard at any time. This did not have the desired effect, obviously, but it made sense to do it at the time.

That's why you see Bernanke and our friends in Europe trying to have some brains and flood the capital markets with currency, to get the rest of the world to start spending and quit hoarding.

You clearly oppose Globalization, but I don't think it really matters.

My problem with being against globalization automatically is that I happen to love Italian wine and French Chardonnay and I know that Europeans should eventually come to realize the superiority of American Whiskey over other distilled spirits.

So, when passions are aside, I would say that I'm against globalization unless all the trading partners agreed to abandon mercantilism and we sort out how to avoid bankers shopping workers into the ground. I would certainly, though, be open to a free trade zone between the USA and European Union, and I also think we should have a NATO Day within the alliance to promote the idea of the West and transatlantic solidiarity. I think THAT would kick ass, and someday, once the USA gets its health care system and tax structure roughly in line with what the EU offers... I'm not saying that because I necessarily believe in it, but only that the EU health system and taxing regime seems to offer their corporations a competitive advantage.

Re:The New Deal failed.

[Nietz2000]

but even if you go by the best way of interpreting the New Deal, unemployment was never lower than 9%, INCLUDING make work jobs, which means that, 8 years of Roosevelt were NEVER as good as the WORST year of George Bush JR.

Economic growth was strong, closer to 10%. Unemployment was falling, but you didn't get full employment until WW2. This is to be expected when you are coming off a 25% unemployment rate and a decline in demand of 40% (90% in equity markets). As the economy was growing, you still didn't need many new workers to meet the growing demand because your productive capacity was built for output much higher (and you were still implementing technologies developed during the negative years).

You can't really compare Unemployment Rates of two different periods like this though. 20% of the workforce now works for the Government. The New Deal programs only employed a few thousand people. A much larger proportion of the population are employed today, so unemployment does not fluctuate so wildly.

The New Deal was not successful at reaching full-employment. You really needed a War Economy or a Centrally-Planned Soviet Economy to do this in the short-term.

The New Deal was actually quite small on a macroeconomic basis. However, it was the programs he created that created the society we know today of high home ownership, middle-class earners, social security & basic health care.

Stimulus?

[Thyamine]

Great, a stimulus package that helps everyone else except for those people who happen to develop software for a living. It's not like jobs in those areas haven't already had problems with being outsourced over seas.

I develop a bit of software for a computer/network consulting company, so I'm insulated from that type of thing in general. But if I was writing software and charging a fair (important here) price, I don't think the government should be coming in to compete against me. This isn't like people are building bridges, but then only letting Fords across, or charging outrageous prices for tolls. The government builds a bridge because there's a need, and they are the ones to do it.

If they want to help, investigate and fully deal with the monopolies or unfair business practices out there that allow Microsoft (or whoever) to do what they do and force competition out of the market.

Re:Stimulus?

[The AtomicPunk]

Welcome to the world of government jobs creation programs. They don't work, jobs are created for political reasons rather than economic ones, and we all end up getting screwed.

Lots of people mistakenly believe programs like this will only take idle workers, and therefore is only beneficial. However, that's a completely unrealistic concept. Large projects like this, or these "green" jobs will draw employed workers from other fields, drain resources from private industry, consume capital that could be used by private industry ...

In the New Deal, this didn't help the unemployment rate, it took drafting 11.5 million men to do that. However, it was very effective in cementing the New Deal coalition that kept one political party in office for a few decades.

Re:Stimulus?

[bnenning]

Great, a stimulus package that helps everyone else except for those people who happen to develop software for a living.

Do you use Apache, gcc, or Python? I don't support this stimulus, but the idea that open source software is bad for software developers in general is silly.

Not only support but use OSS

[randalx]

The government could further mandate that public institutions use Open Source Software. Not only would this spur the demand but it would also save the government millions of dollars in licensing fees. Instead of just supporting a random assortment of OSS projects they should target the money to development they can directly benefit from.

One logical mistake

[Dreen]

Open Source Development does not run on money. You can't throw heaps of cash on a FOSS project an expect it to grow. Open Source works on TIME.

Re:One logical mistake

[Z00L00K]

Investment in this case is time, not money, but some of that time is paid by money so...

No need to distinguish between time and money.

...if anyone cares

[geoffrobinson]

Outside of people following the industry, I don't think most people give open source much consideration one way or the other.

And Limbaugh uses Macs. Go figure.

"Social" isn't "Socialism"

[geoffrobinson]

Socialism is forced and about coercion. There is a big difference between a concept and adding an "ism" to the end of that word.

