Hacker News Reader

Comment by koolala | Hacker News Reader

Internet Noodles of Babel! Let's have every corporation do this too! We can solve every problem that matters by working together like this, the rest is just corpo-gaming.

View on HN

Absolutely! I think the concept of proprietary knowledge for profit was actually a huge mistake, and that humanity can advance much faster and more effectively through open collaboration. This applies to patents too (and arguably copyright).

There is no advancement without profit. Advances are a product of market competition. When no company can profit from investing in R&D, there will be no R&D.

What a sad view of things.

Hi, I feel more advanced getting to talk with you so I am grateful for that, didn't cost us anything :)

Pfffffft

The government invented the internet.

with money that came from ......?

Nonsensical question. You invent things with brainpower, not money.

Try going without food for a month and see how many novel inventions you can make. See, even thoughts require participation in the capital markets.

DARPA? Which is government??

Some life saving pharmaceuticals, automobiles tech, general consumer communications and entertainment tech, all come from capitalists trying to be the first to market to profit. The sheer amount of technological leaps our generation alone has seen was all pretty much for profit. You wouldn’t observe the same rate if it was all purely driven by governments.

Amazing that your comment consisted of three sentences, each of which is incorrect. I could say more, but the simplest refutation of what you are saying is that open source exists. It is advancement without profit, it is advances without market competition, and it is an investment people make without expecting profitable returns.

It’s not that those things aren’t important in a functional economy, but that your absolute thinking cannot explain open source, and thus your theory is incomplete to explain human activity.

It depends how long you’re willing to wait for those advances in open source.

For a fair comparison of “advancement” in open source you have to discuss free open source applications where a commercial version of a similar app exists.

Photoshop vs Gimp, Illustrator vs Inkscape, Microsoft office vs libre etc etc. objectively speaking the commercial version is going to be better across the board.

Open source variants are getting closer these days like Blender and Godot but you’re on a different scale of waiting for those advances to catch up vs the commercial for profit versions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com