We hackers can't continue to depend on the life-and-death high-school popularity contests that are electoral politics to fund the development of a better future. We need to find ways to fund public-interest hacking, like the hacking that produced seL4, that don't come from taxes.
I don't think these kinds of long term, far-seeing projects would survive in the life-and-death contest of startups and the private sector either.
I dunno what the alternative is, other than political activism, pushing parties to support progressive tax policies, and educating our peers and family members. It's not only research on the line here.
The key is that money is, for most people, a negative need, not a positive one. The authors of seL4 didn't write it because they expected to get superrich — but they could have been prevented from doing it by needing a job to pay the rent. Remember that Bram Cohen wrote BitTorrent while couchsurfing on friends' couches and living off credit card balance transfers. YC was founded with the idea that three months of "ramen money" would be enough to get a lot of ideas off the ground.
I think there are a lot of things we can do:
1. Promote free software, peer-to-peer networking, cryptocurrencies, and privacy software like Tor. Don't forget, governments burn libraries. Free hardware like RISC-V will become extremely important once we have matter compilers.
2. Lobby against patent, copyright, trade secret, noncompete enforceability, and other legislation that make the contents of employees' minds the property of their employers and legally impose censorship. We don't need to eliminate these entirely, but the more we can reduce their scope, the better off we are. California's pioneering legislation in this area was probably a significant factor in the 1980s move of the computer world's center of gravity from Boston to Silicon Valley; China's nonenforcement was probably a significant factor in its 2000s move from California to China.
3. Remind people that the freedom to tinker is a human-rights issue, a government transparency and accountability issue, a consumer-protection issue. We need all the allies we can get.
4. Reduce people's dependency on employers and employment for what they need to survive, through programs like public libraries, public healthcare, retirement, public education, universal basic income, churches, widespread solar panel deployment, squatters' rights and easier adverse possession, homesteading, soup kitchens, the Rainbow Gathering, ashrams, food banks, police reform, volunteer mental health counseling, decent public housing like Britain's 1960s council housing, BeWelcome, Hospitality Club, and open borders. Our current society already produces so much that scarcity of basic goods need not imperil anybody's survival. (There are of course cases on the margin like funding Gilead's development of new drugs, and perhaps synthesizing some drugs that are especially difficult, but that's no reason for people to die on the streets of homelessness-induced hypothermia.)
5. Organize programs like GSoC, Patreon, and Kickstarter that can raise funds to the people working on public goods such as free software. Alex Tabarrok's "dominant assurance contracts" might provide an incentive structure for this that improves on Kickstarter's incentive structure.
6. Organize into collectives such as monasteries, Google, or universities — organizations like these, imperfect though they are, have often been very effective at protecting their members from the societal pressures of the "life-and-death contest of startups and the private sector", not to mention law enforcement, with constructs such as academic freedom, tenure, "Googliness", and 20% time. Today's Google, like today's universities, are unfortunately not as strong as it once was — hierarchical command relationships make them vulnerable to political takeovers. But a university is fundamentally a faculty senate organized around a library, and Google was at one time fundamentally a group of hackers organized around a search engine. Such things can be destroyed, but they can also be created. They can survive by receiving donations, as some monasteries do; by providing services to outside entities, as universities often have; or by earning rent from an endowment, as state land-grant universities and other monasteries do.
The housing issue is particularly bad because, in many places, legally housing a person costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, more than an average employee can earn in many years. I wrote a bit in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23264786 about the underlying economics of the situation.
“ China's nonenforcement was probably a significant factor in its 2000s move from California to China.” one of the most anti-human organisation and arbitrary ruled organisation is the best to develop software because it is free. Are you joking.
There are a lot of ways open source gets funded: donation models (Patreon etc), internships (like GSoC), employment (like with RedHat), consulting, grants (like NLnet), bounties (like Bountysource). Personally I like the Snowdrift model.
Is there a significant number of people that can live of this? When I look at monthly income of larger projects on OpenCollective or developers on Patreon, they are doing very well if they make several hundreds of dollars per month. Not something anyone can live off in a western country.
