Mental Peace? If Novell wanted to pay for their customers peace of mind, they should invest in softpat lobbying as Suse did. As a Suse customer the Novell deal would make me pretty nervous as I was irritated when they pushed for premature Ximian technology in Suse, esp. tainted technology such as Mono, the implementation of MS.NET which will likely infringe their patents. We have a look at Novell-MS and think back: Caldera/SCO. Novell, we don't know on what side they are or will be.
150 Millions for license deals? 15 millions for lobby campaigners and the problem will soon be gone, forever, on a worldwide scale.
Lobbying is the only way to stop the dangerous legal machinery. And it works pretty well as the European debate has shown.
Old Suse understood that the only solution to solve the softpat mess is lobbying support. Novell gets into dangerous deals which fire heavily back, provided they were not intended to do harm to Linux or Novell's business. I know just another SuSE developer who intents to leave the company.
Maybe we need a different copyright style system for software designs. Patent law is designed for classical big industry needs, the individual inventor is a myth. No, you cannot fix patent law to serve software industry protection demands.
Unfortunately US patent reform lobbyists go fishing red herrings. Novelty, Obviousness... That is not the way to solve the softpat mess. It is a label for a patent examination test, a dogmatic test which has nothing to do with your imagination about what you think is new or obvious. The 'person skilled in the art' is a legal fiction and does not refer to you.
The problem can be solved but don't try to be smart when there is 'prior art' in patent reform. The inconvenient truth is that there is absolute no proof in economical research that the patent system works at all. That is a economist's credibility test. Most high ranking IP economists will admit it. What we further know is that in dynamic service markets patent law causes much harm. So let's talk about scope of patent law. Let's talk about governance of the patent system. Uhh, that hurts our poor patent institutions. The first step for the USA would be the application of a technical contribution test and a reform of the utility test. Then the USA, switched to first to file, could join the European Patent Convention which would help to solve a lot of problems.
I know how to fix the system. All I need is ressources.
In fact the theory was no hoax, but an existing and published theory which professionals regarded as insignificant. That positivism. The article wasn't bad and it was not the mistake of the author. It is also nothing wrong with the fact that certain authors document their own science.
It is not only death penalty, it is hanging. In my legal tradition it is an inhonourable death penalty, as a high ranking military officer you enjoy the right of suicide or to get executed by gunshot. The judgement here is barbarian.
What's even worse about it is that the US occupation demanded the sentence earlier to the court judgement.
Character is demonstrated by how you thread your worst enemies.
The United States waged war against Iraq but did not let the Iraqi president sign a letter of capitulation. That's disrespect for international law and proper diplomatic proceedings. What will come next? Moral bombing, irregular warfare, killing of presidents, POW which don't get POW-status...
What if Canada invaded the US because of posession of bio and nuclear weapons? Oh, I forgot. Democracies don't start war... Our master democrats don't sign the international landmine treaty. International law? Forget it, abuse it. When a democracy fights a rogue state it should not assimilate. Intrestingly all rogue states call themselves democracies. Some more reflection is needed. The existance of death penalty in 21 century America is an anachronism, a sign of cultural inferiority. No need for its new protectorate to abolish death penalty. Bad pratice in a nation of public killings, many of them allied forces, more of them Iraqi citizens. The judgement will clearly make it more difficult and incite the conflict.
Sorry for my rant. It is just a matter of principle. I oppose death penalty, even when applied to one of the worst political criminals. A criminal with which the US sided in the 80ths...
What happened to Sunbird? I mean Mozilla Firefox is mature and the more you mess it up by innovation (see Netscape user interface) the more problems we get. Does Mozilla really care about the other tools as part of the family: Sunbird, KompoZer,...
It is business culture dependend. In European logistics oral statements count. Not contractual but informally. And if you sco your competitor you are out of business.
So here a Microsoft official went accidently to an investor name Baystar and said, hmm, when you invest in SCO and SCO scos Linux that would be great. And they had a man of honour, McBride for Sco. Trust is important on the market unless Microsoft decides otherwise.
One reason behind the ODF adoption is the aggressive Public Diplomacy funded by Microsoft and their continous bashing of France. France is sensitive. France always understood very well how dangerous ressource dependencies are.
Or think of the European Parliament. Who was the supporter of the freedom of software development and opposed Microsofts aggressive lobbying groups? Michel Rocard, former French prime minister.
