FOSS Development As Economic Stimulus 365
heybus writes "Economist Dean Baker, best known for calling the housing bust and warning of the ensuing economic collapse, has just published his recommendations for how to allocate President-elect Obama's estimated $800 billion economic stimulus plan. Among other things, Baker calls for juicing the economy with $2 billion worth of government spending to support the development of free and open source software. Baker's idea is similar to the New Deal federal arts and writers' projects: the government would fund projects as long as they produce freely available code. In addition to employing programmers, 'the savings [to consumers] in the United States alone could easily exceed the cost of supporting software development.'"
Open Source (Score:5, Interesting)
Open Source is the ultimate in re-usable investments in the area of computer technology.
Possible Concerns (Score:5, Interesting)
I like FOSS, I like it a lot in fact. However, I still have some concerns about this.
1) Would the overhead of allocating funds be greater than the reward? (always a question in government bullucracy)
2) How would we be sure the right people get the money, and not 'fakes'?
3) How do we make sure projects continue to be free after they stop getting government funding?
Maybe these issues have been addressed, but most people will (or should) ask these questions, about ANY government subsidization/awards.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
The Limbaughs and O'Reillys of the world... (Score:4, Interesting)
As much as I love the entire open source movement, I don't think it would ever fly, politically, in our current culture.
Right but not stimulizing (Score:1, Interesting)
As free software conquers more and more areas, funding will become an issue. I think the government will play a crucial role there; in the end, a large part of the software industry will have to be socialized.
However, free software can cause whole industries to implode (call it a positive side effect). So the net effect of funding free software is more and better software solutions for the citizens but also more unemployment and lower salaries for the software developers.
So unless you find enough freeway construction projects for unemployed software developers, free software has the potential of lowering the GDP in the short term. Also, the government generally doesn't want to compete directly with private industry. The society is gradually coming to an understanding that health care and the Internet should be government functions, but it is still a long way from accepting that software should be done by the government as well.
Re:What about Microsoft? (Score:3, Interesting)
I would say the money could be much better spent on R&D. Buying patents and opening up technology to the public to use.
FOSS projects might create... I actually don't have any idea what area they could invest in which would be useful... but opening up patents on the other hand allows both FOSS projects and commercial projects create jobs with a lot less overhead.
Let's say I open up a patent on an algorithm that's sitting idle. Now that' it's open you have people putting their own money on the line to in the hope of being the company or open source group which garners the most money. Instead of paying for the employees directly with federal grants you created an opportunity for people to create jobs from their own cash reserves. Leverage entrepeurs to kickstart the economy.
If you were really concerned about kickstarting the US economy specifically the US Government could license the patent to any US citizen whose operations and employees are local. (Ditto if you're in the UK, India, China France etc... nationalize patents and license them for free to your citizens.)
Re:What about Microsoft? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Sure, but what about Microsoft, or Adobe, or various other companies that make software? Won't this be competing directly with them? It's bad enough that they have to compete with FOSS as is, but FOSS supercharged with two billion government dollars?"
Isn't capitalism supposed to be based on a free market economy? I'm sure that the government hires Adobe and Microsoft to work on software projects they don't readily talk about, doesn't that compete with FOSS software? Seems to me corporate America is all for the free market economy except when it's not to their favor.
Re:The Limbaughs and O'Reillys of the world... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think there are a couple ways to decide which projects to fund:
1) Applications for which there is no adequate solution yet(including those that have only adequate proprietary solutions)
2) Applications that would directly benefit various government projects(including improving security of government through code transparency)
3) Specific projects that have the largest user or developer base(objective metric for measuring attractiveness of the project)
Well, they're not great, but I don't think most decisions made by government are done much better...
Re:This is a bad idea (Score:3, Interesting)
I am not telling you that all projects are the same, but you listen every time about a few successful OS projects: mozilla's thingies, linux thingies, etc, but nobody actually talks about the million of OS projects that actually DIE a painful death. And they are many: just visit SourceForge and you'll see.