Research into developing jet engines is a pretty stable income stream in the US that has persisted for decades. Taxes can fund what you want, you just need to create the political will for governments to value it and fund it.
Taxes won't fund what I want. Taxes fund what is wanted by the people with the power to create political will. That is, as I said, a matter of a high-school-style popularity contest, except that the stakes are life and death. Do you really think the voters whose political will elected Donald Trump and Scott Morrison — or the mass media who directed that political will — should be in charge of whether we get secure operating systems, public libraries, or ICBMs? Should that political will determine whose research gets funded? The idea is absurd.
I think the point is that F-35 seems to get funded no matter how popularity contest goes. It is not completely beyond imagination that seL4 could be funded similarly, since both do serve military need. In fact, DARPA already funded some seL4 work.
Have watched from close quarters how some friends have experienced burnout trying to make a living off their OSS projects. The projects in question are fairly popular and in broad use by large corporations but efforts to monetize were ultimately unsuccessful.
I see this as largely not a problem with OSS per se. It just happens that a lot of people have expectations around software that they don't have elsewhere.
For instance, let's say that I have this very clever idea that would improve on the good old-fashioned shovel. I could try to monetize this idea, but probably wouldn't have much success. Now, if I could figure out how to apply the idea to a grader or bulldozer or boring machine, I might have more success.
My best chance might be if I happen to already own an equipment manufacturer. But to create a new manufacturing company just to produce my new-fangled backhoe is a daunting task. And it turns out my one idea isn't enough. My backhoe needs hydraulics, power, tires, and a bunch of other stuff.
Most people wouldn't expect to be able to quit their day job to focus on a new shovel idea. But they somehow think that people should line up to fund a new web framework. Or a novel NoSQL approach.
It's hard to monetize any idea. This is not limited to OSS.
Note that software is not an abstract idea, it's an idea manifested.
And, really, people can still have a business selling cookies. But open source is unique in providing projects with many users, including commercial entities, that still leave the author in abject poverty.
That's true for software in general. However, you're talking about high-assurance security. That takes math skills, patience, a high commitment to security, and a time commitmemt. Most FOSS developers will not build high-assurance security regardless of the model you find.
This is why I favor creating systems that, with user-provided specs, automate proofs, analyses, and testing. The specs should be easy for non-math types to understand. Any failure is fixed or becomes a runtime check with logging. We might get more adoption of something like that than the masses contributing to an Isabelle/HOL or whatever project.
You're absolutely right, but that's just one manifestation of our society having problems with long-term goals. I'd say it's insecurity that draws people to short-sighted goals and leaders.
The humans are not good at long-term thinking. Any proposed solution that depends on them getting good at long-term thinking, en masse, is doomed to failure. Let's figure out how we can leverage the few humans capable of thinking slightly further out than the immediate present — 8 to 32 years, say — into sustained progress, while protecting that progress from destruction by the senseless masses who call it "weird", "scary", "pedantic", "odd", "creepy", "arrogant", "Satanic", "entitled", "problematic", "elitist", "gross", :unnatural", and "witchcraft".
A la enlightened dictature? I don't think that politics (as in collective decision making) should be disregarded. The inertia of the masses can feel like a drag, but I think that for every hacker that devotes himself to some specific long-term goal, there should be a hacker that devotes himself to politics and undoing that seemingly paralising inertia.
I am not in favor of any kind of dictatorship, although obviously a dark dictatorship is even worse than an enlightened one. Here in Argentina Perón's supposedly enlightened dictatorship — supported by the masses — destroyed the universities' academic freedom, and therefore the universities themselves, and squandered our chances of nuclear-energy leadership on a politically-favored con man who claimed to have built a usable fusion reactor.
We need popular non-free license which would require from big companies to pay fees to the creators, but allow small companies and individuals to use that software for free. Along with some company to handle payments and control usage, so developers won't bother with that.
There are slogans about this ("free software is a matter of freedom, not price", "software should not have owners") but the issue in practice seems to be that software licensed that way is not very good at attracting contributions or broad support. Also, it's difficult to write a license that has the effect of requiring payment without also introducing the other problems that non-free licenses have: you depend on software that you don't have the right to fix, for example.