Now, today GPL is more than the license of GNU. In fact GNU is a minor GPL project family. Look at the preamble: "We, the FSF". In most cases the GPL is used by others than GNU or the FSF. But indeed, they still treat it as their very own license.
Don't forget government procurement. What does the government pay for software licenses? Competition improves things. Announce you want to switch to Linux and watch how nice your Microsoft salesman can get. That's competition. It does not really matter what product you buy in the end. The existance of competition avoids strategic dependencies of your procurement.
If governments put 10% of their license fees into a Free software fund they could reduce their procurement costs for more than 10%. Investment in open source pays off. AOL invested in Mozilla and Microsoft paid them one billion (?) so that AOL stays with IE as their default engine.
Copying hurts the culture industry. Oh well. Whether it is positive or negative depends on your views. I don't want panem et circenses. So let the industry die! We still visit the Colosseum today, as a place where slaves were killed for the entertainment of the masses.
First of all: Microsoft does any mistake possible on the EU level. Their hired guns are unable to communicate with EU officials and lack respect for antitrust authorities. Microsoft employs miriads of radicals of all kind. Microsoft's reputation is pretty low these days.
Second: I personally believe that this is the way it should be. I am an EU citizen. Microsoft is no EU company. Their lobbyists are no EU citizens. So why do they lobby my democratic legislator or my institutions? The proper way should be submissions via the embassy and foreign lobbyists should get expelled.
Microsoft's real problem is the trap. They are trapped in a way that regardless what they do in the field of open source everyone believes it was pure propaganda. Which may well be the case.
Today more open source runs on windows than on Linux machines. Content Management means open source. Cluster computing means Linux. Webserver means Apache.
In some areas Open Source provides real advantage. Unlike its competitors Microsoft cannot run a real open source strategy. They cannot use open source for their own advantage.
And what is worse: Microsoft's policy making, its advocacy against open source, against interoperability, money for politicians, money for software patent lobbying and other dirty business provides them with nasty press coverage and they lost the support of the software elites.
What professional developer likes a company which fights for DMCA style laws and software patenting? Microsoft lost the support of developers. Its technology and progress does not excite us anymore. (Oh, I like MDX but that's very old.).Net is a nice consolidation of the former plattform but... oh well... that is not exciting. "The better Java" so to speak.
Open source values developers. Developers run open source. No marketing braggarts blur the field. That is why we love it.
Well, such a leakage of personal communication to the general public could be considered an offence under data protection laws. Our real problem today is that privacy protection is insufficient in the United States.
With the 30 September deadline imposed by the European Court of Justice for the EU to end passenger data transfers to the US rapidly approaching, Parliament adopted a report calling on the US to ensure that it offers adequate protection of European passenger data and that sufficient safeguards are in place. It is asking the Council to negotiate an interim agreement, valid until November 2007 only, with MEPs observing the negotiations.
For me it is just an example of bad bad MS EMEA communication strategy.
These microsoft pr guys or the myriads of lobbying hats like ovum they hired are real crackpots. Most of them do not understand how to communicate with European Institutions and one mistake follows the other.
Microsoft ruins its reputation among EU institutions. They ruin their corporate relations to the Commission.
Here: - They play the "we are oppressed" communication game and beg for aid. In fact the Commission did not say "We want to take action against Vista". But they asked the Commission whether Vista would also get investigated and the Commission answered "Of course, why not". MS PR sent the message to the world that the EU-Com Dg Competition would investigate VISTA! The rationale behind is that they communicate how tough the EU acted against poor Microsoft. In fact the whole story is exaggerated. Microsoft seems to look for the "strong man" or a more powerful institution that would tell DG Competition "stop, don't treat them unfair". Sorry, that won't happen. DG Competition enjoys independence here. - The story that a EU investigation could delay MS Vista release is bogus and everybody understands that who has little clue about competition policy. MS has to play according to the rules. When they breaks the rules, they will get a penalty. It is not up to DG Competition to say "Go" or "Stop". - The EU institution responsible was very diplomatic but the latest communication is observed as quite unusual by EU standards. In short the answer is that they are fed up with Ms communication strategy and MS can expect very little as it undermined trust to almost every extend. - They don't see the danger that it is viewed as EU blackmail and could seriously fire back - they got a "resolution from Eu-Parliament" was communicated by them to the press. In fact some MEPs, of low fame for instance Sharon Bowles, signed a letter. Bowles is a patent attorney and known to be Microsoft's obedient slave. An a polish MEP and two others, never heard of them.
