🚀 go-pugleaf

In general, public funding of software development is a terrible idea.

void Rant(beer) {

Although some kind of tax distributed to software organizations might
initially help free software, eventually the tax distribution would be
diverted to whichever organizations provided the biggest bribes (or
lobbying, whatever it's called in your country) to the elected
representatives and/or non-elected professional beaurocrats running the
program.

A program of tax distribution would inevitably attract greedy people. 
These people would lobby (bribe) for preferential treatment, regulations
that hurt their competitors, and of course for more money.  Much of the
money would then find a way to be diverted into either the pockets of
the greedy (if they're greedy for money) or into the growth of an empire
(if they're greedy for power).  In any case, comparatively little would
find its way to the actual developer.

}

The best way to support free software is actually to encourage open and
free commercial competition.

A basic tenet of economics is that in a truly competitive economy, the
price of a good or service is equal to the marginal cost of producing an
additional unit of that good or service.  "Marginal cost" does not
include any fixed cost of producing it in the first place.

Once software has been produced (e.g. written) the cost of producing an
additional unit of that software (a copy) is practically zero.

"Free software" in the GNU sense of the term actually provides benefit
to the developer in excess of the developer's marginal cost of producing
the software.  The benefits provided are additional testing, bug fixes,
new features and distributed support.

However, these benefits are sufficient only if the software was going to
be developed anyway.  Few people outside the educational/research
establishment are going to invest large sums of money to develop
software just to give it away.

That brings us to software patents...  Software patents act to encourage
innovation by providing a temporary monopoly to the inventor of a unique
idea.  This allows the inventor to profit from the idea while providing
for the eventual release of the idea into the public domain.

Software patents should not be banned.  I think most complaints about
software patents come from all the crap that gets through the morons at
the patent office.  The patent office needs serious work before software
patents become truly worthwhile.

I'm planning on writing a longer and more formal essay on these topics
as one of the original editorials for the official launch of the Index
of Alternative Operating Systems in a few months.  We'll be trying for a
big publicity push, so you should know when it happens.

In the mean time, if you're interested in alternative operating systems,
are looking for software, documentation or other resources about
alternative operating systems, or just want to browse, please stop by
http://www.indexos.com.

-- 
Index of Alternative Operating Systems           http://www.indexos.com

Joel Peterson                                  joel@odin-consulting.com
President
Odin Consulting, Inc.                    http://www.odin-consulting.com