Funding basic infrastructure as open source is a great idea. And the only way to keep a market economy going. Otherwise the infrastructure is used increasingly to lock out small competitors.
However, I see a distinct lack of “geeks” in this initiative. Instead a lot of pol-sci majors that want to “manage” / claim developments they themselves would not have the skills to build.
> Instead a lot of pol-sci majors that want to “manage” / claim developments they themselves would not have the skills to build
Very few geeks have the skills (or even the desire) to build a financially sustainable open source project. The projects that are financially sustainable, are often tied to corporate ownership, often one of the FAANG. Still, the work to build the financial and community framework for such a project is often valued at close to, or even less than zero - as your comment shows. There's a lot of talk in the open source world about funding, or rather the lack thereof. Still, comments such as yours downtalk every effort people invest as profiteering of open source work. Wonder why no one wants to do that work - it's thankless, hard, undervalued and underappreciated, even by the ones that would profit of it - the people doing the coding. Your comment is doing all efforts to provide funding for open source projects a disservice.
Many open source projects have been widely used without getting any funding at all. In the last decade a group of bureaucrats have arisen who promote the notion that open source will not function without their gracious presence.
In many cases these bureaucrats destroy working projects for their own benefit (fame, power, salaries they would not get otherwise).
That isn't meant to say that funding is bad in all cases, but reflexively cheering whenever a new fund is announced is naive.
Widely used does not at all imply that they’re financially or otherwise sustainable. See the OpenSSL debacle which was at least partially caused by lack of paid maintainer time. It’s not like the lack of funding for large open source projects gets mentioned every time a major bug is discovered in one of those widely used open source projects (log4j maybe?)
A lack of money also means that the pool of people working on public good (open source) projects self-selects to those that have the money to do that - and that’s limiting the pool and input into those projects.
On the contrary. I am very much in favor of people that put in the effort to support the organization around open source.
But it should be done by persons that also have insight in the technical work. Otherwise problems of judgment cannot be avoided.
That’s the same in every profession by the way. You want to be head of the carpenters guild? Work as a carpenter for some time.
Even if it is just carpentry as a hobby. You don’t like it as a hobby? Well, that says a lot already.
There is ample organization and leadership skill among the geeks. Look at the site you are on and its background. Many millionaire geeks...
Now we are in a decision making role vs support role discussion.
“People skills” mostly are detecting the group consensus and running with it. Not the type of leader you need in tech.
Geeks are known to fight hard for their independent opinions. Especially when it goes against the group opinion. You need the willingness to do so - if required - from a leader ... so not a pure people person.
What is required though is being a good communicator. Most geeks learn that very fast. If properly taught...
Accounting can be hired for pretty cheap virtually everywhere on earth.
> I see a distinct lack of “geeks” in this initiative
I feel the same. Germany has a strong undercurrent of great open source developers and I hope the bureaucracy won’t come in the way of helping the geeks/hackers.
> Examples of digital infrastructure include code libraries or standardized protocols used by developers to write and test application software.
Not everything is business and there should be support for new infrastructure that falls outside the purview of businesses. I’m glad there’s some initiative from my Govt to address digital infrastructure woes. It’ll be interesting to see how it’ll pan out. However The most important thing is a periodic audit to avoid a Luca App like situation.
Who would do the audit? The people capable of doing so are either in major open source projects or in industry and have no time.
Many government initiatives in Germany support friends and family and have poor results or none. Below someone is mentioning ARPA. I can assure you that nothing remotely like ARPA will come out of this. Different country, different times.
Before any money is handed out, first I'd like to know who appointed the organizers and for what reason.
I don’t know who can do the audit and that is my biggest concern about such initiatives apart from Nepotism. The fact that the Govt seems to be involved in optics rather than installing checks and balances makes me nervous. The fiascos of Luca app and Corona-warn reeks of graft and incompetence.
The people listed in the study are all female and have also been involved in the application-oriented https://prototypefund.de .
The language used and the fact that the same persons are involved in two government funded funds strongly suggests that this is a diversity initiative in disguise.
The more I see of open source foundations and funds, the more I think that in many cases the prime beneficiaries are the organizers (though I don't have proof in this case and will not claim it).
> The language used and the fact that the same persons are involved in two government funded funds strongly suggests that this is a diversity initiative in disguise.
