Keep your economist hat on! For-profit companies release useful open source all the time, including for the following self-interested reasons:
Attracting and retaining employees who like working with cool tech
Sharing development costs of foundational tools like e.g. LLVM
“Commoditizing your complement”, e.g. free ML software is great for NVIDIA
This is sufficient incentive that in the case of ML tools, volunteers just don’t have the resources to keep up with corporate projects. They still exist, but e.g. mygrad is not pytorch. For a deeper treatment, I’d suggest reading Working in Public (Nadia Eghbal) for a contemporary picture of how open-source development works, then maybe The Cathedral and the Bazzar (Eric Raymond) for the historical/founding-myth view.
I’d generally expect impact-motivated open source foundations to avoid competing directly with big tech, and instead try to build out under-resourced parts of the ecosystem like e.g. testing and verification. Regardless of the specifics here, to the extent that they work impact certificates invoke the unilateralists curse and so you really do need to consider negative externalities.
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!)
Keep your economist hat on! For-profit companies release useful open source all the time, including for the following self-interested reasons:
Attracting and retaining employees who like working with cool tech
Sharing development costs of foundational tools like e.g. LLVM
“Commoditizing your complement”, e.g. free ML software is great for NVIDIA
This is sufficient incentive that in the case of ML tools, volunteers just don’t have the resources to keep up with corporate projects. They still exist, but e.g. mygrad is not pytorch. For a deeper treatment, I’d suggest reading Working in Public (Nadia Eghbal) for a contemporary picture of how open-source development works, then maybe The Cathedral and the Bazzar (Eric Raymond) for the historical/founding-myth view.
I’d generally expect impact-motivated open source foundations to avoid competing directly with big tech, and instead try to build out under-resourced parts of the ecosystem like e.g. testing and verification. Regardless of the specifics here, to the extent that they work impact certificates invoke the unilateralists curse and so you really do need to consider negative externalities.
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!)