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Should Obama Give Stimulus To Open Source?
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Bill Snyder posits a deeper relationship between government and open source than was proposed in last week's open letter to Obama calling for broader open source adoption: economic stimulus. Since software vendors urged the president to go open source last week, security companies 'have raised scary points about vulnerabilities in open source,' suggesting they could step in to help secure an open source switch. Rather than opt for this kind of security through obscurity, Snyder argues in favor of earmarking funds for open source development to instead ensure security through transparency. 'Once the government expands its use and support of open source, venture money — which is drying up in the current recession — would again start flowing to those small companies, allowing them to hire or rehire some of the tens of thousands of unemployed IT workers,' he argues."
That's like an ANTI-Stimulus to us software developers trying to make a living.
No. Why? Because open source isn't typically a large lobbying group.
Next.
The open source movement is exactly what should be funded. Create a grant application program for open source projects.
I had an argument with a microsoftie a while ago, who was convinced that open source was destroying the software industry. I countered that all it was doing was creating a rich infrastructure on top of which other industry could be built.
The open source infrastructure is a national (international) treasure that, by making infrastructure basically free, like roads and bridges, makes other projects that would have been too big and expensive to develop from scratch, almost trivial to develop.
1: You don't create jobs by adding unfair competition to struggling companies(how can companies compete with someone getting guaranteed money with no need to turn a profit?)
2: I'm pretty sure there are international laws in place which don't look too kindly on this.
Dear Mr President, You really should be buying American products in order to stimulate economic recovery in the United States of America. May I take this opportunity to remond you that MICROSOFT is an AMERICAN CORPORATION! BUY AMERICAN! BUY AMERICAN! We love you, Mr President Sincerely, Steve Ballmer
Give money to people for Open Source and you'll have a ton of shitty projects designed solely to get money from the Government.
Most of the rest of the projects will be companies claiming free money for projects they would have paid for in-house, but they could get the government to pay for a portion of it instead. The projects won't be useful to anyone else, and especially won't be useful without the in-house project that goes with it.
And no, GPL'ing all the government-funded software isn't the answer, either. At the very least, the companies will just find a way around that license.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
All economists agree that government spending is important during times of contraction, as it helps to make up the shortfall in the economy from the side of the consumer, and helps "stimulate" the economy. Another advantage of government spending is that it's usually an investment in infrastructure that will last many decades and provide a platform for future growth in the economy.
However, the United States has not taken advantage of the good times. They have failed to reduce their debt during those times- and in fact have increased it to record proportions. Not only that, but they have not even managed to maintain their infrastructure. This is at both the state and federal level. So we went INTO this mess already up to our ears in debt.
People fail to understand that every dollar the US prints reduces the real value of all the other dollars that currently exist by a tiny fraction - because after all, fiat currency is only hard to forge pieces of paper. Once the shared belief in the value of that worthless piece of paper is destroyed, it will quickly return to its intrinsic value - ZERO. Ask Mugabe.
Printing trillions of dollars at a time when you are already close to 60 trillion (when you count social security) in debt, and the WORLD GDP is only 150 trillion, will destroy the currency in short order. The US can't afford to bail ANYONE out - they are too deep in debt already. Yet the political temptation to appear to "do something" is too strong - despite the fact that it's already too late. The "stimulus" is currently designed to put almost $300BN back into the pockets of the consumer in the form of tax relief - consumers that are already deep in debt. That 300BN will disappear in a couple months, as people pay their overdue credit cards, mortgage payments and utility bills, or buy houses thinking that this is "the bottom" (HAH! The "bottom" will be in 2015 or so, because all bubbles are V shaped and this one started in 1998) - and THEN WHAT?
Well, $126BN will be spent on infrastructure - great, let's do what FDR did and build, or re-build, interstates. Surely a plan that worked 70 years ago is still valid today, right? So after giving jobs to all the immigrants again (because who ELSE works with a shovel nowadays?), what's left? A few hundred billion to be spent giving cheap drugs to the elderly and other programs to win political points. Oh and NASA is going to get $2BN, so that should cover the fuel for 2 shuttle launches...
