4 ms·

I can't upvote enough that excellent summary of the situation of software companies. One way to solve that would be to have governments support and subsidies o

by S4M 11y ago

I can't upvote enough that excellent summary of the situation of software companies. One way to solve that would be to have governments support and subsidies open source software development, but I don't see that happening in the next 5 years at the very least.

lazaroclapp 11y ago
So, it is far from a simple problem. For common infrastructure, one can argue governments could fund open source in the same way they fund highways and bridges and physical fiber optic links. But I am not so sure that model would be the best to innovate in end user applications, and I say so as someone working on publicly funded research software. There is something to be said about the market's ability to make decentralized decisions and focus on satisfying people wants[1], so a centralized software economy is also not a good solution. The problem with markets here is that strong privacy and open source are, for the most part, positive externalities. As a user, the benefit you get from having strong privacy yourself is not usually noticeably high, nor that of having access to the source, specially for a non-technical user, yet society arguably benefits from both. Usually the answer to a problem of unaccounted externalities is government regulation, but in this case, large-enough-to-matter governments have been unanimously on the side of less privacy, rather than more (as is the case of the original article). [1] Ideally, software should be designed so that it preserves privacy as much as possible while achieving its function, and is open source, and it provides all the million features and reasons people use something like Facebook, Snapchat, Youtube, etc. Just having privacy preserving software written for and by technophiles is not and can never be a complete solution.
jk563 11y ago
Not quite the same, I can appreciate, but inroads are being made with the UK Digital efforts being mostly open source. http://blog.quickpeople.co.uk/2013/05/17/the-uk-government-pays-me-to-write-open-source-all-day/ http://blog.quickpeople.co.uk/2013/05/17/the-uk-government-p...
krylon 11y ago
For individual projects, it has already happened. BSD development, for example, was sponsored by DARPA in the 1980s. The German government supported the GnuPG project for a while. I am certain there are more examples - but you are right in that it has not been done systematically. (Which does not invalidate your point one way or the other.)

by S4M 11y ago

lazaroclapp 11y ago

So, it is far from a simple problem. For common infrastructure, one can argue governments could fund open source in the same way they fund highways and bridges and physical fiber optic links. But I am not so sure that model would be the best to innovate in end user applications, and I say so as someone working on publicly funded research software. There is something to be said about the market's ability to make decentralized decisions and focus on satisfying people wants[1], so a centralized software economy is also not a good solution. The problem with markets here is that strong privacy and open source are, for the most part, positive externalities. As a user, the benefit you get from having strong privacy yourself is not usually noticeably high, nor that of having access to the source, specially for a non-technical user, yet society arguably benefits from both. Usually the answer to a problem of unaccounted externalities is government regulation, but in this case, large-enough-to-matter governments have been unanimously on the side of less privacy, rather than more (as is the case of the original article). [1] Ideally, software should be designed so that it preserves privacy as much as possible while achieving its function, and is open source, and it provides all the million features and reasons people use something like Facebook, Snapchat, Youtube, etc. Just having privacy preserving software written for and by technophiles is not and can never be a complete solution.

jk563 11y ago

Not quite the same, I can appreciate, but inroads are being made with the UK Digital efforts being mostly open source. http://blog.quickpeople.co.uk/2013/05/17/the-uk-government-pays-me-to-write-open-source-all-day/ http://blog.quickpeople.co.uk/2013/05/17/the-uk-government-p...

krylon 11y ago

For individual projects, it has already happened. BSD development, for example, was sponsored by DARPA in the 1980s. The German government supported the GnuPG project for a while. I am certain there are more examples - but you are right in that it has not been done systematically. (Which does not invalidate your point one way or the other.)