An interesting question. I think government should *use* open source
software, which will inevitably evolve into contributing to it because
sooner or later you have to fix it yourself. There's that itch which
seems to bug only you. (which is not to say floss isn't being used in
government now, but there could be more.)
I am less confident in the idea they should fund it, at least not
directly. Picking who is deserving of patronage and who is not will
turn into a big game, on both side of the line, and developers will
gravitate to working on those projects which have the most likelihood
of being funded. 'tis only natural after all, and nothing wrong in
that, but I don't think it as balanced as it might be. To see how
this would probably play out, look to world of science where it's
(relatively) easy to get a lab funded to work on a multi-year study of
the effects of pharmaceuticals for treating erectile dysfunction and
darn difficult to acquire funding for studying the rate of recidivism
in ex prison inmates based on the construction materials and
decorations of their cells ("do ex-cons who spend 5 years in a blue
room with a window re-integrate more successfully than those from a
yellow windowless one?"). Yes I just made that up, but I think you get
the point. Main stream research is easy, yet truly interesting and
civilization changing discoveries come from the margins.
Government should do what it is good at, funding infrastructure and
leveling the playing field. Roads & sewer. I'm not sure what this
might mean in terms of open source. Before the advent of Sourceforge,
Google Code, Launchpad and the like I might have said government
should provide free web and code hosting with version control for open
source software projects. That the *kind* of thing it could do well
and fairly. My imagination fails me as to what kind of sewer system we
could really use right now but are lacking. :)
cheers,
-matt
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"leo-editor" group.
To post to this group, send email to leo-editor@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
leo-editor+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
