If you sum up the very real value PhantomJS has delivered to very real companies over the last several years, napkin math tells me we wouldn't have the project being abandoned for being a "bloody hell" to work on.
This as opposed to open source tooling which has no such hurdles.
Just because you can download and use it on your local machine, doesn't mean you're not violating your corp policy and procedure.
Kind of defeats the whole reason to have a closed source system when you're still on the hook and charging out $500 per hour to clients.
"You've gotta be careful with those free tools though... Never know what will happen when they break. You can't get any support. Besides, we need logging and alerting too."
"Oh, $currentTool does logging and alerting?"
"Well, yes... But it's currently not working. We've got a ticket in to fix it."
That was months ago. Yesterday it broke and there was no alert. There's also still no logs.
Gotta be careful about that "open source" stuff though.
Besides, now it's some abomination wrapped inside a proprietary program that doesn't work right in the first place, only this time we're out the $x,xxx licensing costs and the entire process is opaque, with absolutely zero hope of sorting it out on our own. That's not a huge gain...
Product Manager has $X per team member. Is encouraged to coordinate purchases and pool purchases together for licenses. Licenses can be proprietary or Open Source licenses X, Y and Z.
They do it for research, which is another thing that would otherwise probably not pay for itself.
I guess if they started doing it a lot of commercial companies would complain to them about the competition.
If you poke around https://government.github.com/community you'll find a lot of government created projects but checking those organizations/ contributors will often turn up a ton of forks of popular tools. One common thing is improving security defaults or accessibility, which are tedious but mandatory for government.
If you value this, make sure to let your elected representatives know: I'm sure they hear from the major contractors regularly.
Here's a nice blog about how the UK deals with this.
https://governmenttechnology.blog.gov.uk/2016/12/15/next-ste...
As to infrastructure work, easiest way to help and still profit is to hire one or more developers that explicitly work on a set of FOSS libraries. That way you have that knowledge in-house and a connection into the community. Also, you'll have some highly motivated employees.
This is probably the reason it worked so good.
So, do we necessarily need governments for other positive externalities in the list?
Open source software is not a public good, in the economic sense. There are two criteria for being a public good: non-rivalry and non-excludability. Open-source software satisfies the first criterion (my using it doesn't prevent you from using it), but it's fairly excludable (I can prevent you from using it legally).
As developers, our instinct might tell us that it's not excludable because "if the source is there, nothing prevents me from using it", but when we're talking about goods which fall under copyright law, the legal aspect matters as well as the practicality. And in fact, open-source licenses (such as the GPL and the Apache licenses) can contain provisions which prevent people from using the licensed software under certain circumstances, while still being considered both free and open-source by the FSF and OSI respectively[0]
The real classic example of a public good is national security. Practically, there is literally no way that national security can be applied to people within a country on an individual basis, as opposed to a geographic one. For most threat models (e.g. espionage, (counter-)terrorism), the mitigations are things like "prevent terrorist attacks from happening". You can't apply the benefits of that only to people who have paid for the service - a terrorist attack either happens or it doesn't, and you can't choose who's a victim of it.
> These are a classic example used by economists of a natural place for government in the economy.
Even for things which are actually public goods, like national security, that's overstating the case greatly. Public goods are used as an example of a good for which an individual market cannot exist, but that doesn't mean that the only alternative is a government one.
The so-called "tragedy of the commons" is an appropriate (and ironic) example - despite the way that most people use the term, the town commons was actually something for which there were plenty of well-established codified rights, and these were not always negotiated or enforced by a government entity.
[0] For example, the Apache license contains a patent retaliation clause, which terminates your right to use the software in the event of a patent lawsuit. (Technically it doesn't revoke your right to the copyrighted code, but it does revoke your right to the underlying patents, which amounts to the same thing, because presumably the copyrighted code utilizes the underlying patents, or else it wouldn't be covered by the license in the first place).
I'm imagining a clause like: "this source and any modifications is irrevocably eligible for use by all, provided that its creation did not break any other laws".
Similarly, critical software intended for developers is impractical to deny to them; doing so has some serious negative effects on the production process (hard to get good feedback/PRs from customers, for example, unless you expose the source to them to a level that closed-source manufacturers find dangerous to their business model).
WRT the original commons, you can make such things work in a tight-knit community that can enforce social norms (which, by the way, would take on a lot of what are now considered "government functions" in a modern society), but in a larger capitalist economy with actors that aren't inside the community, the government is the only actor that has the authority to enforce public ownership of the commons.
You can make your software "source available", i.e., not open-source under activist definitions but still have a GitHub repo and all that, and restrict [heavy?] commercial use. I think it'd be interesting to see more open-source devs take that route and stop giving away the farm.
This will still allow people to use your stuff, developers will get familiar with the tooling and expect to be able to use it at work, and companies that have the dough can be compelled to pony up for a license.
On Windows, there is still an underappreciated market for cheap early-90s-shareware-style applications that are < $100 a pop, but I think most of them think that sharing the source means they have to enter the poor house, which is sad. We should show people that there's a way to share your source without bankrupting yourself in the meantime.
The GPL almost gets there, as it makes large-scale commercial use undesirable due to its infectious nature, which allows for dual-licensing, but with everything server-side nowadays, those stipulations are much less effective (have to go AGPL).
Not giving away something for free (as in freedom) but asking for free legal advice may sound ironic but it's not about the money, it's about having something reliable for a very common use case.
BTW, please mind the distinction between open-source software and Free Software. You don't have to like the FSF, but the distinction they recognize is important.
I don't suggest that the Linux kernel be distributed under non-commercial terms, and I agree with you that such a project wouldn't have done well.
>BTW, please mind the distinction between open-source software and Free Software. You don't have to like the FSF, but the distinction they recognize is important.
Right, so there are 3 levels of "purity" here. For the record, I didn't run afoul of any of them; I intentionally distinguished my suggestion as "source available", not "open-source".
There is "Free Software", which is software meeting Stallman's "Four Freedoms".
There is "Open Source", typically referred to as the improper noun "open-source", which activists insist refers solely to license approved by the OSI (Open Source Initiative). Because these include permissive licenses, the FSF considers them potentially non-free, and makes the point that Open Source isn't good enough; it must be Free Software.
Then there is "source available", insisted upon by the OSI people, to indicate that while you can download and modify the source, it is not distributed under copyright terms they like. This would be source distributed only for non-commercial use, for example. Jef Raskin's Archy project (apparently now dead) [0] was distributed under CC BY-NC-SA and made this distinction.
Does it have to be a market?
The regular market rules don't really apply to Open source software. A lot of viable (or even thriving) open source projects would be dismal failures as stand-alone businesses or startups. Paradoxically, the only way they can provide real value is in their current form of open source projects.
I would have given CyanogenMod as an example, but the amount of inept management at the startup there would cloud the issue.