Comment by fads_go | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fads_go | Hacker News Reader

agree with Svilen_Dobrev, that this could be solved by making certain types of software public infrastructure.

The article says that the main conflict is part one of the OSS license, "The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component… [and] shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale." Which makes it very hard to sell OSS software (read the article for nuance).

Business cannot do this because the business needs to capture the value (ie. through sales) in order to fund creating the value (the software).

A government, however, would not have this restriction, because they don't need to sell it to capture the value the software creates.

This is, in fact, what government is best at doing and where business fails. Business is great when value capture is linked with value creation, think hamburger stand (the value is the burger, and the customer trades money for burger).

Goverment is optimized for when value creation is separate from value capture. Svilven mentions roads. The burger stand couldn't create or sell the burger without roads to freight in raw materials and customers, but only a fraction of the value of the road network is in the burger. Because the road also supplies value to a number of other enterprises.

So the best way to capture the value of the road is via a similarly diffusive system, i.e. a tax. Government.

And for certain fundamental types of software systems, i.e. web browsers, search engines, messaging services, perhaps a government can build them better than a company. Certainly the economic incentives align better.

OSS externalizes costs; it's people working for free for whatever reasons that motivates them at the time.

OSS provides value (let's say, large) uncorrelated to a large extent with those externalized costs (often almost zero). The multiple is enormous.

Commercial software companies capture that value, because they can; they're not stupid.

But, Commercial software companies also create an undeniable value above the captured value - they provide support, security, documentation, even familiarity, a "throat to choke", etc. The captured value, often at zero initial cost, is the margin.

There is no change that can be made to any OSS license that will change that dynamic. Unless it's not OSS anymore.

Governments can do very little; most OSS developers, as cost, will not work, for free, for a government. Maybe the patriots will, but not many others - so that idea will go nowhere unless the developers are government employees. That has its own issues, not all of which are necessarily bad.

Government sponsored software infrastructure will probably not be as good as the OSS projects, or the Commercial products we use today. That's certainly not a given, but overlay it all with leadership, administration and bureaucracy, and you're probably on a hiding to nothing. Governments have little vision beyond the next election cycle.

Software isn't the same as roads. A citizen knows what a road is; they see it, they use it directly, and also see its obvious value for many other purposes - they intuitively understand why they're paying, and for what they're paying. A citizen doesn't easily see the value of some OSS project embedded in the operations of their government - they see the chair and couldn't care less about the lumber. (I'll grant that taxes paid to a general fund might work.)

That's also often the view of people and organizations that buy commercial products based on OSS software. They care about the chair, not the tree, or the process that turned the tree into the chair.

OSS should, and probably will, always exist. People like doing things. It gives them pleasure. But, we can't really mix the open with the closed by screwing around with licenses. It's open or it's closed.

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