Kelsey Hightower: If governments rely on FOSS, they should fund it

Acclaimed engineer Kelsey Hightower, who stopped coding for money in 2023, remains an influential figure in the world of software, and he's proposing something that might stir up the open source community. Funding open source is an ongoing hot topic. During a chat at Civo's recent Navigate event, Hightower joked with us how …

[Anonymous Coward]

Or less gov is better

Governments spending means taxpayers paying. And multiple examples here show bureaucracy is not particular good redistributing money. Most will be spent on themselves and comfy seats.

One alternative is tax credits for businesses, which know what they need. The problem is not trivial, indeed.

[Snake]

Re: Or less gov is better

"One alternative is tax credits for businesses"

Ah, you mean the same businesses that have politicians in their back pockets thanks to both lobbyists *and* PAC's? You mean, tax credits from those politicians?

What could possibly go wrong??

[NoneSuch]

Re: Or less gov is better

If you have a home lab and are using FOSS for personal non-profit use, then zero cost.

Charities and non-profits, zero cost.

Business that use FOSS to make $$$$ should pay for that. It will be a damned sight cheaper than in-house dev teams. Would need to scale to the usage of Open Source within the business.

Governments should not pay for using FOSS, but should get their asses in gear to get legislation in place to protect creators of Open Source solutions from predatory IP legal suits, software patents (seriously, get rid of them) and over-expansive patents that limit creativity. Tax breaks for those that use FOSS, is a good idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Business that use FOSS to make $$$$ should pay

Great idea!

There is a huge regulatory obstacle though - income taxes. Fixing *this* would be *real* help from the governments.

Real case: I am a maintainer of a smaller but important FOSS project. My country's tax code does not allow earning money from individual activity without registering a company, and immediately demands paying huge social security contributions even if it earns a few cents a year! There is no way to reasonably earn money with Patreon or AdSense without facing legal issues. So, if not for the tax issues, I would contribute much more, and would be actually motivated, rather than discouraged.

A separate income tax category should be introduced: FOSS contributions, because they are easily traceable unlike other non-profit activities. Businesses would pay license fees, and blockchain could be used to redistribute the money to individual contributor's. This can stimulate contributions to FOSS as nothing else, since expertise is scarce and quite expensive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Or less gov is better

the alternative isn't that governments don't spend money on software — because governments already spend money on software, they spend it on proprietary software vendors and cloud services. and the relationship between governments and a corporation like Microsoft is already pretty crappy in terms of what value you get for spend, and what corporations spend on lobbying and lock-in to keep their contracts.

in light of that, if you want less government bloat, spending it on smaller organisations with an open codebase and development process makes more sense than relying on closed shops, which is what a lot of governments do anyway, especially for corporations like Microsoft and Oracle.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Or less gov is better

> Governments spending means taxpayers paying

If the availability of open source stopped and Gov departments had to switch to licensed alternatives then the cost to the tax payer will be far more.

A bit of big-picture modelling to determine the cost-benefit ratio wouldn't be hard to do in support of the idea.

[Richard 12]

Re: Or less gov is better

The underying problem is that of horizons.

Over the last decade or so, both business and political planning has become radically short term. We see them both regularly doing things that are damaging and expensive a mere twelve months down the line, but create a brief bump in profit or political capital next week.

How do we get them to think more than five years ahead?

[ThatOne]

Re: Or less gov is better

> One alternative is tax credits for businesses

Another alternative, just as commonly seen, is to take from the poor and give to the rich. They deserve it, don't they.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Or less gov is better

Those who rail about "more government" are usually opposed to _effective_ government and are quite happy to grow things to suit their cronies

It's always worth noting under whose watch things grow and shrink vs the value/money of what's delivered

One thing to bear in mind is that anything "done by private industry" is secondary to "maximising profits"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Or less gov is better

People at the top will always be worse at allocating resources than those close to the problems. Of course, those who are *really* close to the problems can't allocate money either—that'd be a conflict of interest.

You're right. Letting orgs make contributions for self-interested reasons will be more efficient. But is it more stable? I think there are tradeoffs everywhere, and I don't know enough to have an opinion.

[nijam]

Re: Or less gov is better

> Governments spending means taxpayers paying.

Tax credits means taxpayers paying.

[Dan 55]

German Sovereign Tech Fund

The German government already does what he's proposing. It's already supported Samba, OpenSSH, FreeBSD, and Gnome.

[Richard 12]

Re: German Sovereign Tech Fund

Yes indeed, and it works reasonably well.

We need more governments to do similar things.

