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Comment by naringas | Hacker News Reader

I think that if we got rid of those incentives people would still innovate

If someone stole their invention and made money off it?? Why the hell would anyone want to invest time into that? Its not like the Chinese are pursuing some ideology of free knowledge, no they are trying to scoop for profit.

Why do people work on open source or give up time for charity? Not everyone is focused purely on collecting more money when their needs are already covered.

> when their needs are already covered

So few steps to go here then; many (by far most) inventors do not have that little detail so they rely on their invention being monetized to give them that. People in open source or charity often just have enough money/time to do that on the side, but most people do not.

Needs basic income or working communism; both do not exist (yet or ever) so how would that work?

Very few people work on open source. You will find that most people trade their hours for money.

I think most people are very willing to do things simply for the sake of improving the world as long as it doesn't mean giving up their quality of life. Many people offer help for free, pick up rubbish they didn't drop and work on improvements for things we all benefit on. The only problem we have currently is many people are busy with menial work to maintain their quality of life.

I think the solution is potentially a mix of automation providing cheap resources to everyone and government funding for useful research.

With open source, your work is still protected by copyright

Because they want to.

> I think that if we got rid of those incentives people would still innovate

Yes, but then they'd keep their innovations secret as trade secrets or they would only innovate when it was cheap and unrisky.

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