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Comment by calibraxis | Hacker News Reader

Blue-sky research is much higher risk. Without the shorter term payoff that corporations seek. It's reasonable to call an endeavor "harder" when it's less certain of success. Particularly when we're talking about real innovations like computers and the internet, versus a company hiring a couple guys to toss together a "minimal viable product" with PHP.

(If that description of corporate productization sounds unfair, I think it's closer to the mark than saying basic research is analogous to "someone banged out a prototype over the weekend".)

When it's able to be productized, that's when corporations come along. This is well known. (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/technology/02darpa.html)

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Blue-sky research is much higher risk.

That wouldn't stop people from doing it privately. For example, biochemist Peter Mitchell (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Peter_D._Mitc...) won a Nobel in Chemistry in 1978 for work he did entirely without government funding, out of a house he owned. (It's not some little thing he discovered, either - if you take an undergraduate course in biochemistry, you'll run across his chemiosmotic hypothesis directly, and it's taught in less detail in a lot of other biology courses.)

You're right, he was an exceptional individual.

Conversely, the impossibility to exclude (copyright and patents) didn't stop the industry from funding the Linux kernel.

But both cases are probably marginal. In a world where one has to earn money to survive, innovation is slowed down, either because of copyright and patents, or the lack of funding.

The trick is to get a world where one doesn't need to earn money.

"The trick is to get a world where one doesn't need to earn money."

At the very least we need to move towards a place where money is not the final arbiter of 'Good'.

"Intellectual property rights has very little to do with individual initiative. I mean, Einstein didn't have any intellectual property rights on relativity theory. Science and innovation is carried out by people that are interested in it. That's the way science works. There's an effort in very recent years to commercialize it, like they commercialize everything else. "

Interesting example. Pete was actually my step-grandfather, and I visited Glynn quite often as a kid. One thing worth bearing in mind is that he was quite wealthy, having inherited a lot of money (from the wimpey family I believe). So while it is clearly true that some blue sky research can occur without government funding, his path may not be all that easily replicated by others

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