Hear, hear. I've talked about this with people and it's surprisingly hard to convince them that government-sponsored software is a good idea. While a tiny fraction of the amount we already spend on commercial software would utterly transform the free software landscape, it's not politically viable as long as commercial software vendors have lobby power.
Let's not forget that it is not in many governments' interest to have distributed tools (with strong encryption). It is much easier to take down stuff on centralized services.
But of your government is at odds with an oppressive government, it would make sense for it to fund that kind of software so the people could take it down, or at least make trouble, themselves.
Instead of gov. funded software, I like the idea of hedge fund backed FOSS, where the commercial software competition are publicly traded. This would allow the hedge funds to realize returns, but only if the FOSS produced is viable. Such an arrangement would probably benefit under a non-profit foundation to administer the project(s).
I'm just back from lunch, so I'm struggling to follow. How would the "hedge fund backed FOSS, where the commercial software competition are publicly traded" work?
Free distributed P2P software makes technopolies like Github AND mafiaficialities like nationstates obsolete. We do not need to and should not rely on the government to fund that.
I look forward to the day governments start to fund free software, for example through the GNU project. Then we'll all have better tools.
Actually, there were already some fundings. Germany funded GnuPG to port it to Windows.
What do I care what is the new world record in sprinting? But I very much do care about a new release of libreboot, libreCMC/openWRT or Debian!
I hope one day we will see peaceful international competitions between nations of who can provide the best/most used free software.