I certainly think open source under capitalism (work at the margins, engineers spread thin) will always be worse than open source under socialism (abundant work

I certainly think open source under capitalism (work at the margins, engineers spread thin) will always be worse than open source under socialism (abundant workforce, lower stress, more time available). As far as initial investment in the creation of the software - yeah, that’s programmer time. The point of my scheme is to lower the cost of programmer time because their needs are already met, thus lowering the cost of initial investment. Hardware is a separate concern but I have a whole thing about how open source hardware tends to bring the hardware costs down to the lowest physically possible cost. Just look at 3D printers under patent ($25k) versus ten years after the patents expired and open source took over the low end ($250). I’m not sure how Occam’s razor would suggest that the status quo is close to the ideal situation here. Those seem unrelated.