I entirely agree that private contributions to open source are far below socially-optimal level of public goods funding—I’d just expect that the first few billion dollars would best be spent on producing neglected goods like language-level improvements, testing, debugging, verification, etc. where most value is not captured. The state of the art in these areas is mostly set by individuals or small teams, and it would be easy to massively scale up given funding.
(disclosure: I got annoyed enough by this that I’ve tried to commercialize HypoFuzz, specifically in order to provide sustainable funding for Hypothesis. Commercialize products to which your favorite public goods are complements!)
I entirely agree that private contributions to open source are far below socially-optimal level of public goods funding—I’d just expect that the first few billion dollars would best be spent on producing neglected goods like language-level improvements, testing, debugging, verification, etc. where most value is not captured. The state of the art in these areas is mostly set by individuals or small teams, and it would be easy to massively scale up given funding.
(disclosure: I got annoyed enough by this that I’ve tried to commercialize HypoFuzz, specifically in order to provide sustainable funding for Hypothesis. Commercialize products to which your favorite public goods are complements!)