There is always the risk of "picking winners", but FOSS has much smaller risks because the amounts of money are very small, and the results visible - and usable - by everyone.

[ThatOne]

Freddy

> If governments rely on FOSS, they should fund it

Yes, we all saw how well the shareware system went: Unfortunately the majority of individuals are freeloaders and governments are made up of individuals, so don't expect any surprises there...

[Alan Brown]

Re: Freddy

One of the big problems with shareware back in the day (80s and 90s) was the sheer impracticality of sending small payments internationally - quite often the fees for getting a USD cheque drawn up would be significantly more than the actual payment (as one example)

[Ian Johnston]

What responsibilities - legal and moral - to open source developers have to those who fund them?

[doublelayer]

Legal: none, unless they signed a specific contract in exchange for the funding. If it's just a donation, none at all.

Moral: In my opinion, spending their donations on something related to the project, meaning that if the developer spends it, they continue to work on the project at least a bit more. That's what I have done, anyway, trying to respect the fact that the donation was received not as a gift, but as support for something. But moral requirements will only ever be an opinion and everyone will have different ones.

It is important not to take a moral opinion and make it a legal requirement. It is why I disagree with people trying to mandate payment for open source, and it is also why I disagree with people trying to force developers of open source to do certain things. A good developer will fix a lot of bugs just because they are bugs, but that doesn't mean that they are now responsible for fixing any bug a user finds. A company can get their changes done faster by a) paying the existing programmers to do it, b) paying one of their employees to do it and upstreaming the code, or c) having some kind of bounty for whoever adds this thing. If they don't think it's going to happen already, they should do one of those things, and if they choose option A which is one of the fastest ways to do it, the programmers can and probably should add some extra maintenance cost to the cost charged.

[Anonymous Coward]

110%

Bona fide UK Civil Servant here, prior to that a contractor in such places, and long-time advocate of F/LOSS adoption.

Could not agree more. But progress makes a snail-vs-glacier race look like Formula One.

Say 10-15 years ago the situation was very different, endless bureaucratic obstacles in the way. Now we at least have an open license that we can release Crown Copyright materials under, and we have Big Cheeses prepared to support Apache, MediaWiki and the like. But we are still not allowed to release that copyright to an independent project. We now have two potential ways to contribute back:

1. Help out in our spare time.

2. Contract out the work, so the supplier donates the copyright.

Of course, our own time is a drop in the ocean and we are already grossly overworked. It's a bad joke.

Contracts generally have to go to an approved supplier on a cost-competitive basis. So they pump up the smallprint to lower the launch cost, and of course proprietary licensing is the lock and key to the bean hopper. We may even find our own management processes defined under their copyright, never mind the collaborative cloudy hell. They are skilled at gaslighting Contracts droids who do not understand Open Source, leaving the poor project manager and business lead livid. Small fry willing to do it right cannot afford the heavyweight political-correctness overheads which encumber all public service contracts (except handing out defective Covid masks)

I see the way ahead as threefold:

a) Reducing the PC demands on the supplier, especially over things like rubber stamps for approved in-house micromanagement and three centuries of audited accounts.

b) Offering the work to Big Edam, who is desperate to break into a market dominated by Big Cheesecake.

c) Get a law passed to allow Government Departments to release Crown Copyrights to second parties.

Come back here in another ten years....

[Anonymous Coward]

But we are still not allowed to release that copyright to an independent project.

That is a pity. I expect there is a ton of curated data there to feed into your own localhost AI

[Alan Brown]

Re: 110%

"They are skilled at gaslighting Contracts droids who do not understand Open Source"

Which is a strong indicator that those droids need a serious case of reducation (or at least being sent on some courses)

Unfortunately that will never happen

I've seen the same thing happening to procurement contracts too. The knowledgable guy retires - documentinhg everything. New hire dumps everything and starts over, resulting in costs tripling

[elsergiovolador]

Funding

UK is great when it comes to that thanks to large network of food banks that open source developers can use.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Funding

probably not even joking here ^^

[mpi]

Sure, but I have a question:

If governments pay for FOSS projects: What's going to prevent them from using the, then existing, leverage to influence FOSS projects?

[doublelayer]

Re: Sure, but I have a question:

Probably nothing prevents them. I'm not sure which direction they would try to influence the software in. I could see them trying something bad if, for example, Signal received funding as an open source program. That could be a challenge if this was a general FOSS fund for anything considered open source, but such a general fund seems incredibly unlikely and, if it happened, there are lots of other problems that would probably come up first. If it's specifically for software which the government uses, then there's less of a risk. If government gets its database bugs fixed faster than someone else, that's not a major concern as those bugs likely affect lots of other people anyway. Everywhere in the government that relies on open source cryptographic software also knows why you can't put a back door in it, so I'm not sure politicians will be any more dangerous when funding it than they can be on their own.

