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Comment by tgma | Hacker News Reader

I would be much more excited in finding ways to fund public infrastructure like Amazon does Prime rather than going the other way around. If anything, academic open source which is the closest alternative has not really produced much and the production open source that actually works is by and large corporate-sponsored.

P.S. The article also opens by contrasting open source consumption and contribution. In a certain sense, as the article acknowledges later, I care much much more about government consuming free software, as a neutral platform to avoid lock-in for themselves and the taxpayer, as well as providing an open foundation for integration and letting people use free software if they choose to (and not lock them to iOS and Android, for instance.) That alone is one of the biggest ways they can contribute. The actual code contribution will come naturally if they do that.

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> That alone is one of the biggest ways they can contribute. The actual code contribution will come naturally if they do that.

The article claims that this is not happening:

> Procurement practices often make the problem worse. Contracts are typically awarded to the lowest bidder or to large, well-known IT vendors rather than those with deep Open Source expertise and a track record of contributing back. Companies that help maintain Open Source projects are often undercut by firms that give nothing in return. This creates a race to the bottom that ultimately weakens the Open Source projects governments rely on.

> The European Commission runs more than a hundred Drupal sites, France operates over a thousand Drupal sites, and Australia's government has standardized on Drupal as its national digital platform. Yet despite this widespread use, most of these institutions contribute little back to Drupal's development or maintenance.

Generally the people working on academic oss have other incentives (degree, research) and they are often on the inexperienced side.

If it was a primary function and was staffed independently of educational programs, it could work and be a great teaching tool for actual students.

Research is not carried out by the inexperienced!

Much of the actual day to day work is. Typically graduate students, so they’ll be 22-26. That’s not a critique of their intelligence or potential. Students get progressively more experienced of course, but professors aren’t writing code most of the time.

A problem with academia in general is the lack of staff positions. Post docs finish their time then it’s either leave academia or become a professor. There’s few positions for those who want to just do research as a career, rather than pushing for a professorship. This means there isn’t a stable and experienced core of people.

Academics in CS seem to write quite a lot?

Obviously slanted to certain areas (OSes and languages, rather than say word processors), relevant to research, but still.

It has not historically quite important.

Of course, it would be great to fund experienced people just to do this - and a better use of the money currently subsidising commercial R & D at the moment in many countries.

Yeah, most of it is. I got a look behind the curtain when when my son got a master's. His PI was wrote a huge Python program then left and he inherited it. The new PI is completely clueless. They all have other, more pressing things to do, instead of doing proper software engineering.

When I was at UCB in the 80's, a lot of incredible things happened (Berkeley UNIX), but they had a LOT of staff members that did a lot of the work. And that had PhD students (Bill Joy, Sam Leffler) who were insanely smart and spent most of their time doing proper engineering on their projects. And, btw, I was one of those staff members. I saw all aspects of it, because the project I was on was used by a lot of people in the CS dept.

I wasn't actually criticizing anyone. I think it's just the way it is.

Not sure why you think academic open source is the closest alternative. The article doesn't mention academia, but does explicitly name govt-run public goods like roads, fire departments, etc.

I think looking at those is much more instructive as to what govt-funded FOSS might be like.

Because we already have some government funded open source run by academics, so that is a grounded approximation of how well or poorly it could look like.

I don't know where you live, but I hope OpenSSL is not developed like the roads I drive on. That's not some grand aspiration.

I think the thing about academic open source is that the government is not "funding open source" -- they're funding research, and all the incentives and measurements and funding criteria are set up (give-or-take) to drive towards "better research". Any open source software produced is a by-product. A hypothetical "government funded open source" would hopefully have criteria and incentives that drive towards better software...

> fund public infrastructure like Amazon does Prime

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by this?

A capitalist institution, in this case Amazon, charges some basic tax for providing basic services, e.g. package delivery, that have overlap with traditionally public infrastructure, but executes at a higher quality.

One could imagine something like RedHat or a quasi-coop Apache Foundation that actually employs high-quality people and pays them to develop code and sells subscription/support.

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