Your are right. From a European perspective we know that US bureaucracies are very inefficient which makes their citizens think government involvement was bad in general. Intrestingly even US-politicians with libertarian propaganda waste so much public money in certain projects. Think e.g. of Reagan, the strongest Keynesianist ever, though with Libertarian agenda.
I call your approach an idealistic purity approach. The reason is that whenever say Novell, Microsoft start a dependency in X the government of X will pay public money. Government procurement accounts for a whole lot of their annual income. The governments have to reduce their very own strategic dependencies and investment in open source pays off from a procurement perspective. Think of the government of Denmark. It does not matter if they really switched to odf or OpenOffice but the mere announcement to do so ensures better conditions on the procurement front. AOL funded Mozilla and got about 1 billion from MS to continue to use the IE-Engine.
"You make the key error of assuming that small amounts of money mean little or no attempt to regulate and control."
No. Control reduction is all what it is about. I follow an ordoliberal approach which key aim is to reduce control and foster competition. Open Source software plays a key role in the reduction of control and level competition in the software market. The task of ordoliberal policy is to provide a framework which combats 'control'. There are many different means of control: govermental orders, technological , lock-ins, strategic dependencies...
I would like to see a public foundation run by trusted people with a budget around 100-200 million which funds key software infrastructure projects for strategic reasons.
And these strategic reasons are tied to the aims of ordoliberal policy: reduction of power concentration.
US-Libertarians often combat state action in an anarchocapitalist manner. Ordoliberals aim to install Ordo, i.e. a free market. In the software industry the forces of laissez-faire lead to market monopolies (winner-takes-all markets) which bear a welfare burden, power concentration etc.. Open Source software and principles lead to a more efficient ordo. Therefore the task is to fertilize open source in order to get a more efficient state of economy. These activities are tied to infrastructure related projects.
Capacity building for some key projects.
You know there are different policies of government. E.g. activities of a competition authority cannot be regarded as a 'regulation'. Usually those companies affected by competition law enforcement try some 'red tape' media strategies but no one take that serious. An 'industry policy' unit on the contrary is probably a real regulatory body and often the very same companies here plea for aid and regulation which shuts off competition.
* public authorities spent millions on their commercial counterparts
* useful non-profit substitutes run with almost no fuel.
Public procurement, e.g. say who buys EB? Public libraries!! Wikipedia is more open, more accesible,better, cheaper etc. Why not transfer 10% of what governments pay for EB to the Wikipedia foundation, so it can become even better.
Other a) * you get a National Spam Council with a large conference series and spam awareness raising programs, high level. After 2 years of research and numerous networking conferences they will present a report which includes what we know before they even started. Total costs 30 million$ * you don't get a government to donate 200 000 $ for software developments like spamassasin which are useful
b) * Governments around the world pay billions for software licenses and support * You don't get even 100 million for a national Open Source Fund
Now in the case of b) let's consider c) * A local Goverment evaluates an exisiting proprietary and a open source product * The research report which costs the taxpayer 200 000$ will present advantages and disadvantages of open source and the proprietary solution. * The government choses the proprietary solution although its more expensive. * The development of the "missing features" would cost less then 20 000$ but no public money is spent on this.
Think of key projects of our internet infrastructure which are seriously underfunded and the efficiency losses involved. We both don't want Governmental regulation and control but this is not what I talk of. We can imagine a lot of say Google SoC style action, which is all peanuts.
The cyberlibertarian approach is strange because it says: We don't want money at all. A purity strategy.
The rationale behind governmental spending here is to avoid 'strategic dependencies' which cost a whole lot of money on a longterm and the importance of internet infrastructure. It is like geostrategy. What these electronic systems like wikipedia, like wikis, like key open source tools cost is peanuts, but from a social effect perspective it is crucial to support them to get public benefit.
donations by success means: Governments should support the tools which are succesful and play a crucial strategic role for society and not waste their money by starting their own projects.
Slashdot Mirror
Mental Peace? If Novell wanted to pay for their customers peace of mind, they should invest in softpat lobbying as Suse did. As a Suse customer the Novell deal would make me pretty nervous as I was irritated when they pushed for premature Ximian technology in Suse, esp. tainted technology such as Mono, the implementation of MS .NET which will likely infringe their patents. We have a look at Novell-MS and think back: Caldera/SCO. Novell, we don't know on what side they are or will be.