Open Source is Socialism (Score:4, Interesting)
Notice how open source is supposed to work the same way as scientific research does? Both of them requires socialism economics in order to work well.
Look at scientific research for example, you pour a large amount of money into it, but you can't sell the results of your research. You can only see the impact of your research, if any, a couple of years after some companies see the commercial value of your research and decided to use it.
Look at LHC for example, is there any commercial value for investing such large amount of money for the research? No. How about research on nature and species in a certain natural ecosystem? Other than probably selling the video to few people who are interested and willing to pay, I don't see much commercial value in such research.
So then think about it, why on earth can such research still exist today? If the world is under pure capitalism, nobody is going to spend any money to support these research. Instead, you need a socialism model to support the research.
The current socialism model to support research is to gather a pool of fund from a large group of people, and distribute the resource to everyone in a centralised way. Our pool of resource may be from university, which is paid by university students or sponsored by government. Or the resource may be directly from government, which acts as a pool of fund from the taxpayers.
Hence in some way, everyone in a nation contributes a tiny fraction of money to the research institution. The results of the research would then get contributed back to the society and benefits everyone.
In fact, tax is a kind of socialism that solves problem of requiring tiny fraction of resource from huge amount of people. A country with 100% socialism is just meaning a country with 100% tax.
So compare this with open source, what's the different? If you divide the cost of development with the number of people who benefit, everyone is supposed to pay a very small amount of money.
The current difficulties of open source is that there is actually no way to collect this small amount of money from everyone, and thus open source projects usually require small number of people to donate for most of the cost, while all other people becomes freeriders.
I believe that in order for open source projects to grow in a healthy way, a socialism model for open source has to be established, and we have to have a pool of fund to support the projects. And currently, the only kind of pool of fund I can think of is from the government.
nope (Score:5, Interesting)
the savings [to consumers] in the United States alone could easily exceed the cost of supporting software development
Capitalist economics doesn't work like that. Money that consumers don't spend doesn't contribute to GDP, but money they do spend does, and GDP is the magic number (remember, we're all happier when the numbers go up).
This highlights why OSS won't be a pillar of Obama's spending spree. Microsoft sell software made by developers they pay and these developers then spend their pay on other software (say). This moves money round the economy continuously and makes the GDP look great. Paying a developer to create a free piece of software is effectively a one off payment and doesn't contribute to GDP much (it mainly increases coffee consumption), in fact all it does really is inflate government spending/borrowing.
The end result for the user is clearly better in the second case, but better for the "economy" in the first. If you want the government to choose what's better for the user at the expense of the "economy", well, I guess you'd better move to Canada or one of those other commie countries cos it won't happen in the US of A.
of course, because an ideal market has no profit (Score:3, Interesting)
In a perfectly efficient, competitive market, profit goes to zero. Obviously companies don't want that, so it's in their interest to work against the establishment of a free-market economy.
Re:"Called the housing bust" (Score:1, Interesting)
I had a pretty good idea that the housing market was going to collapse, just looking at the housing prices and the ratios, like you described. What I didn't realize was the extent to which it was being propped up by the finance industry through mortgage-backed securities and subprime loans.
For that matter, how many people outside of the finance industry even know what a mortgage-backed security is in the first place? Of course, the economists should have seen that something was fishy.
Re:What about Microsoft? (Score:3, Interesting)
By that logic, the government should stop funding cancer research by universities because it may directly compete with drug companies ?
Re:Open Source (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, is ANYTHING still useful in 80 years? Cars, buildings, roads, all that stuff wears out and becomes obsolete after a long enough time.
I use plenty of structures that are over 80 years old. I regularly use a bridge built in 1886, a railway (and associated bridges) built in 1838 (and a subway opened in 1889). It's harder to find dates for buildings, but they last hundreds of years if they are built properly and maintained. Many of them were built by private companies, but the economics of the last 50 years means no one wants to build a railway any more, but I expect the ones built by the government to still be useful in 80 years -- even if the track is useless, the clear routes through cities may well be useful.