[steelpillow]

Re: Sure, but I have a question:

Good question worth asking. Teh answer is: most likely, good things will happen.

Big companies, with finances bigger than some countries, already dominate contributions to many FOSS projects. Other vital but low-profile projects are left gasping for air. Leavening all that with some Public Service goodies, actually aimed at helping out JJ Citizen and not just the sponsor's business plan, can do nothing but good.

Secret backdoors/spywarez? Well, we've seen enough malware/totalitarian shithouses trying that on; the price of freedom is already a Thousand Eyes, and govs will just luurve pulling each other's black shite out of the codebase. So really, no change there worth a damn.

[Ace2]

Funding open source would be, by definition, giving taxpayer (of a given district) dollars to non-taxpayers. It would not be very long at all before the “less government!” and “waste, fraud, & abuse!” crowd would show up to hound the politicians in question out of their offices.

[Dan 55]

So why hasn't that already happened in Germany?

[Ace2]

Because the German public and the American public is very different. Duh.

[RAMChYLD]

Government Funding

But some of the biggest FOSS Projects do get government funding tho. GCC at least gets funding from DARPA and the US Military for maintaining the ADA compiler. NASA also funds a number of large projects.

[Jim Whitaker]

King Log or King Stork?

If they fund it, they own it. Do you really want that? Be careful what you wish for.

[Alan Brown]

Re: King Log or King Stork?

They may "own" it but being FOSS, forking is the norm when things go pear shaped

[Richard 12]

Re: King Log or King Stork?

The "true" FOSS isn't owned by anyone in particular because of the way the licenses allow anyone to fork it without asking, or even telling anyone it was done.

The direction is influenced by those who donate money, and set by those who donate code. That already includes a great many large organisations and indeed governments.

[Anonymous Coward]

Funding and use

One of the problems that open source has is not having enough data about its users because of privacy respect. Telemetry and other data is limited in most open-source code base to actually address funding campaign properly. I use on personal projects a lot of open-source tools but I feel the times I contribute I get more campaigns targeted towards me and frequently. Which is not bad but it is us much one can do as individual. I am not even aware out of all users of those open source users what is my share nor I know the open source project funding needs. It kind of looks similar to the aid icharity ndustry to the where there is no end to the needed funding and most close to 80% ends up in layers of middlemen. As for theHasgicorp example there is no way that the open source developers would need continuous funding appeal if those who use it most pay the modest share just to cover the developers time and the resources needed like presence in the net. If the commercial versions are creating billions any successful open source project should be able to pay its contributors fairly. It looks there is a lot of companies and gov are taking it as free load even if they pay a fraction of the commercial versions they would cover properly developers and resources.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Funding and use

There is a company working on this - about.scarf.sh - that can take data from open source use. It does this in a way that the Apache Software and Haskell Foundations are happy with and it meets their restrictions on data privacy. Challenge here is getting open source projects to adopt it because of the perception of problems around privacy.

We let organisations collect data to help themselves, so why shouldn't we let open source projects get data to help them understand what users actually use, and help them improve the projects?

[doublelayer]

Re: Funding and use

There's no reason why we can't. I know a few open source programs that have built in data collection of some kind. Nearly every time that got added, there was a lot of discussion about whether this was a problem with lots of people quite angry about it. I'm not going to put telemetry into my own open source work. I will try to collect that data through surveys or monitoring of emails sent to the project, and if people don't do either of those things, I'll just have to live with it.

[RJW]

OK this is a crazy idea, but maybe we should throw the concept of Open Source Software in the bin.

Everyone should get paid for their work!

Why are people working for free on these projects? How are you going to put food on the table if you are not earning money.

If you are working for free, surely you are putting some one out of a job somewhere.

By working on Open Source Software, you are providing you services for free to thousands of organizations who could afford to pay to pay you.

[doublelayer]

This is a bad idea. Open source exists for many good reasons, including the deduplication of effort so that wheels don't have to be reinvented and so that, if one person stops working on it, it doesn't prevent the rest of the world from continuing on. Trying to prevent people from doing things for free would probably not be possible and would, if you got it, create a lot more problems than it fixes. Nobody needs to work for free. Everyone is free to decide whether they are willing to do so or not, and crucially, when they draw that line. Users of the software should respond to this by doing things (paying) to ensure the continued availability of stuff they rely on, and if they don't, they will only have themselves to blame when problems arise.

