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Do you think public ownership would have yielded the development of modern IT, for example?

• jmyeet 2y ago
  The Internet was quite literally a government invention. Google was invented at Stanford. Linux was created by a volunteer who organized on Usenet.
  • mmooss 2y ago
    Sure, but most of the innovation was in private companies and in open source projects (which I should have included in the first place). > Usenet That is FOSS and P2P collaberative (at least on the server level). Is that somehow connected with government?
• Ekaros 2y ago
  Something akin to it very likely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel is one example of early IT done by government owned enterprise.
  • mmooss 2y ago
    Minitel is just one project, a successful one but eclipsed by the rest of the IT world. Does that mean the French government could have done what SV did? Why didn't they?
    • throwaway4220 2y ago
      I was about to argue against you, but here is some nuance from a bbc article about minitel: It was the whole model that was doomed. Basically to set up a service on Minitel, you had to ask permission from France Telecom. You had to go to the old guys who ran the system, and who knew absolutely nothing about innovation. "It meant that nothing new could ever happen. Basically, Minitel innovated from 1978 to 1982, and then it stopped," he says. But others are less critical. Valerie Schafer, Thierry's co-author, says "the way Minitel is now fobbed off as risible and old-fashioned" is unfair. "People forget that many of the ideas that helped form the internet were first of all tried out on Minitel. Think of the payment system, not so different from the Apple app-store. "Think of the forums, the user-generated content. Many of today's web entrepreneurs and thinkers cut their teeth on Minitel," she says. "The world did not begin with the internet."