150 Millions for license deals? 15 millions for lobby campaigners and the problem will soon be gone, forever, on a worldwide scale.
Lobbying is the only way to stop the dangerous legal machinery. And it works pretty well as the European debate has shown.
And by the way: Novell-MS patent deal is no defense against bad laws
What indemnification? Digital Majority features a nice clarification: Novell-MS patent deal is no defense against bad laws
Old Suse understood that the only solution to solve the softpat mess is lobbying support. Novell gets into dangerous deals which fire heavily back, provided they were not intended to do harm to Linux or Novell's business. I know just another SuSE developer who intents to leave the company.
Patents are for inventions, not for 'innovations'.
The best approach to solve the softpat problem is lobbying against them. The approach was succesful in Europe and is much cheaper than any fishy patent agreement deals.
Maybe we need a different copyright style system for software designs. Patent law is designed for classical big industry needs, the individual inventor is a myth. No, you cannot fix patent law to serve software industry protection demands.
Unfortunately US patent reform lobbyists go fishing red herrings. Novelty, Obviousness... That is not the way to solve the softpat mess. It is a label for a patent examination test, a dogmatic test which has nothing to do with your imagination about what you think is new or obvious. The 'person skilled in the art' is a legal fiction and does not refer to you.
The problem can be solved but don't try to be smart when there is 'prior art' in patent reform. The inconvenient truth is that there is absolute no proof in economical research that the patent system works at all. That is a economist's credibility test. Most high ranking IP economists will admit it. What we further know is that in dynamic service markets patent law causes much harm. So let's talk about scope of patent law. Let's talk about governance of the patent system. Uhh, that hurts our poor patent institutions. The first step for the USA would be the application of a technical contribution test and a reform of the utility test. Then the USA, switched to first to file, could join the European Patent Convention which would help to solve a lot of problems.
I know how to fix the system. All I need is ressources.
Margot Wallström is a good example. She is EU Commissioner for communication and runs a weblog. But as she fails to properly communicate with citizens, properly use her weblog. Citizens get upset plus a lot of eurosceptics use her weblog as a garbage can.
Now Margot even considers to put a ban on email and internet communication.
In fact I suppose that is the reason behind Moglen's campaign. He is not really concerned about the Novell-Ms deal.
In fact the theory was no hoax, but an existing and published theory which professionals regarded as insignificant. That positivism. The article wasn't bad and it was not the mistake of the author. It is also nothing wrong with the fact that certain authors document their own science.
Submarines belong to Encyclopedia culture
It is not only death penalty, it is hanging. In my legal tradition it is an inhonourable death penalty, as a high ranking military officer you enjoy the right of suicide or to get executed by gunshot. The judgement here is barbarian.
What's even worse about it is that the US occupation demanded the sentence earlier to the court judgement.
Character is demonstrated by how you thread your worst enemies.
The United States waged war against Iraq but did not let the Iraqi president sign a letter of capitulation. That's disrespect for international law and proper diplomatic proceedings. What will come next? Moral bombing, irregular warfare, killing of presidents, POW which don't get POW-status...
What if Canada invaded the US because of posession of bio and nuclear weapons? Oh, I forgot. Democracies don't start war... Our master democrats don't sign the international landmine treaty. International law? Forget it, abuse it. When a democracy fights a rogue state it should not assimilate. Intrestingly all rogue states call themselves democracies. Some more reflection is needed. The existance of death penalty in 21 century America is an anachronism, a sign of cultural inferiority. No need for its new protectorate to abolish death penalty. Bad pratice in a nation of public killings, many of them allied forces, more of them Iraqi citizens. The judgement will clearly make it more difficult and incite the conflict.
Sorry for my rant. It is just a matter of principle. I oppose death penalty, even when applied to one of the worst political criminals. A criminal with which the US sided in the 80ths...
What happened to Sunbird? I mean Mozilla Firefox is mature and the more you mess it up by innovation (see Netscape user interface) the more problems we get. Does Mozilla really care about the other tools as part of the family: Sunbird, KompoZer, ...
It is business culture dependend. In European logistics oral statements count. Not contractual but informally. And if you sco your competitor you are out of business.
So here a Microsoft official went accidently to an investor name Baystar and said, hmm, when you invest in SCO and SCO scos Linux that would be great. And they had a man of honour, McBride for Sco.
Trust is important on the market unless Microsoft decides otherwise.
