Did you know Siri was developed with $150M of government funding?[1] The government sponsors a lot more than "basic" research. They also support the commercialization of technology through procurement, for example.

Why would government-sponsored software development be any worse than corporate-sponsored? Governments can sponsor multiple teams that compete with one another, after all. That's why "basic science" works even when the money comes from the government -- right?

I'd be interested to here from FSF folks on this. One of the biggest "problems" with our existing Silicon Valley model -- which despite what posturing Libertarians think is very, very heavily based on government support (DARPA, procurement, etc.) -- is basically that the public doesn't receive the full benefit of taxpayer-funded R&D. It's pretty much handed over to the private sector, who take all the profits.

This might possibly be a more profitable avenue for the Free Software movement to take. Advocate that taxpayer-funded research stay Free.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/siri-do-engine-appl...

I'm not a Libertarian, but still think that markets are the best way to provide a lot of things.

> Why would government-sponsored software development be any worse than corporate-sponsored?

Let's see:

* Free rider problem goes global: everyone hopes some other country pays for useful stuff.

* Governments are not going to be as focused or concerned about niche businesses.

* Corruption. It becomes worthwhile to pay off politicians to have them choose your team.

* Calculation problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

* The NSA. Think they're bad now?

The current market has problems, but I just don't see any evidence that moving software production to the government would be much of an improvement, and it might be a whole lot worse.

I'm curious, how do these problems appear in the core sciences, if at all? Since that is almost entirely government funded.

The results are mostly free and open once published. It's incredibly nichey; many scientists dedicate their lives to a very narrow area of study. Nobody, DARPA and the NSF included, is great at predicating what is going to bear fruit years down the line.

And yet science happens.

It's not subject to a crippling "free rider problem", even though the whole world benefits. It's not massively corrupted by bribery.

Are these just what industry folks say when they want to be subsidized by taxpayers? It's ok for core R&D to be publicly funded, but all these problems will emerge suddenly if they bring it to market, so that last mile has to be left to us.. and the profits too?

Limited time to write, but I'm not sure you fully digested the 'economic calculation problem' entry, and perhaps some associated things.

How do you know how much of something to produce? Sure, science happens. Enough? It's very difficult to say.

With a market, outside of big market failures, you can be reasonably sure that, roughly, enough of the right kind of a given good is produced because of the feedback mechanisms involved: South Korea has abundant food - more than enough to feed everyone. North Korea does not.

If the government were the sole purveyor of software, sure, it would still get written, but I think that not enough would, and that it would turn into a big ugly mess.

Presumably you don't think modern science is a "big ugly mess", yet you've failed to explain why the planning problem hasn't caused that. We could go a step further and ask how science would fare under a market system.

Or for that matter, high tech. Oh, you thought high tech isn't a product of a planned state-controlled economy?

> Oh, you thought high tech isn't a product of a planned state-controlled economy?

It isn't. The government is one actor, and certainly has many contributions - the Internet is a big, obvious one - but there are certainly a lot of private actors that count for something too. Apple, IBM, and Microsoft come to mind. So "product of a planned state-controlled economy" is what I would call either "science fiction" or "wildly inaccurate", just as I would say that "high-tech is entirely the result of the free market" lunacy as well.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001C6MQA8/?tag=dedasys-20 is a good book to read for some of the history of Silicon Valley. Private companies figure prominently in it.

> Presumably you don't think modern science is a "big ugly mess"

Actually, my wife does research at a university, and I very much do think there is a lot of messiness in science, and think it likely that it's vastly underfunded - in part due to the fact that it's difficult to bring market mechanisms into play for things like basic research.

I think the ransom model can help a lot in cases like this. Develop closed until the software is good enough and then negotiate a pay-day based on the future discounted value of the software, upon receiving the cash the software gets open-sourced.

This could work for other creative efforts as well.

People tried this out years ago and it never really worked out very well, but perhaps with stuff like Kickstarter, things will change.

Part of the problem with it is that it involves a lot of "make me think" on behalf of the acquirer, rather than simply "ok, I need this, the price seems ok, I'll buy it".

Blender?

Not that I advocate it, but just for a slightly clearer picture of what that world would look like: a situation where lack of copying restrictions leads to the government being the only one paying for development of software for distribution is a very different one than where "all software development [is left] in the hands of the government" - people would still build on what's there, and may hire people to adapt those solutions to particular needs. And of course that's ignoring the fact that you'd probably have a comparable amount of volunteer FLOSS development going on in general.