To a lot of entrepreneurs, especially Americans, "taxpayer funded" sends shivers. It implies bureaucracy, paperwork, lengthy approval times and political correctness. In many ways, it is the complete antithesis of the hacker-entrepreneur mindset.
You're right that OSS is a great example of a free rider problem, but your cure is worse than the disease.
I understand that. I too am an American hacker-entrepreneur with an aversion to bureaucracy. But I think this is the least bad of the potential solutions.
All we need is a few government sanctioned pg's, judging whether or not various projects are worthy of taxpayer dollars.
I'm just using him as an example of an effective, minimal-bureaucracy provider of funding. A government funding organization wouldn't need to be a huge beast. Especially because the costs for OSS development are so low.
Would he continue to be effective and minimally bureaucratic if he worked for the government? Who would ensure that he wasn't just giving money to his friends? Who would ensure that a pg type person got hired instead of someone without a clue but with good 'connections'?
I use Ubuntu, which is composed of thousands of individual projects. Who would decide which ones get how much money? How about the ones developed by 'foreigners' (defined as !citizens of the country paying for development)? Could 'foreigners' just free-ride on whatever government paying for all this open source development? How about new, upcoming and potentially competitive projects? At what point should they get funded, or should the government attempt to pick a winner?
I'm no libertarian, but the problems are not at all insignificant, and while I agree that software is close to being a public good (some exclusion is possible), I am by no means convinced that it ought to be supplied by the government.
Except that tons of open source is produced by a few people working on their own, rather than as part of some big institution like a university. Like Clojure, for example...
Also: my wife is a scientist, and I have come to realize that programming is a way more open, "stand on the shoulders of giants" field than theirs is in many ways.
Again, like I said to axod: "What I would really like to see is something like a cross between the NSF and YCombinator."
Have a few experts decide which projects to fund. Give people 50 to 100K a year to cover their living expenses. Anything they produce goes under a commercial friendly license like BSD. Everybody wins.
Does open source not facilitate the sharing of ideas? Would this not make it easier to stand on the shoulders of giants?
You're right that OSS is a great example of a free rider problem, but your cure is worse than the disease.