On a recent Delta Airlines flight, I was enjoying the individual seatback video/music/games player when a public address interrupted my button pushing. The little display went blank and then displayed line after line of text indicating that Linux was booting. It reminded me that American society has earned a greater return on open-source software than on any other investment. Imagine if the airline had to pay Microsoft or Apple $100 per seat to license an operating system. They probably wouldn’t have installed the little monitors, which generated jobs for engineers, mechanics, plastic molders, etc. The fact that the monitors are in the airliners has generated a lot of jobs for programmers as well as jobs in Hollywood when people buy movies while flying.
About ten years ago, in http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/bill-gates , I proposed that the Federal government invest in open-source software for its own use and let others benefit from the raft of new solutions. The idea seems to have fallen on deaf ears and, even now that the government is paying more attention to stimulating the economy, there is still no money for open-source. The Feds keep spending on Windows and other Microsoft products, which buoys Redmond, Washington, but it doesn’t seem likely to generate sustainable growth.
having more open source projects/products makes us a truly wealthier nation if you measure wealth by reals instead of nominals. The thought of government funded projects that produce proprietary knowledge has always offended me.
I wonder what the reaction would be if it were mandated that every school that received government funding were forced to video tape lectures and make them freely available. I know MIT has done a lot in this area. Would schools oppose it, students. the costs would be minimal to record and post to a website.
I loved watching the SICP videos that were available on the web.
Dear Phil,
Another bright post. Four principled arguments for requiring open-source in government are:
1.Interaction with the government is often mandated, but should not exclude citizens on the basis of hardware choice. Open source can ensure that all platforms are in the mix.
2. Using single vendor software to deliver data effectively grants a government monopoly to a private company. Open-source eliminates that potential source of corruption and dependency.
3. As citizens transfer control to governments, they need to be able to verify the work of governments. Now that government undertakes many tasks involving complex computing data, this requires access to the computing software used.
The argument that open-source development would return not only the service, but (hopefully) some reusable tools is mixed.
Government might inefficiently consume tax dollars in creating the software, that would be bad. So Ideally, they would simply use existing open-source software, paying for required enhancements if required. It is possible that most improvements would come from citizens wanting better access to government data, or to improve the efficiency of government.
Re the comment above suggested it be mandatory that government-funded schools push up streaming video of all their lectures.
This would be very cheap to implement, and I think would be a real boon to the quality and accessibility of education.
Panasonic Avionics (panasonic.aero) makes that in-flight-entertainment-system.