FOSS Development As Economic Stimulus
January 14th, 2009 | by admin |
heybus writes “Economist Dean Baker, best known for calling the housing bust and warning of the ensuing economic collapse, has just published his recommendations for how to allocate President-elect Obama’s estimated $800 billion economic stimulus plan. Among other things, Baker calls for juicing the economy with $2 billion worth of government spending to support the development of free and open source software. Baker’s idea is similar to the New Deal federal arts and writers’ projects: the government would fund projects as long as they produce freely available code. In addition to employing programmers, ‘the savings [to consumers] in the United States alone could easily exceed the cost of supporting software development.’”pa href=”http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/14/0032223amp;from=rss”img src=”http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=09/01/14/0032223″/a/ppa href=”http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/14/0032223amp;from=rss”Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p
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