The fact that there is more than zero contributions from for-profit companies and other sources does not mean that the optimal level of public-good funding has been approached; the fact that other public-goods efforts are crowded out by existing efforts does not mean that either. (The fact that novel incentive or fundraising or corporate structures in the cryptocurrency world can raise tens of billions of dollars to create public-good-ish things while such structures still fall far short of solving ‘funding public goods’, however, does strongly suggest that there is an extremely large gap between those non-zero contributions and the socially-optimal level of funding.)
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!)
The fact that there is more than zero contributions from for-profit companies and other sources does not mean that the optimal level of public-good funding has been approached; the fact that other public-goods efforts are crowded out by existing efforts does not mean that either. (The fact that novel incentive or fundraising or corporate structures in the cryptocurrency world can raise tens of billions of dollars to create public-good-ish things while such structures still fall far short of solving ‘funding public goods’, however, does strongly suggest that there is an extremely large gap between those non-zero contributions and the socially-optimal level of funding.)
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!)