For what it's worth, there is a lot of movement in the Federal government to open source code that is written for the government. The GSA, which is the kind of meta agency that helps other federal agencies do stuff talks a lot about this. They also have a site called <a href="https://code.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://code.gov/</a> that lists open source projects created for the Federal government. A lot of their own repositories are completely open source and they do development in the open.<p>I work on a contract for the CDC and we open sourced an older version of the software we display data on maps in: <a href="https://github.com/CDCgov/CDC-Maps" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/CDCgov/CDC-Maps</a><p>I'm working on switching our development to open so we use the same codebase that is available to everybody and adding other visualizations. It's slow going but there is movement there. I do agree it would be beneficial to fund open source projects, likely by including some requirement in contracts.<p>I think them funding projects directly with cash could cause a lot of problems though. The increase regulations that would need to be added would probably not be worth it for open source projects. People who get funding would likely need to submit a lot of documentation, there'd also probably be weird rules about non U.S. citizens etc... and laws would need to be passed.
I think one piece in federal scope would be school courseware. How many poor schools fork out for something to do forums, grades, homework submission, lesson notes. There's a ton of duplication and there's no point. Get one decent cloud implementation, host it, and scale for several million users. Then give all schools and students free access.<p>It's no-brainer infrastructure, like highways.
<i>> While some FOSS contributors are paid by their employer to contribute, most contributions to FOSS are made without direct compensation. Therefore, another option is to provide tax credits to the people who volunteer their free time to help create and maintain FOSS. A bill for such a credit has been introduced in the New York State Assembly every legislative session since 2009 but has never made it out of committee. If passed, this bill would provide a $200 tax credit for expenses related to FOSS development, which would help incentivize more individuals to contribute, likely leading to spillover benefits for the state of New York similar to those from the French procurement regulation.</i><p>It's like Hacktoberfest, but instead of a free t-shirt it's $200.00 off your tax bill. What could possibly go wrong?
I would suggest that the government does <i>not</i> directly fund existing OSS development, unless it's using said OSS and wants to buy development of a particular feature<p>I would suggest that the government reimbursed 80% of small contributions, e.g. below $300 a year per project, and matched larger contributions, e.g. up to $3000 a year per project.<p>As always, when an influx of free money is involved, cunning criminals would try to siphon it out without producing useful software. This is why I would limit such contributions to small amount per individual contributor.<p>It makes really easy for a large enough group of fans fund a popular project for free, and double their larger contributions, without the government choosing the projects. It also would still require spending money, or just effort, to donate, so donating just for kicks is limited.
Also worth considering is open source software grants for academics. This would increase the number of people in academia who are major contributors to open source projects. Added benefit would be that, as practicing software engineers, those people would be good at teaching software engineering to their students.
The government should <i>make</i> open-source software, paying developers handsomely to do so.<p>I know I live in cloud-cuckoo fantasy land here, but I know plenty of developers that would love to work on projects for the civic good, but they don't because they also want to earn good money so that they can live comfortably, raise a family easily, etc. etc. So they go and work for Facebook and Google, etc.<p>There's an inbuilt assumption that government can't or shouldn't ever compete with tech giants for salary. But look at the incredible sums of money wasted on contracts with borderline useless consulting shops. You can't tell me that money wouldn't be better spent on hiring smart developers and project managers and just <i>getting stuff done</i>.<p>I know it'll never happen, but a developer can dream. There's no actual reason why it couldn't.
How does the licensing work? According to the GPL FAQ[1] code written by government employees is public domain and can't be licensed with the GPL. I'd imagine similar restrictions would apply to other copyleft licenses.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLUSGov" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLUSGov</a>
For a non-American, it is amusing to see Americans believing that their Congress are the people's servants.<p>Unlike other developed democracies, the U.S. is a country where bribing the Congress is actually legalized, in the form of campaign donations. In fact, the main work of most congresspeople is to run after money to finance their next campaign. Therefore they will serve primarily the ones that pay them, not the ones that elect them.<p>When open source bribes politicians then they'll pay attention.
