Agreed that Debian provides (a lot of) value to society. The big question is why don't they have money to fund development? Disregarding the 900k mentioned, because it's not enough to pay everyone and it would be spent soon. In my opinion public infrastructure would ideally be maintained by states, not individuals or private companies.

I may be jumping to conclusions here, but my first impression was you were suggesting that Debian is a public infrastructure, and that therefore in your opinion it would ideally be maintained by the state.

I have a rather strong emotional reaction to this because to me a major reason for FOSS is to break the problem of perverse incentives that arise in corporate -and- government work. Governments want to control their populace. The NSA, for example, has made algorithm suggestions that would give them an easier time listening in on the world. And the US has prominent figures arguing for encryption backdoors that supposedly only the "good guys" would have the keys to. Which is to say nothing of governments that outright ban encryption. So I would be very skeptical of FOSS officially maintained by a government (though I suppose its open source nature would still be a point in its favor for the transparency).

I understand the strong negative reaction; it's common. Thanks for taking the time to formulate a response.

I thinks it's two different problems: maintenance and cleptocracy. For example, should the government maintain roads and bridges? It falls within the common good (public infrastructure) so using taxes for that makes sense.

But, if the government has authority over the bridges, how to stop them from performing obligatory cavity searches (or some other bad thing) on people who use them? That's not a question of what the responsibilities or objectives of a government should be. The question is how to reform a hostile, cleptocratic government.

I won't presume what context you're coming from, but I've noticed that in some cultures it's normal to think of the government as "them". For me it's "us". While someone from the former group might say "government does that", I'm inclined to say "we do that". My outlook seems to be more common in Europe than in US, I think.

For me, using the government is the most direct and efficient way of maintaining FOSS, or doing anything that should be done by "us", as opposed to by "somebody". I see that as the purpose of governments.

These FOSS projects spanning many borders makes things slightly harder, but that's just because we're not used to that kind of cooperation. In principle there's no reason multinational programmes for financing these things can't exist.

Alternatively, make it difficult for states to use non-FOSS software. That way you'd redirect all that money being wasted on closed source.

Funding digital infrastructure through state sponsorship is hard. Because the industry moves fast and politics does not.. nor is politics particularly efficient, they just can't be experts on everything.

Sponsoring large research projects might go along way though.

> Governments want to control their populace.

That's a pretty broad statement :)

In my country we have free speech, and the state/government protects freedom of speech.

Similarly, my government tend to promote human rights. I think that can still be said about the US too.

No governments aren't perfect, but control is not their major concern.

> In my opinion public infrastructure would ideally be maintained by states

There's no government layer at the level Debian operates. As pretty much everything internet based, its users ( and contributors) are international - which I think is the main reason why we don't see public alternative services to social networks, search engines, etc.

China is a special case, since they explicitly would rather keep the userbase restricted to Chinese citizens.

NSF, NIH

There are tons of federal agencies that could sponsor FOSS.

https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/

I'd love to see a program where FOSS devs could get say 2k-4k tax free per month depending on part or full time work. A billion a year would pay for just under 21k developer years or close to 42k part time devs.

Federal, state and local governments burn some large integer multiple of that amount every year on proprietary, closed source software.

> governments burn some large integer multiple of that amount

probably not an integer, more likely an irrational number

Surely it's an actual currency amount, so it's not irrational. I'll accept it's unlikely to be an integer, but it should be a rational non-integer.

But, perhaps you were joking and it's an 'irrational' amount?

I don't know for sure how much the US government / DOD spends on RHEL licenses, but I've worked at plenty of contractors who were using it (and CentOS). I would be surprised if a significant amount of RHEL's revenues weren't from the federal government.

Its good that there is no Government layer in Debian. If they did, it would quickly dissipate into just another disaster.

>clearly verifiable by committed contributions

I'm afraid of this part gaining significance over other and its side-effects becoming main effects.

Ugh, federal job guarantees don't work. Nothing in life is gauranteed.

> Federal Job Guarantee

Job Guarantee isn't as good of an idea as you'd expect: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic...

It's the only idea that works from the point of view of those growing and making your food and shelter.

There is no magic porridge pot. Somebody has to make the stuff you want to buy, and they ain't going to waste their life making stuff for you if you're not doing anything in return. Why should they?