Open source is an interesting creature economically speaking. Being a broadly pro-market guy, when I was in college and I heard about what sounded like a communist software development model, I thought "there's no way this is going to work".
Over time it became clear that it does work to some extent. I became rather fond of FOSS and even embraced the quasi-anarcho-communist aspects of it. In some ways, we can meet each others' needs with even less bureaucracy than with a paid product, just as a paid service tends to have less bureaucracy than a government service. Broad brush, granted.
But it has an interesting relationship with the cash market, in that it does get funded sometimes, despite being non-excludable. There is also a sort of "marketplace of ideas" or perhaps an attention market, that makes certain projects more popular than others and thus get more attention from developers.
Then again, important things like xz have a tendency to fall through the cracks more than in the traditional economy. GnuPG being underfunded was another example. Price signals don't flow as clearly. Also, incentives to fund something crucial that you use aren't there if you're one of many businesses that use the software.
So this is all to say, one could take the argument against government funding in general (picking winners and losers) and apply it here. The reason we're talking about government funding is that perhaps it's better suited toward finding the weak spots like xz. My hope is that (given the alarm bells) the concentrated interests in the market will be able to come in and fill in the gaps themselves. Or, a clever funding method could still arise. My personal idea was insurance policies with stipulations on which software is used, which would give the insurance companies the incentive to find and fix the weak spots.
I think of opensource more as communists using the market power mote bs the government gave private enterprise (copyroght/patent) and inadvertently used it to enforce a brutally laissez faire hypercompetitive market with perfectly known information.
Over time it became clear that it does work to some extent. I became rather fond of FOSS and even embraced the quasi-anarcho-communist aspects of it. In some ways, we can meet each others' needs with even less bureaucracy than with a paid product, just as a paid service tends to have less bureaucracy than a government service. Broad brush, granted.
But it has an interesting relationship with the cash market, in that it does get funded sometimes, despite being non-excludable. There is also a sort of "marketplace of ideas" or perhaps an attention market, that makes certain projects more popular than others and thus get more attention from developers.
Then again, important things like xz have a tendency to fall through the cracks more than in the traditional economy. GnuPG being underfunded was another example. Price signals don't flow as clearly. Also, incentives to fund something crucial that you use aren't there if you're one of many businesses that use the software.
So this is all to say, one could take the argument against government funding in general (picking winners and losers) and apply it here. The reason we're talking about government funding is that perhaps it's better suited toward finding the weak spots like xz. My hope is that (given the alarm bells) the concentrated interests in the market will be able to come in and fill in the gaps themselves. Or, a clever funding method could still arise. My personal idea was insurance policies with stipulations on which software is used, which would give the insurance companies the incentive to find and fix the weak spots.