Working together towards a goal isn't socialism, esp. since you can use open source towards capitalist ends.

Japan Went Keynesian

[geoffrobinson]

Didn't help them in the 90s.

Is Keynesian economics like XML and violence? If spending doesn't work, just use more?

Re:Japan Went Keynesian

[Nietz2000]

Japan actually had good growth in its fiscal stimulus years. They just jumping back into budget-balancing as soon as growth had recovered, and would fall back into recession as a result.

Of course, the slow population growth didn't help. In fact, adjusted for population growth, Japan has grown faster than the US over the last decade.

Re:Japan Went Keynesian

[bbdb]

Except it didn't really help them in 1990s to spend their way out of recession. Stimulus packages work, except those (most) that don't.

Re:Japan Went Keynesian

[DragonWriter]

Except it didn't really help them in 1990s to spend their way out of recession.

Once a deflationary recession is established, its notoriously hard to get out of, because even once money gets into the private economy, the incentive, except for those on the margin with necessities, is to defer spending or investing it (deflation means cash held has a positive real rate of return, and recessions tend to feature high risk in investment markets, so both spending and investing, outside of investing essentially-guaranteed instruments like government securities of a stable government, is discouraged.)

This doesn't mean that stimulus isn't better than no stimulus, but it means that there is big challenge to overcome in any case. (And, in recent months deflation appears to be setting in to the present US recession, which is one of the things that has been making the predictions as to the expected depth and severity of the recession get worse.)

Re:Japan Went Keynesian

[bbdb]

Japan didn't have deflation (well strictly speaking there were some points in 1990s where they had negative _real_ interest rates, but generally it doesn't count as deflation).

There is much simpler explanation to what you write: Japan was simply unwilling to write off the bad loans resulting from their speculative real estate bubble in the 1980s (any similarities to today situation? naa) and in result they couldn't get consumer spending off the ground. That was really the factor behind deferring spending or investment, and not "fear of current situation / uncertain future" which is a psychological factor that doesn't last permanently.

Most likely, all the stimulus packages made their situation even worse, bc they used up money that Japanese consumers could have used to kickstart the investment & consumption cycle again. So yes, no "stimulus" package (which is just a rhetorical hyperbole for taking away money from consumers and spending them on roads & bridges to nowhere) probably would have made them exit recession sooner.

Re:Japan Went Keynesian

[p0on]

Really? How come only 18 percent of Japanese polled believe the 2 trillion yen plan by the Aso government will work? A full 71 percent don't think it will do anything to stimulate the economy. http://www.japaninc.com/jin495_economic_stimulus_package

Re:Japan Went Keynesian

[quanticle]

Not really. If you look at the amount the Japanese government spent during their downturn, it was much less as a proportion of the total economy than American government expenditures during the New Deal. Secondly, due to political instability, the expenditures varied a great deal from year to year, as different parties and politicians rotated in and out of power. This lack of stability robbed what fiscal stimulus there was of its power, as companies hoarded the cash that was given to them, since political change made planning for the future precarious.

Re:Japan Went Keynesian

[bbdb]

"Really? How come only 18 percent of Japanese polled believe the 2 trillion yen plan by the Aso government will work? A full 71 percent don't think it will do anything to stimulate the economy."

Hard to blame them after, what, 11 or so failed "stimulus packages" so far since the beginning of 1990s. I lost count, really.

Re:Japan Went Keynesian

[DragonWriter]

Japan didn't have deflation (well strictly speaking there were some points in 1990s where they had negative _real_ interest rates, but generally it doesn't count as deflation).

Uh, Japan not only had deflation, but it still hasn't gotten rid of it.

And deflation is not indicated by interest rates, real or nominal. (Though manipulating interest rate targets is a tactic frequently used, including in Japan, for addressing deflation.) Deflation is a decline in consumer prices (equivalent to an increase in the value of money.)

There is much simpler explanation to what you write: Japan was simply unwilling to write off the bad loans resulting from their speculative real estate bubble in the 1980s (any similarities to today situation? naa) and in result they couldn't get consumer spending off the ground.

Certainly, the fact that Japanese banks have in many cases lent money to those with bad real estate loans that are used to pay interest on those loans rather than realizing the loss is a factor in continuing the deflation, but that policy itself is a sensible policy because the deflation continues, limiting the real loss associated with the added nominal losses this is likely to produce and limiting the attractiveness of alternative lending choices.

