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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

In general (moreso focused on the EU than the Brits) I've never understood why the EU doesn't pump a billion a year, or a billion worth of dev hours a year into open source. That's an absolutely tiny, almost infitismal amount of EU budget (and even tinier for most member states their budget) and it would allow them to get out of the noose of closed source corporate support contracts and being beholden to foreign companies. Imagine how much a billion a year would accomplish spread over projects like LibreOffice, Matrix/Riot, an EU Linux distro, etc.

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Whenever the government doles out money, the incentives are to do it in return for political favours. To counter that, various processes and institutions enforce checks and balances and accountability. In practice, that takes the form of grant applications, tendering, and the like. That then attracts a bunch of grifters who want to effectively steal the government's money, so the grant process get longer and more complex, and things get more bureaucratic with heavy-handed checks and balances.

If a government anointed any given handful of OS organizations as preferred benefactors of donations, I'd expect grifters to infiltrate those organizations and parasitically siphon off the funds one way or another.

Incentives matter. Government incentives are to be popular, or attract the support of other people who are popular or influential. Being efficient or effective is only a small part of that. I don't know that there's a good solution to the incentive problem.

> If a government anointed any given handful of OS organizations as preferred benefactors of donations, I'd expect grifters to infiltrate those organizations and parasitically siphon off the funds one way or another.

I’d expect companies like Raytheon, Cerner, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and HPE/CSC/DXC to win a supermajority of those contracts.

No way if those companies had to OS their code. You could pump money into OS slowly by making government departments pay a royalty to the maintainers/projects they work with. Things such as Drupal, Tomcat etc.

They probably would not even bid. Working on an OS project is fundamentally providing labor hours. Not high margin, no lock in, no investment and high profit tail on the business. It would end up going to little companies providing bodies at a low labor rate.

Maybe because it wouldn’t solve the problem? Building a great product requires so much more than just the money needed to do it. If money was the only thing required, no startup would probably exist and everything would be built by either governments or large corporations.

Well the idea would of course be to use the budget to invest into suitable European startups. To create a market, where startups could operate and innovate.

EU already does more than that, together with funding they get in touch with FOSS developers.

Please check https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eu-fossa-2/news/how-c...

The reason the "year of the Linux desktop" hasn't happened yet and open source hasn't conquered the consumer world isn't because of the lack of money. It's because none of the projects have a goal per-se; everyone works in their corner, on their own time, mostly just scratching their own itch. Donating money to them won't solve this problem. There's also a lack of certain skill sets like user experience design, project management, branding, etc.

If the EU wants an open-source conferencing solution they have to do it in-house (whether from scratch or fork an existing solution) and treat it like a business with a clear objective and actual employees (instead of benevolent devs donating their time & effort) including positions which open source projects often deem unnecessary like UI & UX design, and so on.

It's not billions, but the EU is funding some open source software. https://hexus.net/tech/news/software/125747-14-open-source-p...

I think France is also funding/developing Matrix.

FOSSA focuses on security audits, not development per se.

There's also EU Public License (EUPL). One notable example of software that uses it is Pi-hole.

One more interesting thing I can think of is Joinup, whose idea is to share solutions between administrations in the EU: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/

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