The problem is that "innovation is driven by profits" is a religious credo at least in the USA. If you’ve ever read Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, you would laugh at how silly it is, how transparently absurd the "story" is.
Then you realize that a lot of billionaires in the USA consider this book as a scientific economical treaty. And they have the power to make it true and to brainwash everybody, including politicians, to believe it is true.
As it is the 40th anniversary of the GNU project, it worth remembering that software has always been created as free and open source. It was how innovation was possible. To the point that, in 1976, a young Bill Gates had to write an "Open Letter to the Hobbyists" which could be summarized as "Stop sharing! Please! Give us money and stop sharing stuff between yourself. We want to be a profitable industry, not an innovation playground".
That highlight how nobody took proprietary software seriously at the time. But people listened. People voted for Reagan (who managed to dismantle antitrust laws because monopolies are good to make lot of money) and, suddenly, making Bill Gates the richest man in the world became a top priority instead of pushing innovation and cooperation.
As Facebook, Microsoft and Google demonstrates every day, a monopoly is never innovating. Every new single "innovation" is from a startup that was bought by fear of having a competitor in the future. So, today, to become rich, you don’t have to make a real innovating business. You simply have to pretend be a bunch of geniuses that could create the next monopoly and be sufficiently good at pretending that an actual monopoly buy you. That’s basically what is now told in every startup incubator (the technical term is "exit" and, as soon as VC enter the dance, you already talk about your exit plans. Which is easier when one of your VC is on the board of an existing monopoly. That’s how he manage to extract lot of money from his position).
The system is completely unfair, corrupt, suboptimal. But we have to tell the fiction that it works so people don’t request a change.
The problem is that "innovation is driven by profits" is a religious credo at least in the USA. If you’ve ever read Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, you would laugh at how silly it is, how transparently absurd the "story" is.
Then you realize that a lot of billionaires in the USA consider this book as a scientific economical treaty. And they have the power to make it true and to brainwash everybody, including politicians, to believe it is true.
As it is the 40th anniversary of the GNU project, it worth remembering that software has always been created as free and open source. It was how innovation was possible. To the point that, in 1976, a young Bill Gates had to write an "Open Letter to the Hobbyists" which could be summarized as "Stop sharing! Please! Give us money and stop sharing stuff between yourself. We want to be a profitable industry, not an innovation playground".
That highlight how nobody took proprietary software seriously at the time. But people listened. People voted for Reagan (who managed to dismantle antitrust laws because monopolies are good to make lot of money) and, suddenly, making Bill Gates the richest man in the world became a top priority instead of pushing innovation and cooperation.
As Facebook, Microsoft and Google demonstrates every day, a monopoly is never innovating. Every new single "innovation" is from a startup that was bought by fear of having a competitor in the future. So, today, to become rich, you don’t have to make a real innovating business. You simply have to pretend be a bunch of geniuses that could create the next monopoly and be sufficiently good at pretending that an actual monopoly buy you. That’s basically what is now told in every startup incubator (the technical term is "exit" and, as soon as VC enter the dance, you already talk about your exit plans. Which is easier when one of your VC is on the board of an existing monopoly. That’s how he manage to extract lot of money from his position).
The system is completely unfair, corrupt, suboptimal. But we have to tell the fiction that it works so people don’t request a change.