OTOH, this is not an "alternative" to the explanation I provide, since it is perfectly consistent with it.

That was really the factor behind deferring spending or investment, and not "fear of current situation / uncertain future" which is a psychological factor that doesn't last permanently.

Its not a psychological factor at all, if by that you mean something like a delusion born by shock that is decoupled from or, at best, an overreaction to the market realities; its a rational response to the private incentives in the existing market situation, and it lasts as long as the market situation lasts.

Most likely, all the stimulus packages made their situation even worse, bc they used up money that Japanese consumers could have used to kickstart the investment & consumption cycle again.

Stimulus packages only use money that consumers could have used if they are funded by present taxes on consumers, which is a decidedly non-Keynesian approach, and not the approach Japan actually took. So this is not only not the "most likely" explanation, its not even an explanation which is consistent with the basic facts.

Anyone actually read his writing on FOSS?

[bile]

His understanding of software development and FOSS in The Conservative Nanny State was completely shallow and lacking.

The evil answer out of this economic crisis.

[tjstork]

Might actually be to tax banks. Its a thought because right now the problem is that banks aren't lending to cover their failed assets, a problem which TARP was supposed to fix but didn't.

Some new deal ideas to try and increase the velocity of money might not be so bad. In general, where money is being hoarded, it should be taxed, so that, holders -must- invest or spend it. And you might want to look at hoarding in other areas as well, and ask questions like, does buying gold or silver or other commodities constitute hoarding? I would think that it would, so you might tax that. Similarly, you might have to ask, well, do futures contracts constitute hoarding? If you want to put money in the hands of the most people, you probably need to make sure that no commodity sits unused.

Re:The evil answer out of this economic crisis.

[Nietz2000]

How about a healthy dose of inflation?

Theoretically, inflation really doesn't cause any harm to an economy. But it does tax those who sit on wealth and refuse to earn more or invest what they have.

Of course, a deep recession is deflationary, which just encourages even more of this hoarding you dislike. Nobody is going to invest when just holding money earns a risk-free return. Who would loan money when interest rates are negative?

Re:The evil answer out of this economic crisis.

[parnasus]

...Theoretically, inflation really doesn't cause any harm to an economy. But it does tax those who sit on wealth and refuse to earn more or invest what they have...

Are you KIDDING?!? Inflation hurts people who rely on fixed incomes: retirees, pensioners, the disabled, those drawing from an annuity. It's a form of silent taxation. A person who works during an inflationary period will (generally) get some form of COLA raise. Fixed-income people get no such protection. Inflation makes them poorer, and many have no recourse than to go to Wal-Mart to make up the difference.

I'm no economist, but what I've been reading about inflation and Keynesian economics leads me to believe it's not the answer.

Government vs Private spending

[nwssa]

So private corporations spending money writing closed software to make profits is bad but governments spending money writing open source software without any focus on profits is good.

If we've learned anything is that governments need to be minimal and get out of the way, let corporations/investors make decisions on where to spend money. That is most efficient.

This could only hurt our competitiveness in the one industry we are the best at.

A stopped clock right twice a day

[DerekLyons]

Reading the linked articles - he didn't actually 'call' the housing bubble. He just kept claiming there was one long enough that he was eventually 'right'.

Hell, even I can do that.

Money for politically connected

[bbdb]

It would be monumental waste of money and it would be the worst PR ever for open source. This could undo FLOSS for many, many years.

Consider: right now only those who have motivation & skills to contribute, do so.

In govt-backed scheme, those who want to milk the money and produce crap, are the first and the most active (read: the most aggressive, politically connected, and successful in getting to the trough) in acquiring govt backing.

It all ends up like Ministry of Silly Walks: "Your walk is not particularly silly, is it? ... I feel with govt backing I could make it a lot more silly".

So the logical next step is to create monumental apparatus of control, verification and planning. Why, what else can government do? That eats up money, too.

There are already precedents for this. In Europe there are big "investment" programs into IT called "structural programs", planned and distributed every several years. Have you *ever*, I mean *ever* heard of or used a usable piece of software that came out of it? Most likely you never heard of it, not because money wasn't spent, but bc it never produced anything usable.

Effective ... ?

[The AtomicPunk]

This will be about as effective as the New Deal was (beyond the rhetoric) - all we'll need is this and a world war to pull us out of this depression too!

I want my commie Lada!

[bbdb]

If you want FOSS to function like commie "car", support this idea. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant

Hey, Linux already resembles AK-47 in its primitive robustness. Maybe we could fuse the two somehow?

