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Comment by koheripbal | Hacker News Reader

I assume military R&D would be a big exception?

It's the other way around -- academic R&D is just about the only type of government spending for which there's wide-spread support for openness and a lack of entrenched power against openness.

The USG spent $6B on cloud computing in 2020. That number is increasing quickly. To say nothing of the massive quantities of non-OSS software that the government buys and incorporates into is own business-critical processes. And it's not just government licenses, but also anyone who interacts with the government. E.g., try interacting with any government agency without an Office 365 license.

You get really funny looks if you say that MSFT should have to give away Office 365 for free if the government is going to use it for anything.

But total USG spend on closed-source software has to be well into the 30B-50B range conservatively. For reference, the entire NSF budget is $10B.

The main reason for this is that there are many monied and powerful stakeholders who benefit from selling closed software to USG, whereas the academic publishers a tiny, often not even American-owned, and got super greedy and screwed their natural contingency (academics hate them as much as or more than anyone else).

There's a difference between the government paying to use software and paying for it to be developed.

I'm not sure the difference is as cut and dry as you're making it out to be. A big organization doesn't just pay Microsoft a zillion dollars for a million Office licenses and then never talk to them again. There's an ongoing support relationship, which for large enough customers might include things like developing features on request.

Most of what the big contractors like Booz do is custom software. Every single cloud provider has an entire GovCloud division. Even Office has special Government licensing that behaves differently on the backend.

I think part of the point here, is that the value from that investment should go to the investors, who are (if you buy the 'by the people, for the people' hype) the taxpayers.

Say I'm vulture capitalist Tom, and I pay a few gajillion dollars to developer Gupta to create a product for me. I would be understandably pissed if Gupta turned around and sold that same product to competitor vc Janet. She didn't pay for that dev work, I did.

1. There isn't as much of a difference here as you think. Contractors do turn around and use components developed in public contracts for other consulting projects. Most commonly with other sovereigns, especially when the original contract was with a city or state, but sometimes at the national level as well.

2. With respect to R&D, one big difference is that the government doesn't provide seed funding. They provide grants. If the government wanted equity in research labs, they'd have to pay a lot more. You'll see this in practice if you ever have the extreme displeasure of doing non-useless research in academia. Companies that insist on IP ownership/sharing end up paying much higher premiums for university research contracts. Repealing Bayh-Dole would have no effect on the accessibility of actually useful research; universities and companies would privately fund the useful stuff and leave the government to fund the labs of politically-connected/twitter-famous but otherwise totally useless academics.

(To be clear: we're on the same side here with respect to open access publications.)

Thanks for the well informed response! I had not yet heard of Bayh-Dole and you gave me some good googlin'.

In regards to your explanation in [2], that sucks - I kinda figured that's how things were but I sorta went around academia rather than through it so it's interesting to hear. Any hot ideas about how it could be fixed?

> Any hot ideas about how it could be fixed?

For Computer Science:

1. replace the current academic funding model with pure fellowships. Each individual, from most junior to most senior, gets their own N year funding.

2. Each has a legal entity under which their IP lives and in which the government takes a small, fair, non-voting share.

3. Completely divorce this funding infrastructure from universities -- if someone wants to use part of their grant to pay for PhD courses/advising, great, but make it so that funding science is not contingent on that institutional apparatus.

For lab sciences things are more complicated.

The other difference is if you had to open source anything sold to the USG then no one would sell anything closed source to the USG.

And there's lots of useful software the government wants to buy that is closed source.

Useful to who, and for what?

The usg, for whatever that piece of software says on the tin. Unless you are just asking if there is any closed source software anywhere which provides value not totally replicable using oss, which seems like a silly question.

I don't think military R&D produces many academic papers, but anything going in a journal a foreign national can just buy should probably also be made available to the tax payer.

It does!

DARPA is probably the best-known route and funds a lot of academic and corporate research (including, for a while, me).

The DoD also has a bunch of other grant-making programs (Office of Naval Research, Congressionally-directed Medical Research Program, etc) and also labs that directly do research themselves. The Air Force has a big research center (AFRL) in Ohio; the army has one in Maryland (ARL), and the Navy has one in DC (NRL). There are loads of other sites as well: the army has a night vision research lab in New Jersey, for example, and the Navy has some marine mammal stuff on the West Coast.

A lot of this work--even the stuff done at DoD labs--winds up in open literature. By policy all of that is supposed to be publicly available, so you can browse it here https://discover.dtic.mil/products-services/.

I'm not referring to military funded research, I'm referring to military R&D as an academic discipline, in the same way one would refer to something like medical research.

> I don't think military R&D produces many academic papers

Do you mean researchers employed by the military? Otherwise, basically half of every STEM professor I encountered had funding via some branch of the military.

I mean military as an academic field. The stuff that people might conceivably be worried about making publicly available and thus want exempted.

The US military funds a lot of basic and applied research that is openly published. DARPA is one agency that does this.

But separately there is classified research that isn't published.

I am referring military R&D as an academic topic, not a funding source. So the classified stuff.

I don't understand the distinction you are making.

Take a new program like "FELIX" - simplifying ways of checking for bioengineered threats.

IARPA funds that, and the research funded through that program can be found here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C47&q=N66...

From the look of it they funded 9 companies and institutions to do the research and their poster presentations can be found at the bottom of [1].

[1] https://www.iarpa.gov/research-programs/felix

"public access to federally funded research results and data should be maximized in a manner that protects confidentiality, privacy, business confidential information, and security, avoids negative impact on intellectual property rights, innovation, program and operational improvements, and U.S. competitiveness, and preserves the balance between the relative value of long-term preservation and access and the associated cost and administrative burden"

It would have to be. It's simply part of it being military, state secrets, etc.

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