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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

What's the problem with this, it seems like the best idea in this bill:

> "Section 5 11547.7 is for the CalCompute public cloud computing cluster. This seems like a terrible idea, there is no reason for public involvement here, also there is no stated or allocated budget. Assuming it is small, it does not much matter."

There are many solid arguments for state funding of open-source programming efforts, the only thing to look out for is that this effort doesn't follow the University of California model of 'public private partnerships' in which taxpayer funds are used to generate IP which is then exclusively licensed to private interests.

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> There are many solid arguments for state funding of open-source programming efforts

Perhaps there are solid arguments for that if your goal is to put open-source projects under the de facto control of political institutions. But for those of us who prefer for FOSS to continue on in a decentralized, mostly autonomous fashion, rather than have it be overwhelmed by rent-seekers looking for state subsidies, or be used as a pawn to advance various factions' political agendas, those arguments don't seem quite so solid.

NASA is a FOSS contributor. Got a problem with that?

Not hugely, since NASA is an organization with a very narrowly tailored scope, and it's participating in FOSS projects as a means to the end of facilitating its space-exploration mission.

FOSS is incidental to NASA's purpose;: they use and modify code, and contribute their work back upstream, but aren't engaged in software development for public consumption as a primary activity.

OTOH, I'd be extremely wary of a political organization founded for the specific purpose of funding/influencing the overall FOSS ecosystem.

That doesn't seem to be state funding of open source programming efforts though. It addresses one aspect: the cost of compute when training models. But it doesn't provide incentives for people to use it and strike out on their own, abandoning the huge paycheck that the big AI research tech company gives them.

This is a “sounds good, but devil is in the details” type situation, and the details typically don’t work out all that well because the initiative effectively assumes good intent from the ecosystem, when we have seen time and time again that there are enough hostile actors with enough creativity to spoil it.

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