I completely agree, but it would be hard to incentivize investors to pay for all of the developer time (and, in the case of autonomous vehicles, driver/vehicle

I completely agree, but it would be hard to incentivize investors to pay for all of the developer time (and, in the case of autonomous vehicles, driver/vehicle time) needed to get the systems up and running without the potential for huge returns to equity. As I see it, there are two ways to avoid the wasteful duplication of effort that we're seeing today: Either a private monopoly pays for it, or the government does. Both options (and the status quo) have their pros and cons, but I'd personally prefer that the government fund it - ideally, borrow to fund R&D now, and then pay off the debt through taxes on autonomous vehicles once they go live. In practice, we're definitely trending toward the first option, one implication of which is that open source is a pipe dream.