A short video citing Fortran, by a Sovereign Tech Agency member

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This is a very short (5’) presentation at the 2025 FOSS Backstage conference, entitled “Open source is a sewer: looking at public infrastructure in the past and future”. The author is Powen Shiah, who handles communications at the Sovereign Tech Agency. In this video he compares the Open Source infrastructure to the water infrastructure, to explain that governments should “invest in digital infrastructure and critical open source in the public interest.” At 0:56 he is citing people maintaining a few open source projects, especially “a very small team revolutionizing or revitalizing the Fortran language.”

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I don’t think this is a good analogy. Sewer and water services can be paid for by the users rather than through taxes. Each quarter I get a bill showing how much water our household used. Paying for the water system out of taxes rather than billing users would encourage waste. The argument for government supporting open source software is the same as for supporting scientific research. You don’t know who the users are, and even people who never use an open source compiler may benefit from the software created by such compilers.

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I think in other countries than the U.S. the waste might be taken care of with taxes. Another analogy is roads if you use them “for free” as a user. It’s hard to find a perfect analogy, since copying programs is completely free for the end users, but maintenance is not, and especially development of modern tools that Fortran needs (compilers, package managers, standard library, etc.) is definitely not free. So maybe building new roads to new towns, and maintaining existing roads.

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The orator just wanted a provocative title. “Open Source is like roads” would be less fun. And every driver cares about road maintenance, for his security. But who cares about sewers? It’s underground, so we don’t see them and don’t think about them (except when there is a problem). The Open Source infra-structure is also infra, underground. Who cares?

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I always wonder if there are any institutional activities for supercomputer centers to make regular funding or donation to open-source developments, particularly for fundamental softwares related to HPC. I’ve asked such a question to ChatGPT, and it gives me some examples like MPICH / OpenMPI, PETSc, Trillinos, Spack, Kokkos, HDF5, etc, …

and the conclusion was like this:

:white_check_mark: Bottom line:
At present, regular institutional donation by supercomputing centers to open-source HPC software is rare. The dominant model is project-based funding from national agencies and in-kind staff contributions. However, there is growing awareness in the HPC community that long-term sustainability requires more systematic mechanisms — and discussions are ongoing (e.g., at ISC, SC, and SIAM CSE meetings) about institutionalizing such support.

Personally, I always think that GCC (and Gfortran!) has been a crucial tool for technical / scientific code development, and so it should be part of such contiguous / regular funding, e.g. from national goverments or large HPC centers (even in a competitive form).

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