Open Source Infrastructure must be a publicly funded service

If it's publicly funded, it should be subject to standard public sector oversight.

I don't think open-source wants this.

Making open source publicly funded will inevitably grant governments more influence over it. Considering all the things that happened in the past decade, it's hard to trust governments to be good stewards of open source.

First of all, the xz incident should be reason to want less government involvement, not more. All publicly available evidence right now points to state actors behind the incident.

Time and time again, we've seen governments abuse technology to subvert democracy and human rights. They engage in illegal mass surveillance. They backdoor encryption standards. They hoard zero days behind our backs. They target journalists and human right advocates. They now even brazenly push for encryption bans and mandatory backdoors. All of these actions pose a serious threat to our society, and yet they're done with little to no oversight. Those responsible have faced no repercussions to date while those who exposed these things have faced retaliation.

Given our reliance on open source infrastructure, it's right that they're desperately in need of funding. However, exactly how we do that is a hard nut to crack.

While I can certainly understand why whatever organization published this wants free money to work on whatever they want to work on, the reality with all that other infrastructure they cite, bridges, roads, sea defense, is they aren't just publicly funded. They're publicly owned as well. This means the public also gets to say how they're run. The government doesn't just give unconditional money to someone who happened to build a bridge a while back and opened it to public use with no warranty (which presumably isn't even legal to do in most places).

If governments want to fund digital infrastructure, they should start projects to produce public domain digital infrastructure code. They could hire the maintainers of existing open source projects. But, it would be a new project made by government employees to produce a public good.

Open source projects generally don’t have an obligation to their users. Taking money will create that obligation.

While I share Mr. Hodgson’s concern about funding free software, I do not think that State funding is a good idea. My biggest concern is simply that the State does not have the ability to make good technical choices[0], and that its presence sucks all the air out of the room. Had the United States government decided on software funding in the 1990s, all public developers would probably be using Ada. How likely would IBM have been to fund Linux development with its investors’ dollars in the early 2000s, rather than just taking federal Ada money for a hypothetical ADA-OS 2000?

Even more frightening, if federal dollars were allocated today, we might all be stuck with Javascript for a century.

OTOH, the government does have a role to play in solving collective-action problems. Perhaps, like X11, it could focus on mechanism, not policy; perhaps free-software-development expenses could get extra, or earlier, tax deductions? Perhaps free software development could count as a charitable purpose (maybe it already does, I don’t know)?

0: Neither do private companies! Indeed, they make poor technical choices all the time. But with private companies, there is competition and at least a chance that the bad ones will fail. States are far more resistant to competition, and their failures are far more catastrophic than a corporate failure.

I think the conversation around this would be much more advanced if the Commons Clause-like non-commercial clauses were accepted as legitimate open-source approaches.

A non-commercial clause basically guarantees that corporations can't hijack OSS projects or they can't pressure the maintainers to the point of burnout.

And similarly, OSS projects who explicitly allow commercial usage could point to their licence and require financial support before fixing issues/merging PRs from interested companies.

I'd imagine some of it already is.

The issue I see is figuring out what deserves funding. Is GNU/Linux the thing that we're trying to serve? Who gets to decide what's critical to the operating system? Initially you'll see project jockeying for position, which is going to be a mess. Then you'll see consolidation around projects that can get the funding. Do people contribute to those projects more in hopes of getting paid, at the expense of others?

Honestly just having a decent list of contributors to pick from and knowing who they are personally before handing over maintainership might help.

And of course, there's always the magic word when someone wants you to provide extraordinary support for software that you made for free: "No."

The xz attacker was most probably publically funded.

The great thing about open source is that governments can make or contribute to a competitive offering and if it's good enough, it will get used. That sounds worth a try.

If people instead want the government to forcibly limit options, that would be stupid.

Open source is an interesting creature economically speaking. Being a broadly pro-market guy, when I was in college and I heard about what sounded like a communist software development model, I thought "there's no way this is going to work".

Over time it became clear that it does work to some extent. I became rather fond of FOSS and even embraced the quasi-anarcho-communist aspects of it. In some ways, we can meet each others' needs with even less bureaucracy than with a paid product, just as a paid service tends to have less bureaucracy than a government service. Broad brush, granted.

But it has an interesting relationship with the cash market, in that it does get funded sometimes, despite being non-excludable. There is also a sort of "marketplace of ideas" or perhaps an attention market, that makes certain projects more popular than others and thus get more attention from developers.

Then again, important things like xz have a tendency to fall through the cracks more than in the traditional economy. GnuPG being underfunded was another example. Price signals don't flow as clearly. Also, incentives to fund something crucial that you use aren't there if you're one of many businesses that use the software.

So this is all to say, one could take the argument against government funding in general (picking winners and losers) and apply it here. The reason we're talking about government funding is that perhaps it's better suited toward finding the weak spots like xz. My hope is that (given the alarm bells) the concentrated interests in the market will be able to come in and fill in the gaps themselves. Or, a clever funding method could still arise. My personal idea was insurance policies with stipulations on which software is used, which would give the insurance companies the incentive to find and fix the weak spots.

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Is'nt the (economic) problem of maintaining software an issue, independently of it being open source or closed?

No. As a taxpayer, my money is already going to 1230987587123 government frivolities. I don't need to be funding infrastructure for bigcorps any more than I already am.

e: To the downvoters, do you seriously believe that Tesla, Apple, MSFT, Amazon, etc require MORE government assistance?