I've been a proponent of something here for awhile. For context, currently, gov requires something like 1% of budget to go to 'small' business (where small is <

I've been a proponent of something here for awhile. For context, currently, gov requires something like 1% of budget to go to 'small' business (where small is < 500 employees!). Doing 1% to OSS would be huge, and get around the problem of NSF/NIH/etc. having to fund novel research but largely failing at common data infra. The main sticking point I struggled with here is around beltway contractors. They already largely prevent good software from making it into gov. Today, they prefer to write their own crap or live on OSS without really giving back. Most proposals I thought about here would result in beltway bandits getting the OSS contracts without doing real passthrough to the actual devs. They're the ones with the contract relationships and can tell funders their OSS value-add layer is the part needing funding to make it gov-ready. Most folks in this community are nice as individuals, but due to the lengthy & uphill nature of pushing a contract through, they've locked down the system, and it'd take a tight policy & strong org to work around them. I'm not a fan of Linux Foundation, Apache, etc. as financial stewards either, so it's tough.