Which makes me wonder why governments don't give more grants for writing open source code.

They do it for research, which is another thing that would otherwise probably not pay for itself.

I guess if they started doing it a lot of commercial companies would complain to them about the competition.

Dutch government has explicitly funded quite some projects, e.g. libressl and libreoffice, but compared to budgets for closed source, it's still very little.

Here's a nice blog about how the UK deals with this.

https://governmenttechnology.blog.gov.uk/2016/12/15/next-ste...

As to infrastructure work, easiest way to help and still profit is to hire one or more developers that explicitly work on a set of FOSS libraries. That way you have that knowledge in-house and a connection into the community. Also, you'll have some highly motivated employees.

I think that in the US, we've been fighting for some long about how much to cut government, the idea of proposing to create a new category of spending just doesn't occur to Democrats. The closest they can come to imagining something new is free college (which is the same what we have now [free high school, college scholarships] but more so) and free daycare (which is like free preschool but younger).

You're kind of in a bubble, there is a lot of U.S. government support for open source and most agencies use it. See https://code.gov for a starting point. There's never going to be a huge multi-billion dollar grant program because it is unfair to closed-source companies (who pay taxes) but you are imagining a debate or hangup that doesn't exist.

Why is it unfair? Those companies presumably charge for their software, and maybe will be incentivised to go open source.

It's unfair because those companies can't extract their required funding at gunpoint.

At some point the falsifiable hypothesis "government cannot provide goods or services better than private actors" mutated into the dogma "government shall not provide goods or services better than private actors."

Governments do fund some things directly – most commonly grants to specific interests – but one other area which helps is allowing staff to work on open-source projects. At least in the United States civil servants’ work is generally considered public domain so we don't have to deal with the IP concerns which many companies still obsess over, which is nice.

If you poke around https://government.github.com/community you'll find a lot of government created projects but checking those organizations/ contributors will often turn up a ton of forks of popular tools. One common thing is improving security defaults or accessibility, which are tedious but mandatory for government.

If you value this, make sure to let your elected representatives know: I'm sure they hear from the major contractors regularly.

Or companies for that matter. I know other companies that have an open source division like AT&T labs.

The question is reversed: open source software _is_ a positive externality, but happened almost always _without_ any government involvement (save for some rare exceptions like SELinux).

This is probably the reason it worked so good.

So, do we necessarily need governments for other positive externalities in the list?

The comment above mine was mentioning chronic underinvestment; I would say that this indicates the current system doesn't work.

It's absolutely not a necessity, but more incentive for writing OSS could be nice.

> It's a classic "public good" - an economic activity whose benefits are impractical or unworthwhile to deny to those who don't pay.

Open source software is not a public good, in the economic sense. There are two criteria for being a public good: non-rivalry and non-excludability. Open-source software satisfies the first criterion (my using it doesn't prevent you from using it), but it's fairly excludable (I can prevent you from using it legally).

As developers, our instinct might tell us that it's not excludable because "if the source is there, nothing prevents me from using it", but when we're talking about goods which fall under copyright law, the legal aspect matters as well as the practicality. And in fact, open-source licenses (such as the GPL and the Apache licenses) can contain provisions which prevent people from using the licensed software under certain circumstances, while still being considered both free and open-source by the FSF and OSI respectively[0]

The real classic example of a public good is national security. Practically, there is literally no way that national security can be applied to people within a country on an individual basis, as opposed to a geographic one. For most threat models (e.g. espionage, (counter-)terrorism), the mitigations are things like "prevent terrorist attacks from happening". You can't apply the benefits of that only to people who have paid for the service - a terrorist attack either happens or it doesn't, and you can't choose who's a victim of it.

> These are a classic example used by economists of a natural place for government in the economy.

Even for things which are actually public goods, like national security, that's overstating the case greatly. Public goods are used as an example of a good for which an individual market cannot exist, but that doesn't mean that the only alternative is a government one.

The so-called "tragedy of the commons" is an appropriate (and ironic) example - despite the way that most people use the term, the town commons was actually something for which there were plenty of well-established codified rights, and these were not always negotiated or enforced by a government entity.

[0] For example, the Apache license contains a patent retaliation clause, which terminates your right to use the software in the event of a patent lawsuit. (Technically it doesn't revoke your right to the copyrighted code, but it does revoke your right to the underlying patents, which amounts to the same thing, because presumably the copyrighted code utilizes the underlying patents, or else it wouldn't be covered by the license in the first place).

Non-excludability isn't just about the law; it's about practicality. It might in some system be legal to prevent fire services from putting out fires in houses that haven't paid for it, but that would be an impractical system.

Similarly, critical software intended for developers is impractical to deny to them; doing so has some serious negative effects on the production process (hard to get good feedback/PRs from customers, for example, unless you expose the source to them to a level that closed-source manufacturers find dangerous to their business model).

WRT the original commons, you can make such things work in a tight-knit community that can enforce social norms (which, by the way, would take on a lot of what are now considered "government functions" in a modern society), but in a larger capitalist economy with actors that aren't inside the community, the government is the only actor that has the authority to enforce public ownership of the commons.

Can we get non-excludability by requiring that any OSS produce with public funds have a license that prevents such possibilities​?

I'm imagining a clause like: "this source and any modifications is irrevocably eligible for use by all, provided that its creation did not break any other laws".