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FOSS Development As Economic Stimulus
heybus writes "Economist Dean Baker, best known for calling the housing bust and warning of the ensuing economic collapse, has just published his recommendations for how to allocate President-elect Obama's estimated $800 billion economic stimulus plan. Among other things, Baker calls for juicing the economy with $2 billion worth of government spending to support the development of free and open source software. Baker's idea is similar to the New Deal federal arts and writers' projects: the government would fund projects as long as they produce freely available code. In addition to employing programmers, 'the savings [to consumers] in the United States alone could easily exceed the cost of supporting software development.'"
Open Source is the ultimate in re-usable investments in the area of computer technology.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
Loose lips lose spit.
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!
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
...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.
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
all code must be written in ADA.
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.
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.
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.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
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.
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.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Profit is market inefficiency due to lack of competition---someone selling a product for more than the marginal cost of production, which hasn't yet been exploited by an undercutting competitor, often due to difficulty of market access or strongly entrenched incumbents.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
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).
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
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.
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.
This is my sig.
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.