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>because from proprietarizing ideas, there is no benefit for society. Except for a profit motive for companies which then benefits society by lowering prices o

• TeMPOraL 5y ago
  It's competition that keeps prices low - if private companies were to properly proprietarize core ideas around computing, we'd still be stuck with room-sized computers. Maintaining a market that's beneficial to society is an attempt to carefully tune interplay between many public and private concerns. From the point of view of society, the market is just a roundabout way of putting people on a treadmill and hanging carrots in front of them. We need companies to produce goods, provide services, and innovate better solutions, so we allow a degree of privileges and exclusivity for things that otherwise shouldn't be owned - like ideas. But we cannot allow companies to actually get the carrot and stop running - because it's the production and innovation treadmill that's the important thing (from society's POV). This model has been so successful that it blinded a generation or two of politicians - they let the donkeys get their carrots, and now we have fat donkeys saying to us, "if you want us to run the treadmill some more, give us the carrots".