Frankly by the time enough "infrastructure" is built that the government begins to require turbines from GE for their wind farms, or technological equipment for the new "smart grid", we will all be out of a job already, burning money by the bucketful in winter in order to keep warm.
Oh and don't forget Chrysler and GM's "recovery plan" is to apparently ask the government for more money every quarter.
America still hasn't woken up and realized that this is not just another "recession". This is the breaking of the previous consumer model, and a complete dissolution of the "American way of life". We can't ALL have SUV's, we can't ALL have big screen TV's, and we can't ALL live in dream houses. Especially not when it's bought on "credit". Well America, the credit has run out.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Obama is an elected official, he is obliged to serve the will of the people of the United States.
To be isolationist about it: this is a stimulus from US taxpayers for the recovery of the US economy. Open Source knows no borders, stimulus into open source will benefit the whole world, not just the US.
To be union-minded about it: open source is a disruptive technology, it destroys established highly profitable service industries and replaces their products with free alternatives. It reduces the scale of the software economy from one that includes compensation for development, sales, marketing, investor returns and support to one that only generates significant revenue in support. In short, open source is a short-term net destroyer of jobs.
To be PAC minded about it: open source doesn't have the deep pockets of the established software industry. There are 25 closed source lobbyists in Washington D.C. for every open source one.
In summary: the American voter doesn't think beyond next week's paycheck, whether or not they can afford the next larger flat-screen TV, or to keep that 4500 sq. ft. McMansion they bought 4 years ago when the balloon payment comes due. Obama is up for re-election, and he has a mandate to make Joe the Plumber happy before November 2012. Investments in Open Source have long-term global returns that are difficult to demonstrate during a 30 second sound-bite on the nightly news. Regardless of how massive that ultimate ROI might be, it's not something that will put Barack back in office in 2012.
Sorry OSS, you are noble, just and worthy, but you've just got no chance of making it on American Idol.
to think of ways to set aside funds for small businesses; ways that would encourage them to adopt and develop open source software.
We might take the Depression era grants that went to artists to decorate many public spaces as a model. Modest grants to people who work in information technology to create freely redistributable solutions public informatics problems would have several important advantages.
(1) Such a plan maintains a domestic informatics workforce in the face of increased pressure to move jobs to low wage countries. Maintaining and increasing the skills of this workforce will make it attractive for industry to turn to it when the economy improves.
(2) Mandating interoperability with open, non-proprietary standards improves the competitiveness of the domestic IT industry, where businesses are too often driven by premature efforts to create some kind of market niche where they ar protected from competition.
(3) The grants should require that the small businesses have a plant to use the work to increase their capabilities, and particularly favor the development of new kinds of technology or application for technology.
(4) Focusing the stimulus money on small businesses allows technology bets to be spread across a greater variety of approaches; it is less likely to introduce what is in effect central planning into engineering decisions. It is also unlikely to strengthen the hand of one big player against all the others because of its skill at obtaining Federal money.
(5) Low margins and ready sweat equity will encourage greater adoption of free software.
(6) There is already a Federal mechanism for doing this; the Small Business Innovative Research grant program.
SBIR currently pays for mostly a lot of boondoggles, although even boondoggles if they are kept close enough to home can be stimulative. However, with the right requirements placed on grant applications the value created can be maximized -- important if we want to avoid the inflationary effects of stimulation. Favoring free software would mean that nearly any work done in an area results in public value. Even bad or poorly implemented systems contain lessons that can be studied and built upon; when the system is proprietary, those lessons die.
Often the problem with SBIR is that work doesn't really result in something that can be commercialized. Even if the system is good, often people can't market it. So perhaps the most politically effective way to do this is to require that if the developer does not make a commercial success of the software within a fixed period, that it be released under a free license.
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