I guess my post was partly influenced by this piece of information being rather hidden on their website, instead of up-front and center.
Spending a million can be justified if they manage to drag at least one useful thing out of the pile.
Then again, i'd rather see something like "Ok, you made this thing and you're fairly sure it's viable, let us help you make it shine". I've seen too many things fail where the tech and thinking behind it was solid and working fine, but a severe lack of round tuits strangled the project before it could blossom.
I found this comment interesting, in that I imagine with the right PR campaign this could be easy to sell, and seems to me to be in line with extant German culture surrounding engineering rigor.
It's just that kind of funding is a little more complicated to justify, as the outcomes are less well-defined.
I'm sure there'll be existing projects will be able to roll with the terms, and use the money in a way that both builds new functionality, while also refining the existing project.
Early in a project you want experienced people putting in lots of time (full time) on architecture and initial design and MVP. Later on, lower paid programmers can evolve the project part time to add javascript flavor of the month.
As an alternative financial model, how about 25KE (or more) for two months for expert level programmers to bootstrap a new project full time only, or 60KE for a year to evolve features and squash bugs on an existing project perhaps part time. Or if politics and PR make ongoing support impossible, then only do the bootstrap phase.
Its possible programmer salaries in .de are much lower than I think they are. However they can't too much lower, someone there is buying all those BMWs and VWs.
Stupid analogy time: Building a shiny, new house; easy. Retrofitting a 300 year old house with 1000gb ethernet wiring everywhere, while keeping the original character of the house and with minimal disruption to its inhabitants; HARD.
Actually, I thought it was pretty apt.
I'm giving interviews with system design, I'd say that the majority of programmers who are decent cannot actually architecture anything well enough. And it doesn't matter if they're given more time, they don't have the training/experience for it. (They'll only learn the impact of their decisions later, eventually painfully).
On the other hand, they may be able to develop it if handed and led through a proper architecture.
I believe this is attractive for entrepreneurial graduates, because they probably already have the self-employed paperwork down. This grant might then become a startup later. I guess you have to release the product from this grant, but being the only copyright holder, you can continue to develop it further in a proprietary fashion.
I think that remains to be demonstrated. I can think of several problems:
* Maintenance, as mentioned above.
* Government's ability to 'pick winners'. How do you decide who gets the money?
* Free rider problem of public goods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Free_rider_problem
It's an interesting experiment, though.
My understanding is the free rider problem would be Linus Torvald quitting linux(because a family member needs experimental medical treatment) to work in HFT for a big pay bump. Even though he creates $10 million of value with Linux he only captures 200k of that, but in HFT he would generate far less value and capture more. This reduction in economic output due to Linus being unable to capture the value he creates because of Linux "free riders" is the free rider problem.
Public funding of public goods is a fix to the free rider problem in economics because it means the value creators no longer need to capture the value they generate.(or as much anyway)
For example. It might not play out that way, but I don't see it as impossible either.
Only if you're bad at math.
The thing about funding public research generally is that the ROI is extremely high. When something good is free to use then it will be widely used and produce widespread benefits.
Which means that if you spend €30K with the result that local people capture a benefit of €200K and startups in the US capture a benefit of $800K, not funding it is cutting off your nose to spite your face. You're getting back more than you put in regardless of what anybody else is getting.
And the US has the same calculus regardless of what you do. If everyone makes the rational choice then it balances out because everyone is funding research and everyone is benefiting from it (and people rationally fund it in proportion to the benefit they get).
The only reason everyone doesn't is because the benefits are diffusely distributed so public research doesn't have a strong lobby. But you still come out ahead by doing the right thing here regardless of what anybody else does.
Here's an article from Nature looking at the evidence:
This is quite common in economics, but it's especially bad here, because the benefits of research don't inherently result in transfers of currency, and the benefit is actually often to eliminate them. The existence of Linux means that businesses can make broadband routers without having a large internal software team, which means vendors have lower costs and more competition, which means you can get a broadband router for <$100 instead of $1000. That is clearly a useful benefit, but the specifics of it are going to depend on what people do with the surplus $900, which will change over time and cultures and populations in ways that have no relation to the research. There is not going to be any good way to measure that and any measurement is not going to be stable or generally applicable.
But the difficulty in measurement doesn't get you out of having to draw a conclusion, because you still have a decision to make and need something to base it on. So when data is not forthcoming, we use analysis. And the analysis clearly points to research producing large returns, because the product is one that is produced once and can thereafter be used and reproduced arbitrarily many times at negligible cost. It's the classic scenario that justifies governments building roads and infrastructure with tax dollars.
The caveat is that the research has to be useful. It is obviously of no benefit to allocate a crate of cash labeled "research funding" and then transfer it to cronies or apparatchiks. But then the fight isn't over whether we should fund research, it's over how to make sure the money goes to the right place.
It might work out, in the end, but there are things that people may not like about it. Experimenting is good.
Is the fund applicable to financing ongoing triage for projects? Nope.
Is €30k worth of funding for 40 kicking off individual projects valuable and worthwhile? Hell, yes.
Might the scope of an endeavor like this evolve in coming years, as they demonstrate success? Sure.
Government backed funding for OSS projects is a really smart and efficient use of public money when it comes to investing in digital infrastructure. It doesn't need to be perfect on launch, and it's far easier to pitch and justify the value of seed money like this, than it is to make (just as valuable, but more subtle) wider case for ongoing funding.
Furthermore I'm sure there's plenty of projects that could pitch proposals for new features that they want to build, while building in the cost of ongoing triage during those 6 months. (Ie. Make sure that the amount of work your proposing is viable on the assumption that you'll also have ongoing triage work to keep on top of at the same time.)
Let's celebrate the OSS funding achievements as they come, rather than knocking them.