ideas-openSourceProfProj

Another aspect to this issue is the funding of open source. Open source, it seems to me, is a "public good", very similar economically to scientific knowledge. Funding it is a tricky problem, because it benefits society as a whole, but only if it is freely available to the public. We already have a system for dealing with this sort of thing; part of our taxes go to paying professors, who produce the "public good" for the public. It seems to me it would be most logical to use the existing infrastructure to fund open source; i.e. those who want to program open source full time should be able to become professors of open source (or, I guess, computer science, specializing in open source).

Of course, right now the obstacle to this is that ProfessorsDontCode? (or rather, professors are not given tenure based on actual usable projects that they produce, but rather based on the excitingness of their research).

I feel, however, that this could change with a little help. I would like for someone (maybe I'll do it later) to start a fund with the goal of endowing a Professor of Open Source at a major university. I think we need in between $500K and $2 million to endow a chair. If we raise money at the same rate as the Free Blender project, then we should be able to do this in a couple of years.

-- BayleShanks