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Re:Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before by abalone on Monday September 30, 2013 @08:46PM (#6473323)
Presumably you don't think modern science is a "big ugly mess", yet you've failed to explain why the planning problem hasn't caused that. We could go a step further and ask how science would fare under a market system.

Or for that matter, high tech. Oh, you thought high tech isn't a product of a planned state-controlled economy?

Re:Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before by davidw on Tuesday October 01, 2013 @04:06AM (#6474840)
> Oh, you thought high tech isn't a product of a planned state-controlled economy?

It isn't. The government is one actor, and certainly has many contributions - the Internet is a big, obvious one - but there are certainly a lot of private actors that count for something too. Apple, IBM, and Microsoft come to mind. So "product of a planned state-controlled economy" is what I would call either "science fiction" or "wildly inaccurate", just as I would say that "high-tech is entirely the result of the free market" lunacy as well.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001C6MQA8/?tag=dedasys-20 is a good book to read for some of the history of Silicon Valley. Private companies figure prominently in it.

> Presumably you don't think modern science is a "big ugly mess"

Actually, my wife does research at a university, and I very much do think there is a lot of messiness in science, and think it likely that it's vastly underfunded - in part due to the fact that it's difficult to bring market mechanisms into play for things like basic research.