Big movement in Iceland on this. Ministry of Finance has multiple teams working in a shared codebase that is open on github, that is supposed to be a shared repository to aggregate the whole gov user experience in one place (island.is). Another example; I’m using an NLP library (Greynir) that was recently MIT licensed because of Icelandic government grants (was previously on a less liberal, but still open license).<p>See <a href="https://github.com/island-is/island.is" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/island-is/island.is</a>
The government has shown time and again that it's terrible at investing. Most people/entities are when they're spending other people's money. This would result in the same issues as all government spending does - the powerful Reps and Senators will funnel money to open source projects in their districts and to their donors. We'll see a lot of open source projects in Kentucky get funded because of McConnell. Liberal & Democrat based projects will see little funding as Republicans block their funding. It would be a mess.
This would be a very big deal in my industry - civil/environmental engineering. In the river/stream flood modeling space, the US Army Corps of Engineers' HEC-RAS program [1] is king. It's a critical part of FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program. HEC-RAS is free, but it's not open source, and USACE doesn't appear to have any plans to make it so.<p>HEC-RAS is a Windows-only GUI application. Supposedly USACE has an internal Linux version, not publicly available. HEC-RAS has a limited COM API, but it's not officially documented. I suspect that the API was exposed unintentionally. Most of the input files are text, but the format is very strange (very old-school), again with no official documentation. I spend much of my days reverse-engineering HEC-RAS file formats in order to make the process of building flood models more efficient and less error-prone. Other developers like me exist at competing civil engineering firms, working on similar reverse engineering projects and secret sauce tools for HEC-RAS.<p>If HEC-RAS was made open source, it would be a game changer. We'd be able to accomplish so much more. If the input/output files were officially documented, it would be a game changer. FEMA would benefit tremendously.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/software/hec-ras/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/software/hec-ras/</a>
This sounds good as a soundbite, but how? Knowing how federal bidding works in general I can't imagine the funds being used constructively, it would end up as some kind of popularity contest.
I don't have hard statistics to back this up, but my impression is that Congress has a habit of adding strings and restrictions on whatever they fund.<p>I would hesitate to accept that Faustian bargain.
I've been a proponent of something here for awhile. For context, currently, gov requires something like 1% of budget to go to 'small' business (where small is < 500 employees!). Doing 1% to OSS would be huge, and get around the problem of NSF/NIH/etc. having to fund novel research but largely failing at common data infra.<p>The main sticking point I struggled with here is around beltway contractors. They already largely prevent good software from making it into gov. Today, they prefer to write their own crap or live on OSS without really giving back. Most proposals I thought about here would result in beltway bandits getting the OSS contracts without doing real passthrough to the actual devs. They're the ones with the contract relationships and can tell funders their OSS value-add layer is the part needing funding to make it gov-ready. Most folks in this community are nice as individuals, but due to the lengthy & uphill nature of pushing a contract through, they've locked down the system, and it'd take a tight policy & strong org to work around them. I'm not a fan of Linux Foundation, Apache, etc. as financial stewards either, so it's tough.
This is an interesting point.<p>If congress invests in open source, it subsidizes all software development for the world.<p>If congress invests in software from companies (like MS or Amazon), it subsidizes software development for these U.S. companies to compete on the global stage.<p>I can see the first case being in the best interest of humanity, and the second case being in the best interest of the U.S.<p>What would you do?
This won't work. It will create another layer of grant writing bureaucrats that shovel the money towards their favorites and cash in on the process.<p>Corporate money already has a bad influence on software freedom. This will be worse.<p>What <i>would</i> work is UBI, so persons who are willing to live frugally for a couple of years can create software, no strings attached.
Europe is ahead of the curve here, wonder if anything they do influenced the Brookings institute to say this.<p>> This research shows that the passage of such a law in France led to as much as an 18% increase in the founding of French IT-related startups and as much as a 14% increase in the number of French workers employed in IT-related jobs.<p>Yes it did!
