[jauntywundrkind]

That's, like, your opinion man.

Maybe the money should have more strings attached, be attached to grant proposals, whatever.

I don't see that that is an important or clarifying distinction. Governments should be directly helping, with money, somehow. Collectivizing the investment is better returns and far better outcomes, open source is the only way you're going to avoid risking your investment in a single company that may over time fail. Having your nation take its infrastructure seriously should be obvious, and this is how. And I disagree that good things only happen at companies. The post I was responding to stands as incredibly broadscale evidence that that often doesn't happen.

[surajrmal]

Contract work is tricky because individuals who own a particular project may be full time employed already and not capable of taking on contract work. Not every project is capable of generating enough contract work to make it sustainable to do it full time and not everyone wants that level of instability on their income.

Hiring an outside company to do contract work leads to longer term maintenance issues where they disappear after the contract completes. It would be better to have individuals from a distributed set of organizations all collectively pitch in to do maintenance. This is how the Linux project is organized and it's very successful. While this is understandably unlikely to happen for smaller projects I think that just means it's important for projects to be created and maintained by larger collectives. Again, this is a common trend you see occur.

[immibis]

Governments are often the ones the encryption is protecting us from - they're not going to fund better encryption.