Governments need to start treating open source in a similar manner to academia and research. A grant based system for open source projects of measurable impact. We need to fund those developers so they can continue working on their projects without economic constraints. I concur it would contribute to significant economic growth.
I like this idea! But would that lead to something similar to academia? With lab heads spending their time grant writing and low paid programmers working on the code?
That's why MS has github. :)
Guns are more expensive than software. And don't forget that open source is communism.