One reason behind the ODF adoption is the aggressive Public Diplomacy funded by Microsoft and their continous bashing of France. France is sensitive. France always understood very well how dangerous ressource dependencies are.
Or think of the European Parliament. Who was the supporter of the freedom of software development and opposed Microsofts aggressive lobbying groups? Michel Rocard, former French prime minister.
I assume he missed the second draft. We can have a third and fourth draft...
Linus should have a look at the source.
GPL? Pah! GNU GPL.
Now, today GPL is more than the license of GNU. In fact GNU is a minor GPL project family. Look at the preamble: "We, the FSF". In most cases the GPL is used by others than GNU or the FSF. But indeed, they still treat it as their very own license.
Don't forget government procurement. What does the government pay for software licenses? Competition improves things. Announce you want to switch to Linux and watch how nice your Microsoft salesman can get. That's competition. It does not really matter what product you buy in the end. The existance of competition avoids strategic dependencies of your procurement.
If governments put 10% of their license fees into a Free software fund they could reduce their procurement costs for more than 10%. Investment in open source pays off. AOL invested in Mozilla and Microsoft paid them one billion (?) so that AOL stays with IE as their default engine.
Copying hurts the culture industry. Oh well. Whether it is positive or negative depends on your views. I don't want panem et circenses. So let the industry die! We still visit the Colosseum today, as a place where slaves were killed for the entertainment of the masses.
First of all: Microsoft does any mistake possible on the EU level. Their hired guns are unable to communicate with EU officials and lack respect for antitrust authorities. Microsoft employs miriads of radicals of all kind. Microsoft's reputation is pretty low these days. Second: I personally believe that this is the way it should be. I am an EU citizen. Microsoft is no EU company. Their lobbyists are no EU citizens. So why do they lobby my democratic legislator or my institutions? The proper way should be submissions via the embassy and foreign lobbyists should get expelled.
The US just lacks a strong movement against software patents.
It is no big deal to abolish Us software patents or at least put the system under pressure. But some money is needed for that task.
So was it murder? A few years ago a car with Richard Stallman was hit...
Mad Governance - the key to success.
Microsoft's real problem is the trap. They are trapped in a way that regardless what they do in the field of open source everyone believes it was pure propaganda. Which may well be the case.
.Net is a nice consolidation of the former plattform but... oh well... that is not exciting. "The better Java" so to speak.
Today more open source runs on windows than on Linux machines. Content Management means open source. Cluster computing means Linux. Webserver means Apache.
In some areas Open Source provides real advantage. Unlike its competitors Microsoft cannot run a real open source strategy. They cannot use open source for their own advantage.
And what is worse: Microsoft's policy making, its advocacy against open source, against interoperability, money for politicians, money for software patent lobbying and other dirty business provides them with nasty press coverage and they lost the support of the software elites.
What professional developer likes a company which fights for DMCA style laws and software patenting? Microsoft lost the support of developers. Its technology and progress does not excite us anymore. (Oh, I like MDX but that's very old.)
Open source values developers. Developers run open source. No marketing braggarts blur the field. That is why we love it.
Or: concentration camps as a job machine for individuals who get new opportunities on the slave labour market.
The European Parliament just discussed a similar case.
For me it is just an example of bad bad MS EMEA communication strategy.
These microsoft pr guys or the myriads of lobbying hats like ovum they hired are real crackpots. Most of them do not understand how to communicate with European Institutions and one mistake follows the other.
Microsoft ruins its reputation among EU institutions. They ruin their corporate relations to the Commission.
Here:
- They play the "we are oppressed" communication game and beg for aid. In fact the Commission did not say "We want to take action against Vista". But they asked the Commission whether Vista would also get investigated and the Commission answered "Of course, why not". MS PR sent the message to the world that the EU-Com Dg Competition would investigate VISTA! The rationale behind is that they communicate how tough the EU acted against poor Microsoft. In fact the whole story is exaggerated. Microsoft seems to look for the "strong man" or a more powerful institution that would tell DG Competition "stop, don't treat them unfair". Sorry, that won't happen. DG Competition enjoys independence here.
- The story that a EU investigation could delay MS Vista release is bogus and everybody understands that who has little clue about competition policy. MS has to play according to the rules. When they breaks the rules, they will get a penalty. It is not up to DG Competition to say "Go" or "Stop".
