Basically, the federal government would be "buying" the program from the corporation that developed it and the people would win. Eligibility would have to be determined by a broad spectrum panel of IT/CS professionals from business and academia and would be based on net benefit to the government and the citizens, taking into account whether adequate OSS projects already exist to cover that use.

Why do people always treat politics as non-issue and just assume "hey this is a nice idea let's do this" without consideration for political aspects in person selection, group responsibility, pecking order, pet ideas, lobbying, corruption, laziness, incompetence, Socialist Calculation Problem, inefficiency, irresponsibility....

This principle you describe could conceivably be used in just about any venue of life. Hey! We could make socialism work! Except not: historically and demonstrably, you can't make socialism or govt-backed FOSS work for complex political, sociological and economic reasons. Covering "why" in detail would take 20,000 times the volume of "The Road to Serfdom" by Hayek. Or more.

Yes, those people were dumb, which is why they couldn't make it work. We're not that dumb. Right?

Except it didn't really help them in 1990s to spend their way out of recession. Stimulus packages work, except those (most) that don't.

The space program, for example, has resulted in lots of useful product spin-offs, but almost nothing that could not have been discovered independently without spending billions on a manned space program

If this site: http://www.vectorsite.net/tamrc_24.html is worth anything, it didn't do even that:

"In contemporary dollars, Apollo cost $25 billion USD, and at its peak it accounted for almost one cent on every dollar of US economic output. Apollo funds similarly totaled about 20% of all US public and private research money at that time. In 1971, NASA commissioned a study that claimed the Apollo program generated a $7 USD return for every dollar spent. The impartiality of such a study was suspect, since NASA used it to justify their funding requests, and the Congressional General Accounting Office (GAO), never much of a friend to the agency, was highly critical.

There was also the question of how relevant such a statistic was even if it was true. A critic could easily observe that to justify the Apollo program only in terms of its incidental benefits and not on its own merit was to imply that it had no merit in itself. States with industries and centers that were the beneficiaries of Apollo funding, such as Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, and California, of course obtained an economic benefit from the work, but could the money have been better spent?

The US interstate highway program, another huge Federal project, also boosted the economy through government contracts, but the end result of the interstate highway system was an "infrastructure" that was directly useful to the vast majority of American citizens, and by even conservative accounting exercises paid back its investment many times over. It is difficult to identify similar long-term benefits from Apollo. The specific technologies developed for the program, such as the Saturn V booster, were more or less abandoned later. While manufacturers used the publicity hype associated with Apollo to promote "space age" products such as Velcro and Teflon, these products had been developed long before. Teflon was actually discovered, more or less by accident, in 1938, and had been used in chemical processing for the US atomic bomb project in World War II.

The only major consumer products to obviously owe their origins to the Apollo program are cordless tools. The Black & Decker company had won a contract to develop a lightweight portable drill for the Apollo program, and promptly developed and delivered it. The company thought they could leverage this effort into a commercial product, and in 1974, Black & Decker introduced a multifunction portable tool that could be configured as a drill, portable vacuum cleaner, and a hedge trimmer. The product died in the marketplace, since nobody had developed low-cost rechargeable batteries that had acceptable lifetimes. The Moon drill itself had used high-grade silver-zinc batteries that were too expensive for a consumer product. It wasn't until 1978 that General Electric was able to provide Black & Decker with rechargeable batteries that could last from five to six years, and in 1979 Black & Decker introduced the popular "Dustbuster" cordless vacuum cleaner. "

I would defend Moon program on the argument that it *made entire humanity more ambitious and feeling less constrained on this planet*, but not even on basis on producing usable technologies as side effects.

If you want FOSS to function like commie "car", support this idea. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant

Hey, Linux already resembles AK-47 in its primitive robustness. Maybe we could fuse the two somehow?

As free software conquers more and more areas, funding will become an issue. I think the government will play a crucial role there; in the end, a large part of the software industry will have to be socialized.

With all the consequences one sees (if bothers to look) found in "socialized" medicine (govt medicine is anti-socialized really), on "socialized" roads, and in total flop of everything "socialized" in former Soviet systems. You think people employed by Soviets were dumb, which is why it all collapsed? Think again.

Nope. The worst case is as it often happens with govt funding, politically connected companies get to spend it *legally* on producing ultra-expensive and poor stuff. Just look at weapons industries. To make sure even that happens, an elaborate govt control apparatus has to be developed, or else it would all be sucked out to private accounts in Bahamas and other Liechtensteins.

Hey, you were supposed to *distribute* the money to worthy submitters.

*Distribute* some to me or govt audit costing $2,000,000 will get you code from behind bars.

Have people contribute towards existing well known projects, have the existing developers judge the submissions, including assessing the quality of the code to judge who is worthy of being paid to write more.

Except:

• Why would clerks bother (let alone be capable of!) with making sure anything good done? The track record suggests smth different. Did smth artistically valuable come out of those federal grants to artists during the New Deal?

• You think current developers are incorruptible? You think that GROUP of developers as such is incorruptible? Those are very real concerns.

• Most FOSS is done to scratch the developer's itch. Whose itch would such projects scratch?

• I can already see $$$s in lobbyists eyes and empty-shell companies created overnight to scam as much money as possible out of this dense govt milk cow.

I could go on like this for a long time, and I think each of such points would be an obstacle that would be politically insurmountable to overcome.

Open Source is the ultimate in re-usable investments in the area of computer technology.

Except govt funding proposed in the article would degenerate it to Frantic Orchestration of Silly Surfing. Or Open Scam.

It would be monumental waste of money and it would be the worst PR ever for open source. This could undo FLOSS for many, many years.

Consider: right now only those who have motivation & skills to contribute, do so.

In govt-backed scheme, those who want to milk the money and produce crap, are the first and the most active (read: the most aggressive, politically connected, and successful in getting to the trough) in acquiring govt backing.

It all ends up like Ministry of Silly Walks: "Your walk is not particularly silly, is it? ... I feel with govt backing I could make it a lot more silly".

So the logical next step is to create monumental apparatus of control, verification and planning. Why, what else can government do? That eats up money, too.

There are already precedents for this. In Europe there are big "investment" programs into IT called "structural programs", planned and distributed every several years. Have you *ever*, I mean *ever* heard of or used a usable piece of software that came out of it? Most likely you never heard of it, not because money wasn't spent, but bc it never produced anything usable.

> WW2 was the New Deal on steroids.

Except it wasn't. Wages were reduced (by National Labor Board, or some such), which allowed unemployment to go down. And Federal Reserve stopped strangling the economy by keeping low money supply.

Those two critical factors dwarfed everything else in economy. Even increase in govt spending wasn't as important.

>The Government quite literally quadrupled spending

Spending on what? Weapons? That also makes a difference, as opposed to previous spending on jobless hacks to break up good pavement and lay a new one.

To produce viable weapons, *real* infrastructure has to be built. That's another difference.

To compare war spending and New Deal is a huge misunderstanding.

>>and took full control of the economy, even to the point of regulating wages and dictating output. If you want to argue WW2 pulled the US out of the Depression, then you're just saying the New Deal was too small.

Nope. It's not the size that matters, it's the actual policies. How you use it. :-)

"One of the biggest strength of the Chinese government right now is that it can leverage a massive and widespread feeling in the population that the West is treating China unfairly and more like a stupid dog than an equal nation"

People who make claims like "a hundred years of tyranny is better than one day of anarchy" deserve no better.