4 ms·

From the article: "On the other hand, regulating the production of open source software (for example, establishing an organization similar to the National Scien

From the article: "On the other hand, regulating the production of open source software (for example, establishing an organization similar to the National Science Foundation to distribute publicly-funded grants to open source software projects) undermines the main advantages of open source development. The stability afforded by regulation comes at the cost of efficiency, and in the fast-paced world of software development, this simply wouldn’t fly. Furthermore, regulation would also undermine the spirit of open source development insofar as it could result in gatekeeping that determines who can contribute and who can consume the resource." This is a really good article, but this paragraph gave me pause. If there were something like the NSF for FOSS, is the threat really "regulation," "gatekeeping," and loss of efficiency? If it were set up along the general lines of the NSF, then I understand that there would be "gatekeeping," in the sense that some group of people would be determining which projects are worthy of funding. I also know very well the way that writing grant applications can be a massively time-consuming task that might be better spent on actually doing things. But neither of those seem like show-stoppers to me. And it's really the word "regulation" that is throwing me off. Perhaps gatekeeping is regulation per se, but the author seems to be using this term in a stronger sense: particularly with the idea that an NSF for FOSS would necessarily determine "who can contribute and who can consume the resource." I'm not trying to argue that the idea is unassailable or somehow the obvious solution, I'm just not following this line of reasoning as an insuperable downside that "wouldn't fly" with the community. Particularly since the creation of such an entity would not eliminate the existence of the standard model in which people develop free software as they always have. Perhaps it's the phrase "publicly-funded" that is the key one here. The author might be specifically imagining a taxpayer-funded entity, and not a private foundation to which large tech players contribute.

t10q 8y ago
I think you have provided a very good list, but I think the list contains actual showstoppers. I know several OSS ecosystems where grants and commercial funding already destroy the original OSS spirit. You get a set of bureaucrats who control who gets to work on OSS and what is being worked on. Often they take the credit for the results. I think OSS should be result oriented: If someone can demonstrate that a piece of software he wrote is used widely, there should be a possibility of retroactive public funding. But results rarely count in the current OSS boiler room atmosphere.
- sramsay 8y ago
  > You get a set of bureaucrats who control who gets to work on OSS and what is being worked on. So I get that a grant necessarily defines some kind of who -- even if the money is given to "the project," it will ultimately boil down to a person or persons who is receiving funds to work on the project. And there's also a what, in the sense that there has to be some kind of boundary to what is being developed. But it sounds like you're thinking of scenarios in which the "what" isn't "working on OpenSSL" or "writing Git," but some more specific demand: paying someone to work on some particular feature or problem, as opposed to giving the project money and having the people on the project decide where to put their attention. Maybe there's no way around that. Maybe there's no practical way to define the "who" precisely, while leaving the "what" ambiguous.

t10q 8y ago

I think you have provided a very good list, but I think the list contains actual showstoppers. I know several OSS ecosystems where grants and commercial funding already destroy the original OSS spirit. You get a set of bureaucrats who control who gets to work on OSS and what is being worked on. Often they take the credit for the results. I think OSS should be result oriented: If someone can demonstrate that a piece of software he wrote is used widely, there should be a possibility of retroactive public funding. But results rarely count in the current OSS boiler room atmosphere.

sramsay 8y ago
> You get a set of bureaucrats who control who gets to work on OSS and what is being worked on. So I get that a grant necessarily defines some kind of who -- even if the money is given to "the project," it will ultimately boil down to a person or persons who is receiving funds to work on the project. And there's also a what, in the sense that there has to be some kind of boundary to what is being developed. But it sounds like you're thinking of scenarios in which the "what" isn't "working on OpenSSL" or "writing Git," but some more specific demand: paying someone to work on some particular feature or problem, as opposed to giving the project money and having the people on the project decide where to put their attention. Maybe there's no way around that. Maybe there's no practical way to define the "who" precisely, while leaving the "what" ambiguous.