1) If you do not think the legitimate purpose of laws is to make the world a better place and nothing else, we do not agree on fundamentals, and I see you as a

1) If you do not think the legitimate purpose of laws is to make the world a better place and nothing else, we do not agree on fundamentals, and I see you as a dangerous enemy, someone who would be a dictator or oppressor if they could. Using the government's monopoly on violence to make you happier with no concern for the rest of society is an evil thing. Why is the legitimate purpose of laws to make you happier as a consumer?? What does that have to do with anything? (And, to the point I was originally making, why do you believe you wouldn't be even happier in the world I describe? You'd get a Kinect researched with awareness of what the Wii and Move tried and didn't, so it'd either be better or cheaper or perhaps both.) 2) Again, the legitimate purpose of government is not to preserve the way I make money, either. You're making the "Yet you participate in society!" argument. Yes, I do. The fact that I think a certain course of action is individually rational for me to preserve life and health does not mean I think the availability of that course, to the exclusion of other possible courses, is inherently good or worth preserving. But just so you know: I maintain systems infrastructure for a hedge fund, all based on open-source software (Debian, OpenStack, Ceph, etc.). The hedge fund operates on secrecy of market data and insights but not on secrecy of fundamental research (and also making e.g. Linux available to everyone makes everyone more productive, but making our ideas about alpha available to everyone makes the alpha go away). To be clear, working at a hedge fund does not mean that I think the existence of hedge funds is inherently good or that I am opposed to societies where hedge funds don't exist, any more than working at Blockbuster means you're opposed to Netflix existing. My work is all on things that would benefit the world more if they were public and would benefit my employer no less; it's just difficult to maintain a separation between publishable work and sensitive algorithms, so I don't do as much as I'd like. But I'd like to do more, and I've quite loudly disagreed with our internal policies on this, because I think I can do better for the world and for our company if allowed to be public about everything. And my work, in any case, is keeping them running, not creating new private ideas. The public knows how to create sandwiches, and yet Subway is profitable. And it is beyond clear that my company would be less profitable if open source software did not exist, or if we used a proprietary stack/vendor for everything. 3) Yes, it's realistic. You haven't presented an argument beyond "Nyeh, it's not," so I say, "Nyeh, is too."