- The EU institution responsible was very diplomatic but the latest communication is observed as quite unusual by EU standards. In short the answer is that they are fed up with Ms communication strategy and MS can expect very little as it undermined trust to almost every extend.
- They don't see the danger that it is viewed as EU blackmail and could seriously fire back
- they got a "resolution from Eu-Parliament" was communicated by them to the press. In fact some MEPs, of low fame for instance Sharon Bowles, signed a letter. Bowles is a patent attorney and known to be Microsoft's obedient slave. An a polish MEP and two others, never heard of them.
Your are right. From a European perspective we know that US bureaucracies are very inefficient which makes their citizens think government involvement was bad in general. Intrestingly even US-politicians with libertarian propaganda waste so much public money in certain projects. Think e.g. of Reagan, the strongest Keynesianist ever, though with Libertarian agenda.
I call your approach an idealistic purity approach. The reason is that whenever say Novell, Microsoft start a dependency in X the government of X will pay public money. Government procurement accounts for a whole lot of their annual income. The governments have to reduce their very own strategic dependencies and investment in open source pays off from a procurement perspective. Think of the government of Denmark. It does not matter if they really switched to odf or OpenOffice but the mere announcement to do so ensures better conditions on the procurement front. AOL funded Mozilla and got about 1 billion from MS to continue to use the IE-Engine.
"You make the key error of assuming that small amounts of money mean little or no attempt to regulate and control."
No. Control reduction is all what it is about. I follow an ordoliberal approach which key aim is to reduce control and foster competition. Open Source software plays a key role in the reduction of control and level competition in the software market. The task of ordoliberal policy is to provide a framework which combats 'control'. There are many different means of control: govermental orders, technological , lock-ins, strategic dependencies...
I would like to see a public foundation run by trusted people with a budget around 100-200 million which funds key software infrastructure projects for strategic reasons.
And these strategic reasons are tied to the aims of ordoliberal policy: reduction of power concentration.
US-Libertarians often combat state action in an anarchocapitalist manner. Ordoliberals aim to install Ordo, i.e. a free market. In the software industry the forces of laissez-faire lead to market monopolies (winner-takes-all markets) which bear a welfare burden, power concentration etc.. Open Source software and principles lead to a more efficient ordo. Therefore the task is to fertilize open source in order to get a more efficient state of economy. These activities are tied to infrastructure related projects.
Capacity building for some key projects.
You know there are different policies of government. E.g. activities of a competition authority cannot be regarded as a 'regulation'. Usually those companies affected by competition law enforcement try some 'red tape' media strategies but no one take that serious. An 'industry policy' unit on the contrary is probably a real regulatory body and often the very same companies here plea for aid and regulation which shuts off competition.
It is an efficiency argument.
* public authorities spent millions on their commercial counterparts
* useful non-profit substitutes run with almost no fuel.
Public procurement, e.g. say who buys EB? Public libraries!! Wikipedia is more open, more accesible,better, cheaper etc. Why not transfer 10% of what governments pay for EB to the Wikipedia foundation, so it can become even better.
Other
a)
* you get a National Spam Council with a large conference series and spam awareness raising programs, high level. After 2 years of research and numerous networking conferences they will present a report which includes what we know before they even started. Total costs 30 million$
* you don't get a government to donate 200 000 $ for software developments like spamassasin which are useful
b)
* Governments around the world pay billions for software licenses and support
* You don't get even 100 million for a national Open Source Fund
Now in the case of b) let's consider c)
* A local Goverment evaluates an exisiting proprietary and a open source product
* The research report which costs the taxpayer 200 000$ will present
advantages and disadvantages of open source and the proprietary solution.
* The government choses the proprietary solution although its more expensive.
* The development of the "missing features" would cost less then 20 000$ but no
public money is spent on this.
Think of key projects of our internet infrastructure which are seriously underfunded and the efficiency losses involved. We both don't want Governmental regulation and control but this is not what I talk of. We can imagine a lot of say Google SoC style action, which is all peanuts.
The cyberlibertarian approach is strange because it says: We don't want money at all.
A purity strategy.
The rationale behind governmental spending here is to avoid 'strategic dependencies' which cost a whole lot of money on a longterm and the importance of internet infrastructure. It is like geostrategy. What these electronic systems like wikipedia, like wikis, like key open source tools cost is peanuts, but from a social effect perspective it is crucial to support them to get public benefit.
donations by success means: Governments should support the tools which are succesful and play a crucial strategic role for society and not waste their money by starting their own projects.