While I share Mr. Hodgson’s concern about funding free software, I do not think that State funding is a good idea. My biggest concern is simply that the State does not have the ability to make good technical choices[0], and that its presence sucks all the air out of the room. Had the United States government decided on software funding in the 1990s, all public developers would probably be using Ada. How likely would IBM have been to fund Linux development with its investors’ dollars in the early 2000s, rather than just taking federal Ada money for a hypothetical ADA-OS 2000?
Even more frightening, if federal dollars were allocated today, we might all be stuck with Javascript for a century.
OTOH, the government does have a role to play in solving collective-action problems. Perhaps, like X11, it could focus on mechanism, not policy; perhaps free-software-development expenses could get extra, or earlier, tax deductions? Perhaps free software development could count as a charitable purpose (maybe it already does, I don’t know)?
0: Neither do private companies! Indeed, they make poor technical choices all the time. But with private companies, there is competition and at least a chance that the bad ones will fail. States are far more resistant to competition, and their failures are far more catastrophic than a corporate failure.
to be clear: in the blog post I wasn’t remotely proposing that governments should determine the technical details of the projects to be funded. But instead the projects which empirically support public infrastructure can apply for maintenance funding.
For instance “xz is used to compress packages for these ubiquitous OSes. please can I get $$K/y for security audits and to cover my time to work on PRs”.
So you would still have the competition for the best tech to get popular and become public infra. But you would be protected against the paradox that the more successful and ubiquitous FOSS projects get, the more they are taken for granted, and the less their maintenance is funded: “I didn’t have to pay for this thing to exist in the first place; why should I start paying for its maintenance now?”
Even more frightening, if federal dollars were allocated today, we might all be stuck with Javascript for a century.
OTOH, the government does have a role to play in solving collective-action problems. Perhaps, like X11, it could focus on mechanism, not policy; perhaps free-software-development expenses could get extra, or earlier, tax deductions? Perhaps free software development could count as a charitable purpose (maybe it already does, I don’t know)?
0: Neither do private companies! Indeed, they make poor technical choices all the time. But with private companies, there is competition and at least a chance that the bad ones will fail. States are far more resistant to competition, and their failures are far more catastrophic than a corporate failure.