Tragedy of the Digital Commons by Chinmayi Sharma 💯
One of the most extensive analyses discussing the issues around the open source ecosystem and why governments should get involved to address them effectively. It places a solid and much-needed emphasis on the prevalent Free-rider problem in providing public goods.
"... interventions that rely on voluntary participation have not and will not succeed." 💯
"Too long has open source operated in the shadows. The government needs to bring open source to national focus and give it the priority and support it deserves as a core component of our critical infrastructure. Beyond that, the government needs to exercise its coercive power because without strong, direct regulation, the private sector lacks any incentive to amend its irresponsible practices and support the delivery of a critical resource."
"But, unlike roads and bridges, we do not want to federalize open-source development. This robust community has self-governed for decades, innovating rapidly and providing immense value to society. It is already taking every measure to secure itself. Regulation's impact on the open-source community should be minimal in compliance and maximal in assistance to preserve this resource's unique potential to benefit society."
@coni2k I will be honest. I understand the moral appeal to the free rider point.
But it is a dangerous and bad idea to bring it as a legitimate problem.
The free rider way is the only way for FOSS infra to work sustainably. Bringing corp in destroy the efficiency of the model at the engineering level. And it destroy the efficiency of the model at the economic level.
And I do not mean that paying devs would be too expensive.
But the work to make it legible to corp would be far too high.
@coni2k what made foss work is that devs at the lowest level of corp can use it without talking to legal or procurement. Reversing that, even a little bit, would make software orders of magnitude more expensive.
"what made foss work is that devs at the lowest level of corp can use it without talking to legal or procurement." That's a valid concern. And indeed, we shouldn't suggest changing the OSS's "free to consume" nature.
What I advocate is that expecting individual OS consumers to voluntarily contribute back to the ecosystem is not a feasible solution due to the Free-rider problem.
Instead, we should finance the OSS ecosystem with public money by establishing national public funds like the Sovereign Tech Fund. This structure would be similar to how we finance almost all other shared resources of society, like public roads, bridges, parks, and libraries.
The article also suggests a similar solution (as well as mentioning STF):
"Government donations can supply resources directly and encourage third-party donations indirectly. Congress can appropriate funding specifically for open-source community support. Economics tells us the government plays an important role in subsidizing producers of public goods when the market fails to provide sufficient supply."
We can only have these solutions at the government level, which is a typical way of avoiding the Free-rider problem (volunteer and unorganized participation of the public good consumers).
And none of these solutions suggest changing the nature of OSS consumption.
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