5 ms·

But it should be regulated by a committee of people with no excellent open source histories?

by cappr 5y ago

Bromeo 5y ago
Establishing a fund is not the same as regulating the beneficiary. Compare for example with academia - universities in Europe are overwhelmingly government funded, yet they get a lot of freedom in what research they conduct.
_fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
How do you know the evaluators won't have any open source history? Usually people who evaluate this proposals will have domain knowledge.
Xylakant 5y ago
What constitutes an "excellent open source history"? People that code often don't want to be bothered by organization and financial matters, and vice-versa, community work is still often disregarded as not truly open source work. Some people did sit down, did all the leg-work of getting funding for a study, did a study, published it (open source under CC-BY) - including a plan for the setup of the fund, cost analysis, how many people to employ and their pay (btw: roughly 10% of the budget, which seems reasonable at first glance), legal analysis of three funding models (1) and then someone with a random new internet account complains about their open source history (2) and their gender (3) (1) the government can't just go throw money at people without rules. (2) they at least have a published 50 page study (3) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29683265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29683265
- jpfr 5y ago
  People with nice haircuts that produce nice looking documents and talk to the government for funding. If the money funds technology that is still great! But be very careful when a subculture becomes a platform for organizers who never did the actual work. Be it art or code or whatever. The majority of people might have the best intentions. The fear though is that we have here a nice breeding ground for sociopathic behavior in the open source space (for a narrow definition of sociopathic: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths).
  - Xylakant 5y ago
    The people behind this study are the open knowledge foundation germany - a foundation that exists since a decade, not just some random people that met and thought “oh cool, let’s rip off some government money.” The OKFN runs Jugend Hackt, the prototype fund and other projects. They’re doing actual work - the work that makes all the money come in that then gets distributed. The bookkeeping that’s required when you spend government money. You may not consider that “work”, but you’re wrong. I’d rather do five days of coding than one day of books.
    - jpfr 5y ago
      > The bookkeeping that’s required when you spend government money. Oh yeah. Acquiring government funding and the reporting for it is a big part of my day job. Coding still happens ... after midnight. The funny thing is, I might even up as a beneficiary of this. And dump 50% of the money into technical work. The rest goes to the organizational overhead needed to get the funding in the first place. But the 50% technical work have to be the focus and acknowledged as the focus. > The people behind this study are the open knowledge foundation germany - a foundation that exists since a decade, not just some random people that met and thought “oh cool, let’s rip off some government money.” Looking at the teams-page of the OKF, that's a funny bunch. 90% did not work on open source prior to taking this gig (with just one or two shining counterexamples). And now they are doing it "for the love of it"? It is okay to do open source as a normal dayjob. And teaching kids to code is important as well. I guess what pisses me off is the political class taking on roles of "thought leadership" in the "secret garden of the geeks" where entrance was once earned by hard, cold lines of code free of bugs.
      - Xylakant 5y ago
        > And dump 50% of the money into technical work. The rest goes to the organizational overhead needed to get the funding in the first place. But the 50% technical work have to be the focus and acknowledged as the focus. You acknowledge that there's a lot of work involved in handling funding for an opens source project. And yet you seem to consider the that 50% of the work worthless, despite them enabling the 50% of the technical work. All my open source work is worthless in your eyes. I'll spend my christmas days fixing a mid five digit tax mistake that the technical people made on an open source project - because that work is boring and tech work is more important - and I get to ensure that the money doesn't go to the tax authorities. But my name doesn't appear in the commit log, so I'm not a contributor. I'm not even on the github org, nor visible in another place. In your eyes, that's worthless. In your eyes, I can't do it for the love of open source since I have no substantial code contributions in the past - and that's why no one takes those 50% off your hands, so you can focus 100% on the tech stuff.

But it should be regulated by a committee of people with no excellent open source histories?

by cappr 5y ago

But it should be regulated by a committee of people with no excellent open source histories?

Establishing a fund is not the same as regulating the beneficiary. Compare for example with academia - universities in Europe are overwhelmingly government funded, yet they get a lot of freedom in what research they conduct.

_fizz_buzz_ 5y ago

How do you know the evaluators won't have any open source history? Usually people who evaluate this proposals will have domain knowledge.

Xylakant 5y ago

What constitutes an "excellent open source history"? People that code often don't want to be bothered by organization and financial matters, and vice-versa, community work is still often disregarded as not truly open source work. Some people did sit down, did all the leg-work of getting funding for a study, did a study, published it (open source under CC-BY) - including a plan for the setup of the fund, cost analysis, how many people to employ and their pay (btw: roughly 10% of the budget, which seems reasonable at first glance), legal analysis of three funding models (1) and then someone with a random new internet account complains about their open source history (2) and their gender (3) (1) the government can't just go throw money at people without rules. (2) they at least have a published 50 page study (3) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29683265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29683265

jpfr 5y ago
People with nice haircuts that produce nice looking documents and talk to the government for funding. If the money funds technology that is still great! But be very careful when a subculture becomes a platform for organizers who never did the actual work. Be it art or code or whatever. The majority of people might have the best intentions. The fear though is that we have here a nice breeding ground for sociopathic behavior in the open source space (for a narrow definition of sociopathic: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths).
- Xylakant 5y ago
  The people behind this study are the open knowledge foundation germany - a foundation that exists since a decade, not just some random people that met and thought “oh cool, let’s rip off some government money.” The OKFN runs Jugend Hackt, the prototype fund and other projects. They’re doing actual work - the work that makes all the money come in that then gets distributed. The bookkeeping that’s required when you spend government money. You may not consider that “work”, but you’re wrong. I’d rather do five days of coding than one day of books.
  - jpfr 5y ago
    > The bookkeeping that’s required when you spend government money. Oh yeah. Acquiring government funding and the reporting for it is a big part of my day job. Coding still happens ... after midnight. The funny thing is, I might even up as a beneficiary of this. And dump 50% of the money into technical work. The rest goes to the organizational overhead needed to get the funding in the first place. But the 50% technical work have to be the focus and acknowledged as the focus. > The people behind this study are the open knowledge foundation germany - a foundation that exists since a decade, not just some random people that met and thought “oh cool, let’s rip off some government money.” Looking at the teams-page of the OKF, that's a funny bunch. 90% did not work on open source prior to taking this gig (with just one or two shining counterexamples). And now they are doing it "for the love of it"? It is okay to do open source as a normal dayjob. And teaching kids to code is important as well. I guess what pisses me off is the political class taking on roles of "thought leadership" in the "secret garden of the geeks" where entrance was once earned by hard, cold lines of code free of bugs.
    - Xylakant 5y ago
      > And dump 50% of the money into technical work. The rest goes to the organizational overhead needed to get the funding in the first place. But the 50% technical work have to be the focus and acknowledged as the focus. You acknowledge that there's a lot of work involved in handling funding for an opens source project. And yet you seem to consider the that 50% of the work worthless, despite them enabling the 50% of the technical work. All my open source work is worthless in your eyes. I'll spend my christmas days fixing a mid five digit tax mistake that the technical people made on an open source project - because that work is boring and tech work is more important - and I get to ensure that the money doesn't go to the tax authorities. But my name doesn't appear in the commit log, so I'm not a contributor. I'm not even on the github org, nor visible in another place. In your eyes, that's worthless. In your eyes, I can't do it for the love of open source since I have no substantial code contributions in the past - and that's why no one takes those 50% off your hands, so you can focus 100% on the tech stuff.