If anything it should be the law that all federal software should be open sourced. This is after all created with the people's money. Companies that write it get money to write it but should ultimately belong to the people. We all know its never going to happen though.
Congress should write laws which are like open source software.<p>Branches.. revisions.. being ran through a legal interpreter to ensure there are no logical errors.<p>There is a movement for plain english bills, which the average user(citizen) could read. I'm for that too.
I think we should have an National Science Foundation level federal institution for free software. Stallman advocated for this early on I think. The NSF funds fundamental research to the benefit of all (setting aside the issue of pay-walled journals...). Anyone can apply for a grant to fund research, and in fact this is how "soft money" researchers who are not tenure-track professors fund their salaries. Using the academic community as an anchor for a free software equivalent to the NSF would also solve the problem that academics have no incentive to develop or maintain software.
I've been saying that too, especially for the crypto space.<p>Everyone just has an incoherent mix of gaslighting regarding everything that went wrong, and inadequate regulation.<p>Governments can be helping contribute to industry standards, the protocols, the smart contracts that would help some industries function more seamlessly. A state-contributed escrow smart contract would basically fix the escrow industry. A backdoor in it would be laughed at hilariously within a day.<p>This would be a more collaborative role of the state and propel things forward much faster.
The federal government has ramped up that exact goal with the launch of the US Digital Service:<p><a href="https://www.usds.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://www.usds.gov/</a>
<a href="https://digital.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://digital.gov/</a>
Don't we already do this via National Science Foundation (NSF) grants? A lot of open source has come out of them. If you look at academic papers associated with the source, you'll often see NSF grant numbers.
I'm biased seeing as I'm a software engineer, but this is actually a great idea. It could provide much needed competition to expensive gov contractors creating proprietary software.
Asking for government support is really an admission of failure.<p>It is an admission that the open source concept cannot survive on it's own merit in the marketplace.<p>It is asking government to pick winners and losers by way of funding, instead of the marketplace.<p>What could possibly go wrong? Everyone knows that government lives on the cutting edge of technology and will always respond instantly to the open source community --- rather than say corporate donors and lobbyists. They would never demand things be steered in their direction.<p>As they say, be careful what you wish for --- you just might get it.
Indeed, I once did some work for the Library of Congress. Despite all of it being developed and served on Linux, I was forced to boot a Windows VM to connect to their VPN and work through it.<p>Who's the "cancer" now?
I think this would backfire. The cash cow contracts will be viciously defended, and OSS will invariably be labelled "socialist" or "communist" (at it is socialist at a fundamental level).<p>Essentially it will politicize it, probably to a degree it has not been publicly subjected to.<p>And OSS has little to no professional PR to defend it, at least in relation to the vendors that will employ armies of PR flacks.
This is the infrastructure investment I'm about!<p>I want to see Biden / Congress cutting the ribbon on a datacenter, quantum computing lab, or something.
I think I'm going to disagree with the sentiment of the article and say that congress should not be investing in opensource generically any more than they should be building cars, computers, or whatever other shared technologies we all use (except maybe to boost some really fundamental research, AKA Sematech).<p>But that isn't to say, that congress shouldn't be allocating budget to open source projects where it makes sense. Another poster pointed out the education software market, which is a good example of a case where the government is basically creating a whole industry that exists primary to service a government need. In that case there should be a strong bias to libre licensed software, even going so far as to create it if needed.<p>Blanket statements though, about all software the government uses should be free is crazy. Why can't the government actually do cost/benefit analysis and make that determination on a case by case basis and pick the tool for the job. It would be crazy to say that they should write their own internet search engine, or niche software for the two guys in the government that use $commercial_off_the_shelf_package that only runs on windows.<p>So, why not identify a few places that need change and fix those rather than these all encompassing statements. Tax filing software is another area where anyone who isn't h&r block or Intuit thinks the government should actually spend a few million and write some software, or for that matter voting software.<p>PS, in case it wasn't clear, if the government writes some software is should absolutely be opensource with a liberal license.