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Whenever the government doles out money, the incentives are to do it in return for political favours. To counter that, various processes and institutions enforc
by barrkel 7y ago
Whenever the government doles out money, the incentives are to do it in return for political favours. To counter that, various processes and institutions enforce checks and balances and accountability. In practice, that takes the form of grant applications, tendering, and the like. That then attracts a bunch of grifters who want to effectively steal the government's money, so the grant process get longer and more complex, and things get more bureaucratic with heavy-handed checks and balances.
If a government anointed any given handful of OS organizations as preferred benefactors of donations, I'd expect grifters to infiltrate those organizations and parasitically siphon off the funds one way or another.
Incentives matter. Government incentives are to be popular, or attract the support of other people who are popular or influential. Being efficient or effective is only a small part of that. I don't know that there's a good solution to the incentive problem.
- mcny 7y ago> If a government anointed any given handful of OS organizations as preferred benefactors of donations, I'd expect grifters to infiltrate those organizations and parasitically siphon off the funds one way or another. I’d expect companies like Raytheon, Cerner, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and HPE/CSC/DXC to win a supermajority of those contracts.
- gonzo41 7y agoNo way if those companies had to OS their code. You could pump money into OS slowly by making government departments pay a royalty to the maintainers/projects they work with. Things such as Drupal, Tomcat etc.
- bdavis__ 7y agoThey probably would not even bid. Working on an OS project is fundamentally providing labor hours. Not high margin, no lock in, no investment and high profit tail on the business. It would end up going to little companies providing bodies at a low labor rate.