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Comment by j-bos | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it's rhymes with people getting mad about pharmacos charging outrageous prices for life saving drugs they developed in order to charge outrageous prices. In both cases (drugs and OSS) it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity, but the alternatives are less value overall, even to those on the losing side of the uneven value.

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>it's an ugly process that produces great and greatly uneven value to humanity

That'd be far more believable if it weren't for the fact a vast majority of the research is publicly funded for those drug companies. They have no issues selling their drugs for less money in other markets while still turning a profit. And there's absolutely no indication they'd cease to exist with just outrageous profits, not "crippling entire economies" level profits.

So I agree with you in that it's ugly, and they do take the lion's share of benefit from public research. That said, the public research doesn't run human trials, scale up, or QC production. Still ugly, still valuable.

The cheapest part of the research is publicly funded. The extreme costs come from taking the outputs of public research and trialing and developing it into a viable drug.

Pharma profits also aren’t particularly noteworthy. Their revenues are, because of the ubiquity of their need, but profit margins for Pharma is pretty middle of the road compared to other industries.

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