{"by":"JesseAldridge","descendants":11,"id":647502,"kids":[647746,647556,647701,647540,647586],"score":6,"text":"I think open source development has the potential to produce far superior software than closed source. I think the only thing that keeps it from revolutionizing the software world overnight is that it's tough to make money at it.<p>If governments funded various software projects you would remove the need for those projects to turn a profit, thus removing a big obstacle to the sharing of code. I believe this would benefit society greatly.<p>If the code is released under a business friendly license, corporations could effectively have their R&D costs outsourced for free. This would allow them to focus on their customers more. This would be good for the economy.<p>I could see excessive regulation being a problem. I'm not sure how much oversight would be appropriate. I wonder what would happen if you just gave 100 hackers $20K over the course of a year and let them choose what to work on, just so long as it was open source.<p>A more realistic pilot program would not take much funding at all. Let's say we pay 1000 programmers $50,000 a year to work on open source projects. Toss in another $10 million for regulators and whatnot and that's $60 million total. Peanuts, really -- less then .01% of the U.S. federal budget.<p>What do you think? Is this a good idea?","time":1244477790,"title":"Ask HN: Taxpayer funded open source?","type":"story","url":""}