just small circles 馃晩
@smallcircles@social.coop  路  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

Funding Open Source like public infrastructure

> To protect the digital foundation of essential government services, governments should invest in Open Source as public infrastructure and shift from consumption to contribution.

https://dri.es/funding-open-source-like-public-infrastructure

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44896433

#FOSS#FreeSoftware#OpenSource#Funding
Konrad Hinsen
@khinsen@scholar.social replied  路  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago
@smallcircles This looks like good advice to governments. But I wonder if FLOSS communities would be happy in the long run if governments took this advice.

There would be FLOSS projects that are effectively taken over by government, whose employees would make up the majority of contributors and perhaps even 100% of maintainers. Worse, governments could delegate development and maintenance to BigTech. Leading to pseudo-FLOSS like Chromium and Firefox.
Open Risk
@openrisk@mastodon.social replied  路  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago
@smallcircles

this is a valid discussion no matter which corner of the digital universe we focus on, but priorities are terribly important:

what matters now is not whether goverments fund tools they use (or could use) like #drupal, #nextcloud, #libreoffice, #fediverse servers and so much else

Total control of mobile devices is the Death Star of the Evil Empire.

The equivalent of funding roads, schools and hospitals is an #opensource mobile OS as a universal right for every single citizen.