[steelpillow]

What bollocks. Everybody who does the heavy lifting on Open Source project gets paid by their taskmasters. 99% of the code is paid for.

The problem only arises for hobbyists who come up with something so cool it deserves to becomes a career.

I contribute lots of useful shit for which cash is not on the agenda. Charity, hobby, local government, Creative Commons licensed verbiage, you name it. Why should I be banned from F/LOSS because I am not insured to work from home?

I also do work for my employer above and beyond the terms of my contract. I do it because I love it and it's just another hobby - except, wow, I even get paid for a lot of it!

So checkout that glass in front of you. Is it really half empty, or have I persuaded you that actually, it is still half full? Get a life, buddy!

[Anonymous Coward]

The analogy with infrastructure is incomplete. Civil engineering became a licensed trade because of a few high profile dam disasters (California iirc).

Since then, only a civil engineer can sign off on e.g. a dam or a bridge, and they are legally protected from companies forcing them to cut corners.

Software engineering should, ideally, have similar constraints. Should, but does not have.

By the same token, if society depends on the security and 5x9 SLA of a software project, it should be written or audited by licensed engineers.

But until you come up with the legislation to enforce that, it is not happening.

Software is not a static utility either, it is volatile, and evolving. A living language is a closer analogy.

Smart countries will use their funds to support software that is critical to their geopolitical longevity (see e.g. Germany and US).

But much as I would love to see more support for these core packages, until you get equivalent dam and bridge disasters, no MP will introduce or vote for such laws.

Those disasters are occurring, and affect a lot of people, see e.g. the Birmingham Oracle or a large swathe of govt and industry contracts, the Ariane 4 mishap, etc etc.

But slow boiling frogs and other more pressing issues move it to the back of the queue, and little changes.

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

Only one small part of the solution

I see this as being Yet Another example of Common Human Fallacy #7 : Someone Else Should Pay Because I Am A Special Snowflake.

We're all guilty of this at some point (and pretty much continually to some extent if you live in a first world economy), but you can't shove all responsibility on government or 'taxing billionaires'. At some point the responsibility lies on everyone.

If you use open source, pay for it. Governments, companies, individuals. Everyone. The best that can happen with a government open source funding model is particular specific open source projects are well funded, the non chosen few will receive nothing.

The dialogue needs to shift from free as in beer, to freely available source, and at some stage open source firmware and hardware - but that's several steps down the line.

One interesting approach strikes me - the major power governments have is legislation backed by force. There's technically nothing stopping a law being raised that if a company uses open source software, they must also contribute money/resource to it. Obviously if such a law was created the companies would move development to a government where the legislation doesn't exist, and make local employees redundant, but at least I can dream a little of a slightly more ideal world.

Or possibly World War 3, the source code wars. At this point of political insanity, I wouldn't rule anything out.

[Richard 12]

Re: Only one small part of the solution

Incorrect. This is simply pointing out that (some) FOSS software is now an essential service that governments, companies and the public all already rely on.

As it'd be disastrous if it vanished, governments should be putting resources towards it to mitigate that risk. If they won't put civil servants to work directly, then putting money directly is far better than the current state where they mostly pay a small number of extremely large multinational companies instead.

There are actually several laws in this space, mostly around auditing code.

They're mostly ignored because of the impossibility of enforcement.

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

Re: Only one small part of the solution

As far as I can see your argument is 'if specific FOSS software is essential for all of governments, companies, and the public governments should fund it'. There is some validity to this given we all pay taxes, so the recipient of those should supply funding.

There will also be FOSS software that is only relied on by one or more of governments, companies, and the public. If there isn't a larger consumer of the FOSS above the level of the entity using it, they should be paying. Sometimes this will be companies, sometimes this should be end users, and everyone should still understand that there is a human cost to being provided something for free, and a reward should be provided.

[Grunchy]

Uh oh I smell a scam debacle brewing. Some swine is about to make a dirty deal with corrupt government officials to deliver some garbage public IT project that is going to be minimum 10x over budget and extend 3x beyond the project time span, accomplishing at best 25% of the agreed scope before being cancelled as a massive boondoggle and delivering absolutely nothing at all, and we learn in the forensic investigation that everything was hopelessly outdated and incompetently managed for every single second. And everybody responsible evades culpability by retiring to the Canary Islands.

[Uh, Mike]

"Government Supported," has limited compatibility with,"Free."

Just ask Bitcoin.