It is of course one of the problems a Federal Job Guarantee would solve.
Clearly working full time on Debian is of value to society, a good use of time and clearly verifiable by committed contributions.
Definitely worth the living wage.
Clearly working full time on Debian is of value to society, a good use of time and clearly verifiable by committed contributions.
Definitely worth the living wage.
I have a rather strong emotional reaction to this because to me a major reason for FOSS is to break the problem of perverse incentives that arise in corporate -and- government work. Governments want to control their populace. The NSA, for example, has made algorithm suggestions that would give them an easier time listening in on the world. And the US has prominent figures arguing for encryption backdoors that supposedly only the "good guys" would have the keys to. Which is to say nothing of governments that outright ban encryption. So I would be very skeptical of FOSS officially maintained by a government (though I suppose its open source nature would still be a point in its favor for the transparency).
I thinks it's two different problems: maintenance and cleptocracy. For example, should the government maintain roads and bridges? It falls within the common good (public infrastructure) so using taxes for that makes sense.
But, if the government has authority over the bridges, how to stop them from performing obligatory cavity searches (or some other bad thing) on people who use them? That's not a question of what the responsibilities or objectives of a government should be. The question is how to reform a hostile, cleptocratic government.
I won't presume what context you're coming from, but I've noticed that in some cultures it's normal to think of the government as "them". For me it's "us". While someone from the former group might say "government does that", I'm inclined to say "we do that". My outlook seems to be more common in Europe than in US, I think.
For me, using the government is the most direct and efficient way of maintaining FOSS, or doing anything that should be done by "us", as opposed to by "somebody". I see that as the purpose of governments.
These FOSS projects spanning many borders makes things slightly harder, but that's just because we're not used to that kind of cooperation. In principle there's no reason multinational programmes for financing these things can't exist.
Alternatively, make it difficult for states to use non-FOSS software. That way you'd redirect all that money being wasted on closed source.
Sponsoring large research projects might go along way though.
> Governments want to control their populace.
That's a pretty broad statement :)
In my country we have free speech, and the state/government protects freedom of speech.
Similarly, my government tend to promote human rights. I think that can still be said about the US too.
No governments aren't perfect, but control is not their major concern.
There's no government layer at the level Debian operates. As pretty much everything internet based, its users ( and contributors) are international - which I think is the main reason why we don't see public alternative services to social networks, search engines, etc.
China is a special case, since they explicitly would rather keep the userbase restricted to Chinese citizens.
There are tons of federal agencies that could sponsor FOSS.
https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/
I'd love to see a program where FOSS devs could get say 2k-4k tax free per month depending on part or full time work. A billion a year would pay for just under 21k developer years or close to 42k part time devs.
Federal, state and local governments burn some large integer multiple of that amount every year on proprietary, closed source software.
probably not an integer, more likely an irrational number
But, perhaps you were joking and it's an 'irrational' amount?
I'm afraid of this part gaining significance over other and its side-effects becoming main effects.
Job Guarantee isn't as good of an idea as you'd expect: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic...
There is no magic porridge pot. Somebody has to make the stuff you want to buy, and they ain't going to waste their life making stuff for you if you're not doing anything in return. Why should they?