In August, the United States Government issued a Request for Information (RFI) regarding open source software. The objective was to gather input from the private and public sectors and begin formulating a long-term strategy and action plan for the federal government to strengthen the open source ecosystem.

Here is an excerpt from the official press release:

In addition to its many benefits, the ubiquity of open-source software in commercial products, government systems, and military platforms presents unique security risks. For this reason, the White House established the Open-Source Software Security Initiative (OS3I), an interagency working group with the goal of identifying policy solutions and channeling government resources to foster greater open-source software security across the ecosystem. By working with other interagency partners, OS3I identified several focus areas, including:

• (i) increasing the proliferation of memory safe programming languages;
• (ii) designing implementation requirements for secure, privacy-preserving security attestations;
• and (iii) identifying and promoting focused areas for prioritization.

For more detailed information about the RFI, see the following link:
Request for Information on Open-Source Software Security: Areas of Long-Term Focus and Prioritization.

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In response to this call, we (under the Dalewind Software name) submitted a proposal to create a federal-level fund to support the open source ecosystem, similar to the Sovereign Technology Fund established in Germany.

In the response, considering that open source software (OSS) can be classified as a public good and that its global consumption leads to the well-known Free-rider problem, we focus on the following questions:

• Can we create dedicated funds to address coordination problems among OSS consumers?
• And can we design these funds to account for the fast-paced nature of these new digital public goods?

Below is from the “Principles” section:

• Proactive: The fund should proactively identify and evaluate eligible open source initiatives, reducing bureaucracy and uncertainty.
• Scalable: The fund should be designed to scale, accounting for the ongoing growth of the open-source ecosystem.
• Data-Driven: Resource allocation should rely on objective metrics to ensure an unbiased distribution.
• Transparent: The evaluation criteria, metrics, and weights should be publicly accessible.
• Continuous: Acknowledging the ongoing contributions of the OSS to the economy, the fund should commit to generating constant revenue rather than one-off payments.

For the first time in this document, we use the term “Digital Goods Income” to describe the income generated from the funds. We have also included YouTube’s data-driven payment structure, where it shares advertising and subscription revenue with content creators, as an example. Please feel free to share your thoughts on these details.

We would also like to thank Deborah Bryant, Michelle Barker, Benjamin Nickolls, Richard Littauer, Gerardo Lisboa, Django Skorupa, and Andrew Nesbitt for taking the time to provide feedback as we prepared this text.

You can visit the following link to see our full response:
National Public Fund to Finance Open Source Ecosystem