Ask HN: Taxpayer funded open source?

I think open source development has the potential to produce far superior software than closed source. I think the only thing that keeps it from revolutionizing the software world overnight is that it's tough to make money at it.

If governments funded various software projects you would remove the need for those projects to turn a profit, thus removing a big obstacle to the sharing of code. I believe this would benefit society greatly.

If the code is released under a business friendly license, corporations could effectively have their R&D costs outsourced for free. This would allow them to focus on their customers more. This would be good for the economy.

I could see excessive regulation being a problem. I'm not sure how much oversight would be appropriate. I wonder what would happen if you just gave 100 hackers $20K over the course of a year and let them choose what to work on, just so long as it was open source.

A more realistic pilot program would not take much funding at all. Let's say we pay 1000 programmers $50,000 a year to work on open source projects. Toss in another $10 million for regulators and whatnot and that's $60 million total. Peanuts, really -- less then .01% of the U.S. federal budget.

What do you think? Is this a good idea?