“6) Funding for the Development of Open Software

In the same vein, the government can spend $2 billion a year to develop open source software. This money can be used to further develop and simplify open source operating systems such as Linux, as well other forms of free software. The payoffs from this spending would be enormous. Imagine that every computer buyer in the world would be able to get a computer for which the operating system was free, as was almost all the software that they would ever use.

This would surely save consumers an average of at least $200 per computer. With sales at close to 20 million a year, the savings in the United States alone could easily exceed the cost of supporting software development. Adding in the benefits (and presumably some contributions) from the rest of the world, we will be way ahead by going the route of publicly funded open software open software. The cost would be $2 billion a year. “

http://www.truthout.org/011209R

Your Drupal adopt+improve example would happen 1% of the time. The 99% case would be a mishmash of undocumented, custom ASP.NET. The code would be replete with embedded SQL queries, XSS vulnerabilities, IE-specific code, and other 2002-era problems. The application would either miss the use case by so much that it was completely useless (for the intended purpose as well as any other), or be so poorly structured that changes are practically impossible, or both.

After launch, it would be supported by Alex and Sandra, two sysadmins paid by the contractor. They would work full-time at the the government agency under a 7-figure, 5-year operational maintenance contract. It would be “released” as an obscure HTTP URL to a ZIP file, without any Web site (”it’s public”).

As an open source project, it would have zero reuse potential and zero value.

If you’ve seen government software created, you know I’m not kidding. Inventing funding constraints would cause the system to be more inventively gamed. There’s a cultural mismatch much deeper than lack of funds (and they would be even less cautious with slush funds than with their own).

That said, I do think you could pick 10 OSS luminaries and give the collective $10MM. They would allocate it in very small chunks to cover part or all of an existing OSS developer’s salary (to devote themselves to the project). Such a system would build on existing developer reputations, ability to execute, OSS distribution, and demonstrated need for the project. The results would be available to that clued Drupal contractor and everyone else. You could call it “Google Summer of Code.”

George: We can’t lock out foreigners from our open-source software? I don’t see how that makes us worse off. Remember that the U.S. government will be paying programmers to solve its problems. If the problems get solved, the U.S. taxpayer has already gotten value for the dollar.

Jim: Would we be worse off if the GIMP puts Photoshop in the shade? If so, we could greatly improve the economy by outlawing free and open source software. Nobody would be able to embed Linux; they’d have to license Windows from Microsoft or find some other commercial closed-source OS.

You can’t separate a single investment from the system that makes it. If my system for investing, for example, was to invest in only the most hyped companies, I of course would not regret my investments in Lotus, Oracle, and Google. But on the other hand, Webvan, Mamma.com, Boo.com, Enron, Pets.com, Inktomi, and even Cisco and Yahoo! at the height of the boom would not have worked out so well. Should I celebrate my winners, or should I recognize that even a crappy system will get a few hits if it makes enough investments?

And that’s what we have here, a systemic problem [2]. Our government is a system that uses force to take wealth from the best producers and managers and then either redistributes that wealth poorly (to GM, for example, or to corrupt foreign government officials), or simply destroys that wealth outright (bombs).

Therefore, I regret every dollar the government spends. No matter how well the government manages to spend the money, it can never hope to do better than private entrepreneurship and private charity. The harm is already done when the government takes, prints, or borrows the money. If anything, managing to spend the money ‘better’ might embolden politicians to try to extract more wealth and increase the scope of government power over our lives.

Also, government control always follows from accepting government money, so I sympathize with the notion that little good could come from government money going to open source software. This fact is, I believe, in large part why our country’s esteemed private universities look so much like the public ones — they’re both on the dole. Here’s an even bleaker thought experiment to highlight this point: Taking ownership of Google, Cisco, and Berkshire Hathaway would clearly be a ‘better’ investment of government money than failed corporations like GM, Chrysler, and Fannie Mae, but could you conceive of any good that would come from nationalizing these firms?

[1] It wasn’t, but I think we could still agree that companies on the free market could have invested that money more efficiently had the government not appropriated the funds out of the market in the first place and taken its cut for bureaucratic overhead.

[2] Your point that you would support government spending on certain types of infrastructure is a case of the Dictatorship Fallacy. That is, if the government did exactly and only what you want it to do, then it would be good and useful [3]. The problem is that in our current system, the only way for you to actually get the spending you want (if at all) is for other people who have different values and economic interests than yours to also get the spending they want (farm subsidies, bombing Arabs, Wall Street bailouts, etc). The real choice is deciding who should get to allocate wealth, government or the individuals who create it. Once the decision has been made to let government allocate wealth, the decision of where to spend that wealth will inevitably be decided by the political power of special interests.

[3] Given the enormous government encroachments on privacy in recent years, I’m not clear on why anyone would want the government directly operating a massive portion of the mobile internet.

Published digital content (including software) is a “public good”, which means that it makes sense to fund it via taxes. Even though we have a complex and freedom-threatening worldwide intellectual property legal system which tries to turn it into a private good, technological developments are making that legal system less effective every day, and in the end all published content will be a public good no matter what.

For more details about what I call Voted Compensation (including how to solve the “I vote to pay myself” problem), see http://www.1729.com/ip/PublicGood.html .

(1) How much money should be reserved for this fund in total?
(2) How is the money allocated among potential spenders?

Concerning (1): While you say that Open Source has proven to yield high returns, where’s your evidence? It’s hardly a law; quite many people have burned time and money to make open source components work before they figured out that a proprietary solution would have been more cost-effective (or finally found an open source solution that worked).

Also, it may yield high returns from a individual point of view (users, companies) because of lower license costs. But does it really yield high returns from a social point of view? Volunteers make no money, they don’t pay taxes, they often can’t build a successful business on open source — that is, whenever there’s no complementary good they could sell. Increasing supply of open source may also reduce the number of existing software companies, jobs, and taxes — all positive assets for a society.

Concerning (2): I’m not familiar to your university’s policies. So I’d like to ask: What happens if you have, say, $1.000.000 in total but spenders request $1.400.000 during the year? There’s still have to be a rule concerning the allocation; for example: “First comes, first serve”. What prevents the first spender to request all the money for a “useless” project — say, to develop another desktop environment that is “more like Windows”?

The later also indicates another problem: There’s no evidence that spending will be useful from a social point of view. Open Source is full of examples of re-inventations of wheels. That’s not much of a problem as long as individual burn their own time and money to do so. But governments spend public money, so they should not spend it on recreating existing wheels. Your suggestion does not seem to adress this problem.