This initiative is form the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, a foundation that’s like a decade old. One of their projects is the prototype fund. Is it really surprising that the people involved in one initiative of the OKFN are involved in another of their initiatives, especially since it revolves broadly around the same topic - funding public interest software? Are you seriously suggesting that the OKFN is a front to distribute government money to a thinly veiled diversity initiative? Because the language used in your comment strongly suggest so. But I don’t have proof in this case, so I will not claim that this is what you’re doing.
I think the question here is about probabilities. What is the likelihood of particular gender ratios within particular fields?
If this were in the field of nursing which is dominated by women, I would be very surprised to see a group of (exclusively) men leading some advocacy/project.
Correct. The government has a spending target, let's say 56% of GDP (that is taxes, how much you can borrow from creditors, and how much money printing you can afford).
Then they divide that money in categories, and it turns out IT industrial policy got allocated that much money, which they divide into projects.
In this project, they build a comittee, which decides the best is to subsidise cool sounding initiatives by well connected, politically correct groups.
Top to bottom government spending that goes wasted in politically connected groups that give nothing back to society.
Why do governments feel compelled to constantly intervene in businesses?
What market failure (apparently unique to Germany) are they fixing?
Edit:
I have like 4 different responses. 1) Open source is a human right, 2) security is a mess, 3) China has proven an invasive industrial policy can be successful, and 4) Government intervention is important to prevent wealth imbalances
So my conclusion given the lack of consensus is that this fund is totally pointless.
The statement here is that some "basic digital infrastructure" like compilers or security protocols are fundamental to every individuals participation in the "digital revolution".
Therefore the government wants to fund some of this basic infrastructure in order to prevent it from going closed-source or proprietary.
The point is that open-source software is not and should not be regulated by the market, as it should not be profit driven.
What constitutes an "excellent open source history"? People that code often don't want to be bothered by organization and financial matters, and vice-versa, community work is still often disregarded as not truly open source work. Some people did sit down, did all the leg-work of getting funding for a study, did a study, published it (open source under CC-BY) - including a plan for the setup of the fund, cost analysis, how many people to employ and their pay (btw: roughly 10% of the budget, which seems reasonable at first glance), legal analysis of three funding models (1) and then someone with a random new internet account complains about their open source history (2) and their gender (3)
People with nice haircuts that produce nice looking documents and talk to the government for funding.
If the money funds technology that is still great!
But be very careful when a subculture becomes a platform for organizers who never did the actual work. Be it art or code or whatever.
The majority of people might have the best intentions.
The fear though is that we have here a nice breeding ground for sociopathic behavior in the open source space (for a narrow definition of sociopathic: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths).
The people behind this study are the open knowledge foundation germany - a foundation that exists since a decade, not just some random people that met and thought “oh cool, let’s rip off some government money.” The OKFN runs Jugend Hackt, the prototype fund and other projects. They’re doing actual work - the work that makes all the money come in that then gets distributed. The bookkeeping that’s required when you spend government money. You may not consider that “work”, but you’re wrong. I’d rather do five days of coding than one day of books.
> The bookkeeping that’s required when you spend government money.
Oh yeah. Acquiring government funding and the reporting for it is a big part of my day job. Coding still happens ... after midnight.
The funny thing is, I might even up as a beneficiary of this. And dump 50% of the money into technical work. The rest goes to the organizational overhead needed to get the funding in the first place. But the 50% technical work have to be the focus and acknowledged as the focus.
> The people behind this study are the open knowledge foundation germany - a foundation that exists since a decade, not just some random people that met and thought “oh cool, let’s rip off some government money.”
Looking at the teams-page of the OKF, that's a funny bunch. 90% did not work on open source prior to taking this gig (with just one or two shining counterexamples). And now they are doing it "for the love of it"?
It is okay to do open source as a normal dayjob. And teaching kids to code is important as well. I guess what pisses me off is the political class taking on roles of "thought leadership" in the "secret garden of the geeks" where entrance was once earned by hard, cold lines of code free of bugs.
> And dump 50% of the money into technical work. The rest goes to the organizational overhead needed to get the funding in the first place. But the 50% technical work have to be the focus and acknowledged as the focus.