(Admittedly, the current stone bridge was built because the previous wooden bridge (built 1729) was obsolete, and wooden bridge was built because there was too much traffic for the ferry, which was running a service at least as early as 1086, and probably a lot earlier.)
The expensive part of buildings, roads, railways, bridges etc is the construction (and land), if they're useful maintaining them isn't a problem.
sure they do (Score:5, Interesting)
Profit is market inefficiency due to lack of competition---someone selling a product for more than the marginal cost of production, which hasn't yet been exploited by an undercutting competitor, often due to difficulty of market access or strongly entrenched incumbents.
Re:Open Source (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, is ANYTHING still useful in 80 years? Cars, buildings, roads, all that stuff wears out and becomes obsolete after a long enough time.
I live in a house built in 1560. It's still very useful to me and my family. I make that about 448 years or 5.6 TIMES 80 years.
Re:Open Source (Score:3, Interesting)
With the pricing of AutoCAD today, what you spend every year on AutoCAD upgrades and new licenses you could hire a programmer to do the changes that *YOU* care about. Also, that programmer could be paid as well by other firms. So in the end everybody wins. You effectively cut out the Marketing/Sales middle men.
Re:Open Source (Score:3, Interesting)
If we're going to spend unfathomable amounts of MY money, lets have something to show for it that will still be useful in 80 years.
My preference to "paying the salaries of Open Source writers" would be a system for giving people income deductions if they contribute meaningfully to unfunded public projects (be they GPL development or be they performing free concerts in a public park).
I've written about this in more detail here [metaphrast.com].
Re:Open Source (Score:5, Interesting)
Just to play devils advocate here, in the old days, the long long ago, when you bought a big app from some development house, it was understood that you were going to customize it, and you licensed the source along with the compiled app.
27 years later, I'm supporting one of those apps, and 27 years of customization has created a monster that I dream nightly of killing (preferably, with fire). Another business unit of the same company (which I also maintain) runs the same software, but their version was customized by different people, and the two systems are wildly divergent.
Individual customizations on software are necessarily not a good thing in the long run.
Re:Open Source (Score:2, Interesting)
If turbidostato supposedly created a "new derogatory term for closed source software", what was it? I don't understand why there are such flame wars for open source vs. closed source software.
If Microsoft Word were (as a predominant example) an open source application, doesn't it stand to reason that more of the bugs would have been found and squashed? It also stands to reason that a piece of software with such a massive following would invariably become a much better product with hundreds or thousands (more) of talented programmers working to add features and such. The other beauty of it is that there generally seem to be just as many people testing changes to the code as there are coders, so bugs would be found faster and features would be solidified quicker.
So what's with the flame wars? I don't understand why so many people seem to think closed source software is so awesome. It seems to me the problem isn't with whether it's closed or open sourced, but rather the perception. I've talked to a few people who were very much attached to Microsoft products; when I mentioned anything about Linux or the software that runs on it, they got incredibly uptight for no good reason. They seemed to quickly grasp that "open source" mean NOT Microsoft, and quickly became terribly defensive about anything that went against them.
This is the "fanboy [wikipedia.org]" concept to a tee. Listen for a minute to the concept instead of thinking we're somehow bashing this way of life that you want to cling to so much.
Re:Possible Concerns (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically, the federal government would be "buying" the program from the corporation that developed it and the people would win. Eligibility would have to be determined by a broad spectrum panel of IT/CS professionals from business and academia and would be based on net benefit to the government and the citizens, taking into account whether adequate OSS projects already exist to cover that use.
A few good examples:
These are just a few examples. I'm sure there are hundreds more. A good place to start is just poll companies who can't switch to Linux on the desktops and you'll get a hit-list of programs that the OSS community has yet to develop.
With the remaining money, they should sink that into federal work study grants for CS students to work on open source software. Given that companies have a lot of overhead compared to schools and there would be no oversight for private companies or persons to spend that money appropriately - this is the best option.
Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't (Score:2, Interesting)
I would argue that both the New Deal and WW2 were very bad for the economy. As an example: From 1923 to 1929, the square feet of office space in Chicago almost doubled. From 1931 to 1950, no new office buildings were erected and no new large hotel was built in Chicago. But I guess we did kill a lot of people and destroy a lot of buildings.
So, yes, WW2 "saved" us, in the same way that a broken window saves a glazier. But what if there had been no New Deal, and no second world war? Perhaps we might have had a real economic recovery during those years...
Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't (Score:3, Interesting)
Hell, there never were any, depending on how you define mainstream. Even Mises himself, while allowed to call himself a "visiting professor" at New York University, never got paid to do so. Economists who say that governments can help business best by mostly leaving it alone tend to not get paid very much. No surprise, since the government and government-sponsored universities tend to be the major employer of economists.
Re:Open Source (Score:3, Interesting)
In the case of writing FOSS, much of this would be replacing existing software rather than creating new software projects.
At $2B investment, that would be 10000 man-years of development (if you assume that a programmer costs $200K/year including all benefits, workspace, tools, etc.).
Although I can think of many pieces of existing non-free software that could be replaced with that many resources (like Exchange), there's also some middle ground:
Then, there are some real new projects that could be tackled:
I'm just throwing some things out there that come to mind right now...I'm sure there's a bunch more.
Re:Open Source (Score:4, Interesting)
Quite true. In this sense, W. didn't cut taxes at all; he merely deferred them.
Maybe, maybe not.
On the other hand, John Maynard Keynes was right. Recessions are caused by too little spending. Right now, consumers are (on average) overextended, so cannot increase spending. Businesses see no economic returns on additional spending. So they can't increase spending. That leaves government.
Government could waste the money on warfare and bridges to nowhere. Waste is waste, and taxpayers would be paying for it for a long time. Wise governments, in these circumstances, would spend money to create assets that pay dividends long into the future. Improve infrastructure. Not just bridges and highways, but other transportation (rail), energy (R&D, conservation), communication (internet!).
The last thing the government should do is to pass permanent tax cuts. Once the economy starts going again, taxes will have to go up to pay interest on all the borrowing. If that doesn't happen, then inflation and hyperinflation are possibilities.
Re:Open Source (Score:3, Interesting)
If a bunch of non-technical bureaucrats are going to start deciding what software should be written under the auspices of this program, I foresee $2Bn dollars going down the drain.
Are there REALLY not enough universities around the country that have Comp. Science departments with unfunded (but innovative, and probably viable) research projects? I keep seeing people say "But it's the stepping stone to new stuff." Great, then instead of paying a bunch of people to rewrite Samba and OpenOffice and put proprietary software companies out of business, fund real innovative research.
As a condition of research funding, require that any software written must be licensed under the GPL or some other compatible license, and made available to the public. Seems like a mission that's right up the alley of institutions of higher learning anyway.
Re:As if the New Deal was successful, it wasn't (Score:3, Interesting)
WW2 was the New Deal on steroids. The Government quite literally quadrupled spending and took full control of the economy, even to the point of regulating wages and dictating output.
WW2 "fixed" the unemployment problem by putting millions of American men to work at gunpoint (the draft).
WW2 also enhanced the US export market by destroying the main competition, Western Europe (of course, pre-war trade was destroyed by the Depression-era global trade war).
WW2 ended "regime uncertainty" [independent.org] in the United States with the death of FDR and the realization that Communism was the enemy, and not a good potential idea for the US. Pre-war polls of businesspeople revealed that they were very worried of a fascist/communist regime coming to power in the US, which probably reduced US private investment.
Private spending did not return to pre-1929 levels until several years after WW2 was over, mind you.
FDR did one thing right - ending the contractionary "speculation busting" Fed monetary policy of 1929-1933 (through the gold clause ban and dollar devalution). Much of the rest of his efforts were anti-growth, as revealed by the recession of 1937-1938 after the initial recovery began slowly in 1933.