Ask HN: Would you support government open source grants?

3 pointsby flubflub5 tahun yang lalu5 comments

I was reading about 'faker' and 'colours' and thought solo authors of widely used libraries are decoupled from the influence of their libraries.

Could common open source dependencies be a (con)federal government responsibility? The European Union does not have as large a software industry as the USA so there would be a less strong argument of government/corporate competition. It could take the form of government grants depending on the size. My rationale is that governments benefit from the general prosperity of open source more so than solo authors or small companies.

I am restricting the scope to simple and small libraries where investment is more clearly beneficial unlike Tensorflow as that is large and complex.

Here is an extreme example, the 'either' crate is a 'rayon' dependency and many others. Paradoxically a project of this size likely does not need funding but it is really important.

https://github.com/bluss/either

https://crates.io/crates/either/reverse_dependencies

With applications having so many dependencies, peculiar/'rogue' library changes are guaranteed.

5 comments

version_five5 tahun yang lalu

Government programs optimize for people willing to fill out grant applications, and always mix in government vote buying objectives with supporting actually valuable things. Look at Canadian arts funding as an example. It will turn into a waste of taxpayer money that produces things that nobody wants. I would not support it

flubflub5 tahun yang lalu

What do you think about the EU open source strategy?

version_five5 tahun yang lalu

I'm not familiar with it, I've worked with a few Canadian government "strategies" to encourage different industries or outcomes and that's what my comment was based on, I believe it is general to most government or non-market based funding.

WheelsAtLarge5 tahun yang lalu

No, there are fairer ways to finance it. Also, government will only get in the way since they have to satisfy so many constituents so there will be a huge amount of bureaucracy to keep it going.

Right now there are billionaires that are directly benefiting from the advantages of open source. It's time that they create foundations that focus on maintaining open source software and making sure that the movement continues. Or users need to pay a minimum amount at a certain point after they adopt it in a for profit venture. It doesn't have to be a large amount but it needs to be enough to keep the software up to date and free of bugs.

The Linux foundation is a good model. The foundation pays Linus Torvalds to oversee the OS's development and make sure it continues to be kept up to date.

I agree that software needs to be libre but it can't be at no cost forever. It's not maintainable. Very few people can donate their time and know-how for very long before they run out of money. At the very least, the programmers behind the software need to eat and have a place to live.

garbagecoder5 tahun yang lalu

I think most government software but especially voting should be open source for security reasons, so if that means the government is financing open source through some kind of contract vs. a grant, that's fine with me.