I’ve written an article defending “affirmative action for open source” in government procurement over on TechCentralStation, with a response by Jim DeLong (recently of CEI, now of PFF). The reply is, as one would expect from DeLong, quite an able one, though I do feel compelled to observe that he focuses quite heavily on the incentives question, on which I admittedly just deferred to Yochai Benkler, to the exclusion of the political and public choice arguments. Also, he’s certainly right that it’s not quite accurate to call him, at least, an “enemy of open source” just because he opposes a procurement preference. That would be like the lefty bit about how you must be “against” something if you don’t want the government to fund it… or, in light of the Kurtz debate, the righty line that you must hate traditional marriage if you don’t want the state to valorize it to the exclusion of other forms. I was just being cutesy and tipping my hat to Karl Popper’s book. Though actually, if you search TCS for “Linux” or “open source”, it does seem as though some other writers do go beyond opposing procurement preferences, and exhibit a weird, inchoate hostility towards open source generally.