Re:Economic Stimulus, not Private Investment

[bbdb]

A tax cut makes people invest more and spend more. It is true that character of spending matters: private spending doesn't have Socialist Calculation Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem which is why it is efficient and develops economy, even if that means some money ends up in China (hint: this is because Americans have better things to do than manufacturing cheap shoes, read up on comparative advantage, intl trade, mercantilism and such). People estimate opportunity costs in their lives, which drives them to spend money on A and not B. This in turn drives companies to deliver A and not B.

Public spending has political problem on top of Socialist Calculation Problem: it just *doesn't measure opportunity costs and doesn't adjust production accordingly*. Got it? Private economy is directed. Public one isn't. Not in any reasonable sense of the word "direction".

In comparison to economy driven by private needs, public sector is a headless chicken: it just *isn't directed well enough*.

This ultra-short recap should remind some why traditional economy works and New Deal / stimulus packages don't and haven't worked.

Churchill wrote smth about new generations forgetting the experience of previous generations and repeating the same mistakes all over again. You're a living proof he was right.

Re:When will they "get it"

[bbdb]

Obama, we are going to learn if you really are intelligent right out of the gate.

Politically, he's dead duck: can't do anything without infringing on grounds of *some* important (ideological, economic, etc) majority, simply because he doesn't lead simple majority big enough, while govt tools he has at his disposal have been historically proven as ineffective.

Obama - the Change You Can Forget About.

Re:The US won't get the benefit

[bbdb]

I believe Linux and Apache, to name just 2 projects, do benefit USA to at least some extent. Not that *anything comparable* would be produced by the said program.

What about quality?

[Garbageman67]

Not sure this has been discussed, but when software is put out by usually open sourcers, they take pride and work to make good quality software.

Bring unaccountable money to the table and not only with the above probably start slacking, but will bring every tom, dick and harry that can write something that compiles out of the woodwork If all I have to do to get a grant from the government is produce XXX lines of code, well that's an afternoon, it will do something, but lord knows it probably will be a POS. How is that useful or beneficially to the FOSS projects?

Another aspect is the perception that OSS is socialistic. From what I can tell, most projects are actually closer to what would be called a monarchy as far as approval processes and direction. The reason it works so well is that a good monarchy (where those in charge are actually looking to the benefits of all and just aren't power hungry people looking to buy votes) is the most stable and beneficial long term arrangement.

Bring the government into this type of arrangement and your gonna start having quotas on who can contribute to a project, complaints and even lawsuits because if some really bad coder can't get his stuff in and thus can't get paid, he's going to say that the project leaders are just biased.

I realize this is chain of thought, but would like to get some of these concepts out there.

Re:of course, because an ideal market has no profi

[bbdb]

Nnope. Profit of *the most expensive supplier* goes to zero. Even less efficient suppliers bankrupt. The rest (more efficient suppliers) keep their profits.

There is no such thing as government stimulus.

[p0on]

Government spending does not stimulate the economy. It takes money FROM the economy and redistributes it to politically favored and connected groups. Bastiat recognized this 160 years ago. Keynesian economic stimulation has never worked before, during, or since Keynes lived. http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html

Re:free everything

[bbdb]

"Don't Capitalize! CO-OPERATE! AND FREE EVERYTHING!"

Don't Fornicate! Make Love! To Everything!

The My Dad's an Asshole Defense

[mr micawber]

That would make as much sense as blaming the game.

that can be considered a cost

[Trepidity]

Effectively, it's the minimum salary required to entice the owner-operator to operate the business. If someone's earning more than that (say, making millions) and hasn't yet been undercut, it's due to the market for one reason or another being uncompetitive.

d) and e)

[EmbeddedJanitor]

d) People viewed the war as a temporary thing and spoke of hope ("After the war we'll ...."). People were prepared to make personal sacrifices because there was a war on. Nobody talks of the current US wars in that way and never has personal consumerism and self-absorbtion been any higher.

e) People were generally more frugal back then and did not just thow their money (and credit) around. They tended to save more and spend more wisely and acted for the longer term. Today's people are different: they have credit cards and do everything for instant gratification. Today's people are not prepared to cut their consumerism to rebuild the economy over a 5 or 10 year period. That's why it has been a lot easier to just print more money and increase the national debt than it has been to pushing up taxes or interest rates or whatever is really required to improve true economic health.

Where do I sign up?

[Bill Kendrick]

Having a day job has always interfered with Tux Paint development. :)