this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Public money, public code!
IMO this should be the case for everything developed using public money, looking at you, pharmaceutical companies...
The issue becomes when things are developed with a mix of public and private money. I'm not saying we shouldn't tackle the issue, only that it can't be as simple as public money = public resource. If that were true, nearly all of us would be required to work for free, since we got the majority of our education through public funding.
Edit: It seems everyone ignored the generalization I was replying to. Yes, in terms of code it's actually relatively easy to require that a publicity funded project be open source and leave it at that. The business can decide if they want to write everything from scratch to protect their IP or if they want to open up existing code as a part of fulfilling/winning the contact.
In terms of other partially government funded projects, like the pharmaceutical example given, it's much more difficult to say how much of the process and result are thanks to public funding. That's really the only point I was trying to make, that it can get very hard to draw the line. With code, it can be relatively easy.
You can still pay people to write public code, though. Just because you can use it for free doesn't mean it always has to be written for free. In some cases, sure, it can make more sense to have it for free if it's a fully non-profit volunteer-run project, but that is not the only way to write open-source software. Talented developers are still talented, open-source or not.
I don't think anyone intends public funds to be quite that sticky; public education is itself a public good, and having once attended a public school really has nothing to do with developing a product 20 years down the road.
Also, writing open source code can support a viable business. Not every example has been successful, and some have been sold to hypercapitalist owners who wanted to extract more profit, others have failed to keep up, but Canonical is doing alright with it, Red Hat did for a long time, among others. Plenty of bigger tech companies also employ people to write open source software, despite it not being the company's main business, React, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and so many other projects. Those engineers definitely aren't working for free.
There's the difference between individual knowledge (company training) and code licenses though.
Maybe this lazy private money should get a real job if it wants to pay for things to profit off of.
govts print infinite money. All of us are working for free. Their fiat is credits for the company store.
If you think funding projects is bad then the response is to support lobbying project owners to put in malware until FOSS is publically funded.
All we have to do is verbally support it. And cheerlead when it occurs. We don't actually have to actively do it. It's a threat which is done in politics all the time.
If governments could print infinite money they would just pay themselves an infinite salary.
Your fundamentals of economics is broken.