You acknowledge that there's a lot of work involved in handling funding for an opens source project. And yet you seem to consider the that 50% of the work worthless, despite them enabling the 50% of the technical work. All my open source work is worthless in your eyes. I'll spend my christmas days fixing a mid five digit tax mistake that the technical people made on an open source project - because that work is boring and tech work is more important - and I get to ensure that the money doesn't go to the tax authorities. But my name doesn't appear in the commit log, so I'm not a contributor. I'm not even on the github org, nor visible in another place. In your eyes, that's worthless. In your eyes, I can't do it for the love of open source since I have no substantial code contributions in the past - and that's why no one takes those 50% off your hands, so you can focus 100% on the tech stuff.
Dude ... we basically have the same job.
I take the 50% off so other people do the technical work.
And without knowing specifics on what you do, if it is helping open source then I am grateful. In no way did I want to denigrate your work. And I understand where some frustration might come from if the effort is not properly acknowledged. Yet, there is nobility in knowing to have helped society in a quiet way.
Do you know the golden rule?
"The person with the gold makes the rules."
Things only become problematic when the organizational roles start to draw power from the golden rule and build a little political fiefdom to uphold their power according to their values and skills, say, lawyering. And given the different voices in this HN thread, I'm not the only one to have noticed such effects in some previously technical communities.
[sarcasm mode]
Let's see what happens once you become the person distributing the gold. Then it shouldn't be hard to extract some respect out of the grubby dirty hands of the code contributors.
Establishing a fund is not the same as regulating the beneficiary.
Compare for example with academia - universities in Europe are overwhelmingly government funded, yet they get a lot of freedom in what research they conduct.
The mess we're in, in terms of software security and reliability, when it comes to the infrastructure that runs our world is a textbook case-study on how a free market with profit incentives is neither an efficient nor effective driver of an economic system.
The drive for unsustainably externalised costs in both resource and labour exploitation, colloquially known as "pay peanuts, get monkeys", creates brittle systems with short term returns.
The whole idea of infinite returns in the limit due to steady return from a one time investment is just a different spin on a perpetuum mobile. Entropy incurs a regular cost, be it supply chains, tools, workers, or software.
Hey, came across a comment of yours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25499058 in search engine results while researching the reasons to why learn Clojure as my next programming language.
I'm curious if you have change your mind about it or still prefer JS for new projects?
One thing that I find attractive about Clojure is Datomic (databases being a source of complexity in applications), its features like immutability(the db as a value, history), data structures as query language not strings, transactions and data model, OTOH, it's a scary niche black box. Also, the clojure REPL is a nice addition.
I'm no stranger to lisps, having played with scheme and racket, know macros, watched some Hickey videos and overall understand clojure's philosophy and concepts but haven't never use it for a real world business application. I'm sure nodejs/postgres could suit my needs perfectly but the ergonomics/defaults of clojure/datomic makes me think things would be less tedious to develop.
You can expect this to happen more and more as China demonstrated that innovation is indeed possible by government intervention.
Another thing that was demonstrated at exactly same time was that it is possible to have decade long stagnation in an open market. I'm talking about the state of the Web and mobile has come to in the hands of FB, Google and others in the free market with no government interventions.
The biggest sensation since many years is (China government supported) TikTok and the "free market" response to it was to try to ban it or force purchase it.
My hope is, that countries like USA and UK will re-think their understanding of fairness in a free market and once again we will have fair and innovative free business environment but at this time and stage there's evidence that governmental intervention can yield innovation in stagnated markets.
In this exact case, people at the German government are targeting a specific risk of foundational elements in tech being underfunded or overprotected.
Because it is one of the primary functions of the government to prevent excesses in the free market so that generated wealth is spread out over many people in society as opposed to a only a few. Because people consider that unfair it often leads to destabilizing society causing even more suffering.
Being generally conservative (and especially in business) would be the main reason. Cannot go wrong with the government after all, right?
Second reason may be strong lobbying from legacy IT concerns. They usually get government contracts and are usually viable for support from such funds.
If only the government had not intervened, via ARPA, to push packed switched networking and had allowed AT&T to keep doing what they did just imagine what the Internet would be today!
However, I see a distinct lack of “geeks” in this initiative. Instead a lot of pol-sci majors that want to “manage” / claim developments they themselves would not have the skills to build.